# News & Current Events > Economy & Markets >  Money laundering $2.1 trillion a year

## Firestarter

I’ve found information on another interesting money laundering scandal and thought this is a good moment to compile money laundering stories in one thread. In 2017, an estimated $2.1 trillion was laundered by the banks (annually).

I’m beginning to see a pattern.
Corrupt politicians, attorneys and judges never punish the top management of the banks and fine them only a small percentage of the laundered cash in the hope they can get a slice of the pie. The banks simply promise to do better (but why would they?).
The money laundering in itself is simple. It’s just a matter of making some transactions over several countries using shell companies and the authorities and banks simply claim that they don’t know what’s going on.

The following countries are hotspots of money laundering:
Britain, the British Virgin Islands;
The Netherlands, the Dutch Antilles;
USA, New York and California;
Iceland;
Cyprus;
Switzerland.

The big problem is to get the laundered money back without drawing suspicion from the media.
One way is to pay excorbitant consultancy and speaking fees (see for example Clinton).
Another way is to pay much more than the market price for real estate (see for example Trump).

Money laundering schemes inflate prices, so basically laundering money even takes away the value of our hard earned savings.
The money is used to rig elections.
The laundered money is also used to sponsor (false flag) terrorism: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...e-flag-attacks


*Danske Bank - $230 billion*
Last month, Thomas Borgen resigned as the CEO of Danske Bank (Denmark’s biggest bank), after it became known that from 2007 to 2015 its Estonian branch laundered more than 200 billion euros (some $230 billion).
In 2013, the first whistleblower came forward to disclose that the Estonian branch was knowingly laundering funds from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s family and the Russian security service (FSB). Since then several whistleblower followed, including one that claimed that the Estonian branch “_knowingly continued to deal with a company that had committed a crime_”.

Despite all of the suspect activity and these whistleblowers, Danske Bank did nothing and the money laundering continued into 2015. The Danish authorities cleared Borgen and the board of directors of any legal responsibility. 75 customers of Danske Bank are implicated, and Danske Bank’s Estonian branch handled the accounts of all 4 major companies involved in the Azerbaijani Laundromat.
According to Danish authorities, the main perpetrators were the Russian and Azerbaijani “Laundromat” operations.
During the period 2007-2013, 44% of all deposits at Danske Bank’s Estonian branch came from foreigners (approximately 10,000 of the branch’s customers). Between 2007 and 2015, these customers conducted 7.5 million transactions of about 200 billion euros.

Legal action against Danske Bank is expected in Denmark, the UK, and the US (no doubt without consequences for the higher management or involved politicians).
In 2015, the European Union passed legislation to convince the gullible public that something is done against the “criminals”, but in reality the money laundering will continue: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/08...nancial-crime/
(archived here: http://archive.is/QdR2Y)


Madis Reimand, the head Estonia’s financial intelligence unit of Danske Bank, said his office had already found suspicious Azerbaijani cash flows in 2013.

The Azerbaijani “Laundromat” used a series of shell companies to disguise the origin of $2.9 billion (£2.2 billion) that is suspected to come from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Large sums came via the state-owned International Bank of Azerbaijan.
The 4 firms at the centre of the Azerbaijani Laundromat were all limited partnerships registered in the UK: Metastar Invest; Hilux Services; Polux Management; and LCM Alliance. Their corporate “partners” are anonymous entities based in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles and Belize tax havens.

They used the Azerbaijani Laundromat to bribe prominent politicians, buy luxury goods, and launder money through a network of British  shell companies.

Luca Volontè received more than €2 million via his Italian-based Novae Terrae foundation. Volontè has been indicted in Milan for money laundering and corruption.

In 2014, former CNN producer Eckart Sager (based in London), received nearly €2 million from the British companies. His PR company has promoted the Azerbaijani government and denied that Baku did anything wrong in the Volontè case.

Eduard Lintner, German MP until 2010, founded the Society for the Promotion of German-Azerbaijani Relations, which received €819,500. A €61,000 payment was made 2 weeks after Lintner returned to Berlin from a trip to Azerbaijan where he “monitored” the country’s 2013 presidential election. Lintner said the election was up to “German standards” while official election observers found “significant problems”.

In 2016, the Bulgarian Kalin Mitrev was appointed to the board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (based in London). Mitrev received at least €425,000 for consultancy from a local Azeri company, Avuar Co. Mitrev’s wife, Irina Bokava, is the director general of Unesco that awarded the Mozart Medal to Azerbaijan’s first lady and vice-president Mehriban Aliyeva: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...obbying-scheme
(archived here: http://archive.is/sOJLg)


Azerbaijani partners in crime of US president Donald Trump since 2012, in a project to build a Trump Tower in Baku, also appear in the Laundromat scheme.
The $35 million project was controlled by Baku XXI Century of Elton and Anar Mammadov, the brother and son of the country's transport minister Ziya Mammadov. They hold seats in parliament and have ties to Azerbaijani President Aliyev.
The Mammadovs’ Baghlan holding company is linked to Laundromat transactions.

Ziya also has connections to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and with Iraq-Iran war veteran Keyumars Davishi, the chairman of a company which Mammadov awarded transportation contracts to in 2008.
In February 2017, defense and intelligence officials warned the White House against designating Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation.

Anar founded The Azerbaijan American Alliance. Between 2011 and 2015, he spent almost $13 million for lobbying in the US.
Anar Mammadov lives in London and considers Ivanka Trump a “dear friend” (see them together).


In October 2014, Ivanka Trump toured Trump Tower Baku that was scheduled to open in 2015. Ivanka wrote that she had “overseen” the project. For some reason the hotel never opened despite being almost completed.
In December 2016, before he was inaugurated, Trump cut his connection with the project: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...deal-ever.html

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## Firestarter

*Global Laundromat – 20 billion*
In the “_Global Laundromat_”, between 2010 and 2014, at least $20 billion of Russian money was laundered; _Deutsche Bank_ again played an important role.
In this scheme the Latvian bank _Trasta Komercbanka_ was used as a last point before the money was transferred across the globe. Trasta needed a corresponding Western financial institute to process its dollar-denominated transactions.
Two German banks became corresponding banks for Trasta: Deutsche and Commerzbank.

There are of course connections from the Global Laundromat to Vladimir Putin.
The Russian RZB bank was a major player in this multibillion rouble fraud. This Moscow bank wired 152.5 billion roubles (about $5 billion) to the Moldovan Moldinconbank from 2012 to 2014.
Moldinconbank received most of the wires from Russian banks and then routed the money through the Latvian _Trasta Komercbanka_, which transferred it to Europe.
Until 2011, RZB belonged to Elena Baturina, wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov. In 2010, Luzhkov was ousted by President Putin, and the next year Baturina also lost RZB.

In 2011, 6 Cyprus companies became the owners of RZB.
One of them – Boaden Ltd, which controlled 16.35% of RZB – was owned by St. Petersburg businessman Alexander Grigoriev, who became the corporate director of RZB.
Grigoriev brought a new management team to RZB, which included Igor Putin, Vladimir Putin’s cousin, who served on RZB’s board until 2014.
Grigoriev and Igor Putin share several connections.
Igor Putin also was a board member of construction company SU-888, where Grigoriev is a majority shareholder.
Igor Putin was also a board member of Promsberbank, in which Grigoriev owned a share.

In 2013, Grigoriev acquired another Moldovan bank, Zapadniy.
Zapadniy opened correspondent accounts in Moldindconbank and also became involved in transferring money from Russia to Moldova.
Ilya Lomakin-Rumyantsev, who became CEO of Zapadniy had been head of Putin’s Presidential Expert Department in 2009-2011.

In 2014-15, regulators stripped Alexander Grigoriev from his banking licences: 
https://www.reportingproject.net/the...ins-cousin.php


It’s hypocritical to blame the whole Laundromat on Russian and German banks, going as far as labelling it the “_Russian Laundromat_” when British banks were arguably taking most of the action, with HSBC bank as THE major player.
Other banks involved in the Laundromat: HSBC, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, Lloyds, UBS and ING.


*HSBC Russia - $80 billion* 
UK banking giant HSBC (HQ London) is in a league of its own.
At least $20 billion (possibly $80 billion) was moved out of Russia between 2010 and 2014 in the money-laundering operation dubbed “The Global Laundromat”.
HSBC processed $545.3 million in Laundromat cash, mostly routed through its Hong Kong branch.

Several of China’s state-controlled banks have processed hundreds of millions of US dollars from this money-laundering operation run by Russian “criminals” with links to the Russian government and spy agency FSB. 
The 5 largest Chinese banks processed more than $1 billion. Bank of China processed $716 million of the Laundromat cash, making it the fourth most active bank in the plot.
Laundromat also included the Chinese banks: China Construction Bank Corporation, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of Communication and Agriculture Bank of China.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Bank is also implicated.

Credit Suisse, Citibank and Falcon Private Bank have also processed dirty money through their Chinese branches.
The OCCRP investigation shows that $20 billion found its way to 96 countries, with about $915 million ending up in mainland China, and $927 million in Hong Kong: *http://web.archive.org/web/20180202035456/http://www.atimes.com/article/chinese-banks-hsbc-caught-huge-money-laundering-scam/*

Other UK banks involved in the “The Global Laundromat” are: the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Coutts.
It involved 1,920 transactions totalling nearly £600 million that went through UK banks, with a further 373 million routed through US banks: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/bu...-a7640861.html

More banks involved in the Laundromat: Bank of America, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, Lloyds, UBS and ING (from the Netherlands).
According to OCCRP, the scheme allowed tens of billions of dollars to be moved out of Russia, involving roughly 70,000 transactions from 2011 to 2014.
According to prosecutors in Moldova, at least $22 billion was laundered as part of the scheme.
They are investigating 16 judges, 4 employees of Moldova’s central bank and 9 commercial bank employees over involvement in the money laundering operation.
500 people are suspected of being involved, including many wealthy and influential Russians.
French bank BNP Paribas pleaded guilty in 2014 to violating US money laundering laws by helping clients dodge sanctions on Iran and Sudan: http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/24/news...-global-banks/

Here’s a short explanation of this scam.
Two front companies are set-up in the UK, which allow the owners behind them to remain secret.
Company 1 makes a huge loan to company 2, a Russian company guarantees the loan, and a Moldavian straw man is included as co-guarantor for the loan.
UK-company 2 refuses to pay the loan back to company 1.
UK-company 1 sues in a Moldavian court to get back the loan.
The judge orders the Russian guarantors to pay the sum, typically in the range of $100-800 million.
The Russians transfer the money to a bank account in Latvia, and the court order has made this money clean: *http://web.archive.org/web/20170109191920/http://www.independent.co.uk/atom/4009236*


*HSBC Mexico/Columbia - $670 billion*
HSBC Holdings Plc’s agreed on a $1.9 billion settlement with the US to resolve charges it failed to monitor *more than $670 billion in wire transfers and more than $9.4 billion in purchases of US currency* from HSBC Mexico, allowing for money laundering.
HSBC also violated US economic sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba.
HSBC paid a $1.256 billion forfeiture and $665 million in civil penalties.
The deal was approved by a federal judge: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ndering-accord

A report by the US House financial services committee dated 11 July 2016 shows that UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, warned the US against prosecuting HSBC, because it could lead to a “_global financial disaster_”.
The US government decided not to pursue criminal charges against HSBC for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars (and *not reviewing transactions worth over $200 trillion*). The HSBC settled the case for $1.92 billion
According to the committee the UK interventions “_played a significant role in ultimately persuading the DoJ not to prosecute HSBC_”.
Here's the 288 page report of the committee that consists mostly in the written mails and documents that led to the settlement: http://financialservices.house.gov/u...oi_tbtj_sr.pdf

The most interesting from this report is the letter by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke dated 10 September 2012 (pages 42-45), see the picture.



The settlement agreement between the DoJ and HSBC of November 2012 is also interesting (pages 73-151), see the following excerpts:



> 10. There were at least four significant failures in HSBC Bank USA's AML [Anti-Money Laundering] program that facilitated the laundering of drug trafficking proceeds through HSBC Bank USA:
> a. Failure to obtain or maintain due diligence or KYC information on HSBC Group Affiliates, including HSBC Mexico;
> b. Failure to monitor over $200 trillion in wire transfers between 2006 and 2009 from customers located in countries that HSBC Bank USA classified as "standard" or "medium" risk, including over $670 billion in wire transfers from HSBC Mexico;
> c. Failure to monitor billions of dollars in purchases of physical U.S. dollars ("banknotes") between June 2006 and July 2009 from HSBC Group Affiliates, including over $10.5 billion from HSBC Mexico; and
> d. Failure to provide adequate staffing and other resources to maintain an effective AML program.
> (…)
> 16. From 2006 to 2009, *HSBC Bank USA knowingly set the thresholds in CAMP so that wire transfers by customers, including foreign financial institutions with correspondent accounts, located in countries categorized as standard or medium risk would not be reviewed*. Only transactions that involved customers in countries rated as cautionary or high risk were reviewed by CAMP. During this period, HSBC Bank USA processed over 100 million wire transfers totaling over $300 trillion. Over two-thirds of these transactions involved customers in standard or medium risk countries. Therefore, in this four-year period alone, *over $200 trillion in wire transfers were not reviewed in CAMP*.
> (…)
> 18. Despite this evidence of the serious money laundering risks associated with doing business in Mexico, from at least 2006 to 2009, HSBC Bank USA rated Mexico as standard risk, its lowest AML risk category. As a result, wire transfers originating from Mexico were generally not reviewed in the CAMP system, including transactions from HSBC Mexico. From 2006 until April 2009, when HSBC Bank USA raised Mexico's risk rating to high, *over 316,000 transactions worth over $670 billion from HSBC Mexico alone were excluded from monitoring in the CAMP system*.
> ...


 
*Wells Fargo- $380 billion*
The Wachovia Bank was accused of *laundering $380 billion in Mexican drug money*.
Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo in late 2008. Wells Fargo settled the case for $160 million and promised to never do it again.
3.5 million unauthorised bank accounts were created for this scam.
No large US bank has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Department of Justice (DoJ) settles criminal charges with deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again...
The mere possession of a small amount of drugs can get you sentenced to years in prison, but laundering hundreds of billions of dollars? A fine of a small percentage of the money laundered and the promise to don’t do it again: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zach-c..._b_645885.html

Of course those poor people on the board of directors cannot be held accountable for laundering hundreds of billions of dollars...
Five people were convicted as scapegoats, for money laundering of a little more than $1 million.
The funds were laundered using newly created bogus bank accounts, into which proceeds were deposited.  The cashier’s checks and wire transfers were made out to gold dealers. 
The bank accounts were opened using the identities of individuals from Eastern Europe who were not in the USA when the accounts were opened: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/forme...trademark-scam

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## Firestarter

*HSBC whistleblowers*
I’ve also searched for “whistleblowers” on the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC or Hongshang bank). No less than 3 supposed “whistleblowers” popped up, who look like “limited hangout operations” to me. Two of them are trying to sell their whistleblowing credentials by entering politrics...

The most attention is given to the French-Italian Hervé Falciani, who supposedly copied confidential information on 300,000 secret Swiss bank accounts without it being noticed. Falciani was sentenced to 5 years in jail in Switzerland for violating the Swiss bank secrecy.
While he boasts being arrested in France and Spain, he’s supposedly out of reach of the Swiss authorities by staying in France. Falciani said that being locked up for five and a half months in Spanish jail was part of his grand design in which he was helped by “_the Network_”.
Falciani’s story even involved being kidnapped by Mossad agents, but he has later admitted that this tale was “_real fake_”: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...iss-bank-heist

Of course I hope the wonderful “_Network_” will save the day, but have no reason whatsoever that something similar to “_the Brotherhood_” of George Orwell’s 1984 is for real…

Another “whistleblower” is  Sue Shelley, who until 2013 was an HSBC executive vice-president in charge of compliance in Luxembourg.
An executive vice-president in charge of compliance for a big bank was enough for me to not take Sue seriously…

I can’t rule out that Wilson is for “real”…
British politician Nicholas Wilson uploaded a video in which he was “shut down” by Home Secretary Amber Rudd, when he made a political speech. He talked about how HSBC is involved in the arms trade to Saudi Arabia: https://youtu.be/TEcMW6RmC_w


*Rabobank Calexio Mexico*
In the first of a series of purchases of US regional banks, the Dutch Rabobank (that was involved in a plot to murder me by simply blocking my bank accounts) acquired Valley Independent Bank in 2002 and its two dozen branches. This included one in Calexico - located on a major border crossing with Mexico.
The deposits of the Calexico office from 2008 to 2013 rose 39% to $153 million.
So many US dollars were deposited that they needed weekly armoured truck (sometimes more) to transport all the cash.

Rabobank recruited Laura Akahoshi, a 10-year veteran of the Comptroller’s office responsible for watching the banks, for compliance officer to solve problems with the authorities.
Akahoshi left the US to work in Rabobank’s headquarters, according to her LinkedIn profile, and later moved on to a special assignment in Asia...

Rabobank in California got rid of 3 of the 9 people monitoring money laundering. Each remaining worker went from checking about 25 transactions a day to more than 75 (about 6 minutes per transaction).
Eventually the Rabobank compliance team was consolidated at its Roseville office in the centre of the state, leaving no one on in Calexio: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-over-rabobank


*UBS, Birkenfeld*
I think I’ve found a “real” whistleblower in the American Bradley Birkenfeld, who blew the whistle on the Swiss banking giant UBS. He made 30 names of the rich clients with secret Swiss bank accounts known to the US government, only one of these has been charged and publicly named.
Whistleblowers are really dangerous, so Birkenfeld was jailed for two and a half years for helping his clients “evade taxes”. After being released in August 2012, he had to remain in the USA wearing an electronic ankle-tag until November 2015, before he moved to Malta.
His information is hampered, because he is convinced that it’s all about tax evasion, instead of money laundering.

Most (if not all) of his clients and superiors at UBS got off without prison time. 
Birkenfeld got a nice pay check for helping the US government get hundreds of millions in back taxes. According to some whistleblower policy he was entitled to 30% of the profits, which amounted to $104 million minus taxes leaving him with a pay check of $75 million net (he claims that he’s entitled to much more).

Bradley Birkenfeld, worked as Head of Business Development for North America out of Geneva, Switzerland for UBS from 2001 to 2006. In 2007, Birkenfeld offered to help US authorities with information about how the UBS had helped thousands of Americans evade taxes.

Maybe the most interesting is how he helped the Russian immigrant, Californian real-estate billionaire Igor Olenicoff, with connections to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Birkenfeld detailed how he bought and smuggled diamonds to the USA for Olenicoff in a toothpaste tube.
He deliberately destroyed offshore bank records on behalf of clients and helped Olenicoff with offshore assets worth $7.26 billion.
Olenicoff was looking at serious time in jail, but pled guilty to one count of filing a false tax return. This deal kept him out of prison and he only got 2 years of probation, and had to pay $52 million in back taxes.

UBS bankers assisted wealthy Americans to conceal ownership of their assets by creating “sham” offshore trusts. Misleading and false documentation was routinely prepared to facilitate this.
It is a system that connects Wall Street and the City of London to Liechtenstein, Panama and the British Virgin Islands - all places where Birkenfeld parked cash for his clients.
As a result of Birkenfeld’s leak, UBS was forced to turn over to the IRS the account details of more than 4700 clients in the USA of the 19,000 illegal account holders, and paid a fine of $780 million in 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/business...29/ubs.banking

Birkenfeld bought and smuggled diamonds for Olenicoff. I suspect that these were paid for with dirty money.
If a multibillionaire has millions worth of diamonds or art in his house, this wouldn´t necessarily be suspicious. I can´t tell if this is already enough to have the money laundered...
Creating “sham” offshore trusts could be used to hide money from the IRS, but these types of constructions are also used for money laundering...

Birkenfeld says he's looking for revenge, because he was locked up for so long, where nearly everyone else involved got off with light penalties or none at all.
Of the tens of thousands of Americans who hid money overseas, only a handful were indicted or charged. Fewer than 50 American clients of offshore banks have been sentenced in the USA since the Birkenfeld revelations. One received a 19-month sentence, only a few have gone to jail, and nearly 30 were given no jail time at all.
All of his bosses made secret non-prosecution agreements. When the head of the private bank, Raoul Weil, was indicted, he escaped and was arrested in Italy on an Interpol arrest warrant. Weil was acquitted in about 30 minutes because Birkenfeld wasn’t allowed to testify in his court case.
Billionaire Ty Warner — one of the few Swiss bank clients whose name has been made public —was sentenced to probation without jail time.

Birkenfeld saw clients coming into the bank with a million dollars in a suitcase. Specialised couriers brought cash into Switzerland and deposited it in the clients´ bank account. Many clients tore up receipts of a deposit on the spot.
The best banknote for cash transactions is the 1000 Swiss franc bill - "_The largest note in the world, I mean, you could put a half a million dollars in your pocket, no problem_”.

UBS was making $200 million for 8 years, that´s a total of $1.6 billion; and only got fined $780 million.
Birkenfeld offered the DoJ to wear a wire to record conversations with bankers and clients. He said he turned over the names, cell phone numbers and preferred US hotels of UBS banksters. He offered to help the DoJ with the investigation. But the Department of Justice (DoJ) covered up this case.

The Swiss government and UBS are really one organisation. The bank was protected but the clients, colleagues and shareholders were not.
Back in 2004, UBS was sending illegal wire transfers of millions of dollars to Cuba, Libya, and Iran. The US government fines them $100 million and no one goes to jail. UBS promised to do better.
In 2012, UBS is fined $1.5 billion for the Libor scandal.
In 2015, UBS was fined $545 million for foreign exchange manipulation.

Birkenfeld has not publicly named most of his clients at UBS, although he provided that information to the government.
Birkenfeld did expose Abdul Aziz Abas, who had $420 million in six numbered accounts and lived in a $50 million condo in New York City. Abas was doing illegal oil sales with Saddam Hussein. The DoJ did nothing about Abas, because he was best friends with Rudy Giuliani and Raymond Kelly (Commissioner of NYPD).

The most secret category of American client is the Politically Exposed Person (PEP).
Birkenfeld does not know any names of American political figures who had secret accounts in Switzerland, or how many there were.

According to Birkenfeld the Panama papers are an orchestrated leak by some intelligence agency (like the CIA or KGB) as it is impossible for any whistleblower to get his hands on 11.4 million documents: http://www.valuewalk.com/2017/04/bra...eld-ubs/?all=1


Barack Obama, back in the days he was Senator Obama, was on the Senate committee investigating UBS. At the time they were investigating UBS, he accepted millions of dollars from UBS for his Presidential campaign.
In August 2009, on the first Sunday after Birkenfeld was sentenced to prison, Obama’s golfing partner was Robert Wolf, Chairman of UBS Americas.
When Obama paid $1.4 billion in cash to the State of Iran, the money was sent in cash on a private jet from Geneva, Switzerland. So obviously President Obama had access to Geneva bank accounts.

Eric Himpton Holder Jr. served as the 82nd Attorney General under President Obama from 2009 to 2015.
In 2001, after having served as deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno, Holder started his private law practice, in which he represented UBS.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also involved in covering up this affair.
Until 2008, UBS donated less than $60,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
After Hillary intervened to help UBS out with the IRS and announced the legal settlement, Bill Clinton was paid a whopping $1.5 million for speaking engagements, while the donations to the Clinton Foundation grew to about $600,000 by the end of 2014.
UBS also helped the Clinton Foundation launch some inner-city development programs, by lending $32 million at very reasonable rates.
The Swiss government also donated gave $500,000 to the philanthropic Clinton Foundation while they were negotiating the settlement with UBS: http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/tops...nks-27114.html


Because Birkenfeld was not happy with his job, he began to copy and hide internal UBS documents in Switzerland, France and the United States.
Here are the UBS documents that Birkenfeld put on his website: https://lucifersbanker.com/ubs-documents/


Martin Liechti, the former head of UBS wealth management for the US and the Western Hemisphere, received a non-prosecution agreement. As a result, Liechti never spent a day in prison, probation or supervised release.
Here´s the non-prosecuting agreement between the DoJ and Martin Liechti of 2 July 2008: https://lucifersbanker.com/wp-conten...nt-Liechti.pdf

Here´s the deferred prosecuting agreement of the DoJ with UBS of 2009, where they settled the case for $780 million: https://www.justice.gov/sites/defaul..._Agreement.pdf

This brings me back to the current Secretary of Labor,  Alexander Acosta, who as US Attorney made the deals with UBS
Acosta oversaw the settlement with UBS, a bank from Switzerland which helped 20,000 Americans with assets of about $20 billion evade taxes. The bank paid $780 million and agreed to hand over the names of “some of their clients”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...021802541.html


*Israel Discount Bank - $35 billion*
On 31 January 2006, a controlling interest in the Israel Discount Bank (IDB) was acquired by an investor group led by Matthew Bronfman (younger brother of Edgar Bronfman Jr.) - $300 million for a 26% stake, with an option on a further 25%.  The deal gave Bronfman ownership of IDB's wholly owned subsidiary, the Israel Discount Bank of New York.

Regulators approved the deal after the IDB bank agreed to pay $25 million to settle a money-laundering probe of its New York unit. On 17 December 2005, the New York Times reported that some $2.2 billion of illegal funds had been transmitted from Brazil through the IDB in New York (IDBNY).

The Jerusalem Post reported on 2 November 2006, that the scale of money-laundering going on at the Israeli bank was much, much larger than the Brazil case reported in the New York Times.
A "substantial" part of $35.4 billion in third-party wire transfers during the year ended March 2005 showed traits common to laundering operations. This $35 billion of “not monitored” transactions was settled for $12 million: http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_d...p?q=1230169460
(archived here: http://archive.is/i6Yus)


*ABN Amro - $3.2 billion*
No surprises here, my former employer ABN AMRO bank has been involved in money laundering...

In 2007, the Dutch ABN AMRO Bank was bought by a trio of banks, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Fortis and Banco Santander.
RBS was fined in 2010 for the past activities of ABN AMRO’s New York branch. RBS agreed to forfeit *$500 million* in connection with a conspiracy to defraud the USA, violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA), as well as a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).

ABN AMRO implemented procedures to flag payments involving sanctioned countries so that ABN AMRO could delete problematic text to process transactions with countries in violation with the laws of the USA.
From approximately 1995 to December 2005, offices and affiliates of ABN AMRO removed or altered names and references to sanctioned countries from payment messages.  ABN AMRO’s New York branch office intentionally failed to establish an adequate Anti Money Laundering (AML) program. 
According to assistant Attorney General Breuer: 


> ABN AMRO facilitated the movement of illegal money through the U.S. financial system by stripping information from transactions and turning a blind eye to its compliance obligations. It is essential that financial institutions both large and small properly monitor the origins of funds flowing into our financial system.  When financial institutions fail to do so, and, even worse, manipulate information in order to profit from prohibited transactions, they will be held accountable.


Multiple high-risk shell companies and foreign financial institutions were used to launder money through the USA.  *More than $3.2 billion dollars involved shell companies and high risk transactions* with foreign financial institutions through ABN AMRO NY.
In December 2005, ABN AMRO pleaded guilty and paid penalties: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/forme...defraud-united

Correspondent accounts allow foreign banks to move funds into the US without a US branch, by paying fees to a host bank that has a US banking license.
The Justice Department investigated $885,000 in transfers from Latvia through ABN AMRO in NY that were part of evading Russian taxes. That and similar transactions are part of a broader pattern of fraud, tax and money laundering involving millions of dollars, passed through ABN AMRO NY and banks in Russia and Eastern Europe.
ABN AMRO had to cut off its correspondent banks in Cyprus, an offshore banking centre that caters to the Russian market.
ABN AMRO didn’t check if customers were foreign shell banks used for money laundering and tax evasion: http://www.shadowfed.org/wp-content/...wartz_1104.pdf


In 2005, International Strategies Group (ISG) from Hong-Kong-based accused ABN AMRO of helping First Merchant Bank from the Turkish part of Cyprus to swindle it out of *$16.7 million*.
ABN AMRO NY was a “turn-key” operation for international money launderers.
ABN AMRO’s New York office handled First Merchant’s business despite a warning from the Central Bank of Cyprus against First Merchant’s chairman, Hakki Yaman Namli. Namli was wanted by Italian police for laundering $50 million.

It sort of went like this: 1) Money comes from New York; 2) is sent to First Merchant Bank in Cyprus; 3) Money is sent across the globe.
The money was often send to countries with lax banking regulations, like Saudi Arabia, Chile, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Latvia, which are part of Russian money laundering activities: http://nypost.com/2005/05/11/banks-i...cyprus-client/


In 2015, federal prosecutors fined ABN AMRO $80 million for money-laundering and violating federal restrictions on deals with Iran and Libya; $40 million to the Federal Reserve, $20 million to New York’s bank regulator, $15 million to Illinois’ bank regulator, and $5 million to Illinois bank examiners’ education fund.
ABN AMRO falsified payments recorded at its US branches to camouflage transactions with Bank Melli Iran and the Arab Bank for Investment and Foreign Trade (owned in part by the Libyan government).
ABN AMRO modified wire transfers and letters of credit in order to obscure any references to the Iran and Arab banks.
This involved suspect Russian and US bank accounts.
The transactions were carried out by the Dubai branch of ABN AMRO between 1997 and 2004: https://www.law360.com/illinois/arti...undering-probe


In 2015, ABN AMRO was also fined *€625,000* ($682,000) by the De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB, the Dutch central bank) and a further *$640,000* (€586,000) by the Dubai Financial Services Authority.
The Dubai branch of ABN AMRO took part in high risk transactions that could facilitate money laundering. 
Suspect customers deliberately opened an account at the private bank to escape strict supervision. Most of the fraudulent customers came from India by way of the banks subsidiaries: http://nltimes.nl/2015/11/04/abn-amr...otection-dubai

In 2013 ABN AMRO was fined by the DNB for breaking anti-money laundering rules in connection with housing corporation Vestia for a mere €27,000: http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archive...d_abn_amro_ov/


In December 2008 ABN AMRO was taken over by the Dutch State.
Since the end of 2015, the State has been selling shares ABN AMRO mostly to institutional parties below the market price. To protect ABN AMRO from a hostile takeover, technically speaking the shares aren’t even sold.
The Dutch State still owns 63% of ABN AMRO bank…


*ING Bank - billions*
Last month, the biggest financial institution of the Netherlands, the ING Groep with more than 52,000 employees in over 40 countries, has admitted that between 2010 and 2016 it helped “criminals” in laundering millions of Euros of dirty money. ING boasted €4.9 billion in profits in 2017.
Coincidentally ING Bank handles the bank accounts for the Dutch government.

The ING Groep settled the case for a fine of 675 million Euros and 100 million as a reimbursement for the gains, totalling 775 million Euros ($900 million).
CEO Ralph Hamers said the bank "_takes full responsibility_" for not preventing money laundering by “criminals”.

Two years ago, financial investigators started their investigation after they noticed that many “white-collar” criminals held bank accounts at the ING Bank.
The Dutch prosecutor concluded that clients could use accounts for criminal activities “virtually undisturbed”. ING NL didn’t monitor suspicious transactions.

In one case a women's underwear seller in Curacao laundered €150 million through a bank account at ING: "_It should have been clear to the bank that the monetary flows had little to do with the lingerie trade_”.

In 2012, in another case, ING paid a penalty of $619 million for facilitating billions of dollars worth of payments through the US banking system for Cuban and Iranian clients in violation with sanctions banning transactions with Cuba, Iran, Myanmar and Sudan: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news...probe-10684244
(archived here: http://archive.is/vzskK)

Lead prosecutor Margreet Frohberg stated: 


> We had various ongoing criminal investigations and ING bank accounts cropped up repeatedly.
> Since 2008, ING was repeatedly warned, but it failed to take sufficient measures to stop the practice.


ING Bank was involved in money laundering for international telecommunications VEON, formerly VimpelCom (using an account of its subsidiary Watertrail), that "_transferred bribes worth millions of dollars via its bank accounts with ING to a company owned by the daughter of a former Uzbek president_".
In 2016, VEON settled US charges for $795 million after it paid $114 million in bribes to a government official in Uzbekistan.

According to ING’s CEO Ralph Hamers no individual at the bank is responsible for the failures, or has personally benefited, but it had taken measures against around 10 employees anyway.
The Dutch authorities won’t prosecute a single employee of ING, but instead ING has promised to do better, which involves giving the authorities even more confidential information on their clients: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-in...-idUKKCN1LK0CY
(archived here: http://archive.is/mjY18)


_In one of those strange coincidences I have a bank account at ING since 2015 that last month sent me a letter that the new policy is that I should do my bank transaction only with the smartphone app..._

VEON (Vimpelcom) is part of the Russian Alfa Bank that was communicating with the Spectrum Health of the DeVos family and the Trump Organization in 2016 during the US presidential election: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/vie...start=60#p4908

ING’s chief financial officer Koos Timmermans had to resign in the wake of the scandal.
He was forced by former Minister, and director of Royal Dutch Shell Hans Wijers, as chairman of the supervisory board of the ING Groep since 2017: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/0...ering-scandal/

Prosecutors detailed several examples of misused accounts.
In one case a one-man-company in building materials without address in the Netherlands had a business account at ING NL with 15 ATMs linked to it in Surinam. A total of 9,000,000 Euros of criminal money ran through bank accounts at ING NL, but not to pay for any building materials. In reality the terminals in Suriname were used to withdraw cash money.
ING NL did little to investigate the client and the transactions weren’t properly monitored.

In another case, in a little more than a year, 500,000 Euros in cash was deposited in ING bank accounts of 2 connected companies. These were supposedly importing fruit and vegetables from South America as their cover for money laundering.
In total, the ING noticed only one suspicious transaction that was reported much too to the Financial Intelligence Unit, FIU (in Dutch): https://www.om.nl/@103953/ing-betaalt-775/
(archived here: http://archive.is/fukim)

Another interesting company is EY that was the accountant for both Vimpelcom and ING when the money laundering was happening.
EY has denied knowing anything, refused to settle the case and is expected to be taken to court by the Dutch authorities (in Dutch): https://www.accountant.nl/nieuws/201...-verdachte-fd/
(archived here: http://archive.is/0wN76)


*Consultancy fees and speeches*
After the “dirty” money has been washed clean, the money has to be funnelled back to the drug trafficking elite.
This can be done by paying ridiculous wages, like half a million for a part-time job like corporate director, or bizarre amounts in consultancy fees, and best of all, hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches.

Former President Bill Clinton earned more than $16.3 million for 72 speeches in 2012 alone, and combined with Hilary Clinton - the couple have made $25 million since the beginning of 2014 and *$130 million since Bill left the White House* (not even counting Chelsea). On average they earn around $200,000 per appearance. Bill Clinton made $750,000 for one speech in Hong Kong to Swedish telecom giant Ericsson.
Another former President, George W. Bush, gets up to $175,000 per speech, and George Jr. even collected $100,000 to speak at a charity fundraiser for wounded US military veterans (so the “charity” was really the poor Bush family).

Former British Prime Minister *Tony Blair got an estimated £2 million salary at JP Morgan for consultancy. Blair got as much as $300,000 per speech*. In two half hour speeches in the Philippines in 2012, Blair was paid close to £400,000 (or over £6,000 a minute).
Former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy got €250,000 to speak at a conference by Morgan Stanley.

Former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan reportedly received $250,000 for a speech in 2004.
Former Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke reported a $250,000 fee for a speech in Abu Dhabi in 2014: http://www.cityam.com/221317/forget-...make-big-bucks

Donald Trump was caught in one of his (many) blatant lies, when he claimed that he was paid $1.5 million per speech by the Learning Annex in 2006, 2007.
He later stated that they had paid him approximately $400,000 per speech. Donald Duck explained that the promotional campaign, that included himself, made his pay worth more than $1 million to himself: https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczy...PRQ#.oqAGQgnN9

In reality Donald wasn’t paid only for his speeches, but also for taking part in the advertising campaign.
I can’t even believe that they paid Trump $400,000 for every speech though.
But I also have a hard time believing that Donald is US president and only now realise that my wages when I worked for a big bank were much too low, so never mind poor old me...

----------


## Jamesiv1

This is all fake news.

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## devil21

Excellent research as always, firestarter!  I assume you know that UBS and HSBC, among others, are Vatican (Roman) controlled banks, so keep that in mind in the context of our recent convo and your research.  American Express, also, hence the Centurion theme.

----------


## Firestarter

> Excellent research as always, firestarter!  I assume you know that UBS and HSBC, among others, are Vatican (Roman) controlled banks, so keep that in mind in the context of our recent convo and your research.  American Express, also, hence the Centurion theme.


 No less than 8 Holy Roman Emperors were Knights of the Garter (Wikipedia deletes this interesting info from the main page on the Order of the Garter)…
Sigismund - Holy Roman Emperor from 1368–1437;
Albert V, Duke of Austria from 1397–1439 -  later Holy Roman Emperor as Albert II;
Frederick III - Holy Roman Emperor 1415–1493;
Maximilian, King of the Romans 1459–1520 - later Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I;

Charles, Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy 1500–1558 - later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V;
Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 1503–1564 - later Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I;
Maximilian II - Holy Roman Emperor 1527–1576;
Rudolf II - Holy Roman Emperor 1552–1612: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3...Roman_Emperors

The Holy Roman Empire was founded by the grandson of Carolus “Charles” Martel, Charlemagne.
Carolus Martel was the founder of the Carolingian Dynasty in the 8th century that still rules the world (including the banks and the Vatican) through the Order of the Garter: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6613589

The Christian “religion” was founded in the 4th century by Roman Emperor Constantine, who had the New Testament written to corrupt the teachings of Jesus Christ (changing the “definition” of Jew in the process) that was later declared the “Word of God”.
Constantine was not only a Mithras, Sun worshipper but also part of the same Dragon, Mithraic bloodline as the Carolingians: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/vie...start=10#p4570

----------


## Firestarter

*Baronoff – Trump Organization*
Elena Baronoff was a former Russian Spy. She had originally come to USA as a “_Cultural Attaché in Public Diplomacy for the Russian Government_”, a title used in the 1980’s by Russian spies that infiltrated business circles.
Her job was to introduce Russians from all over the world to the Trump organization — to help them launder their money by buying real estate.
Reuters Reported that many people involved in Putin’s government bought real estate in Sunny Isles, but didn’t report them, to hide these money laundering activities.
Three buyers of real estate were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organised crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia. One of them was even arrested for running a gambling and money laundering ring in the Trump tower in Manhattan: http://ania.com/2017/05/19/exclusive...launder-money/

See, Donald Jr. with the pink tie, Michael Dezer, _who worked on Trump projects,_ in the blue sweater, Ivanka, Eric Trump with the blue tie, and Elena Baronoff on the far right.



*Trump condos*
Records show that more than 1,300 Trump condominiums were bought not by people but by shell companies.
Trump condo sales that match Treasury’s characteristics of “_possible money laundering_” totalled $1.5 billion (21% of the 6,400 Trump condos sold in the US). Half of the secretive sales – with a total value of $769 million – were made to a particularly opaque type of shell company called a limited-liability company, LLC, which FinCEN says is “_inherently vulnerable to abuse_”.
Trump himself signed the deed for each secretive sale at _Trump Tower_ and collected $28 million.

Secretive Trump condo sales surged in 1997/1998 when most Wall Street banks stopped lending to Trump after his 2 Atlantic City casinos filed for bankruptcy.
From 2008 through 2012, shell companies bought 823 Trump condos with $890 million in cash – 25% of units sold. More than 87% of those sales were in Trump-licensed buildings.
Secretive sales generated $110 million between 2010 and 2013, records show. The buyers were largely LLCs that were formed just weeks or days before buying. Most of the transactions give little or no clues about the actual buyers.

In July 2016, FinCEN wrote that more than a quarter of the people who controlled the shell companies in Manhattan and Miami-Dade had at one time engaged in “_possible criminal activity_”.
One of Trump project’s engaged a Russia-born developer, who had been convicted of money laundering in the 1990s.

In March 2008, a Russian billionaire paid Trump $95 million for a Palm Beach, Florida, estate that Trump had bought 4 years earlier for $41 million.
On 10 September 1997, a shell company bought a condo at the _Trump International Hotel and Tower_ in Manhattan for $2.26 million, and sold it 8 weeks later to another shell company – for $3 million (a 33% gain).
In Miami-Dade County, Florida, a shell company bought a condo in a Trump-licensed building on 12 Augustus 2010 for $956,768. The company sold the condo the same day to another shell company for $525,000.

In 1984, federal prosecutors charged Russian native David Bogatin with taking part in a massive gasoline bootlegging operation and buying five Trump Tower condos for $4.9 million to launder the proceeds. Bogatin pleaded guilty in 1987 and was released from federal prison in 1998.

After Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier had been overthrown in 1986, the Haitian government claimed that Duvalier had laundered stolen treasury funds by buying a Trump Tower apartment 54-K for $446,875 in August 1983.
Duvalier used the Panama shell company _Lasa Trade and Finance_ to buy the apartment in cash. Trump signed the deed of sale: https://www.buzzfeed.com/thomasfrank...gg0#.cqdmzr88x
(archived here: http://archive.is/Q8N7v)


*Erdogan – offshore tankers*
It looks like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was caught in some money laundering scandals.
The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, claims he has documents to prove that members of Erdogan’s family and their allies, in late 2011 and early 2012, transferred $15 million to offshore company Bellway Limited, registered in the British Isle of Man.
According to Kilicdaroglu, Erdogan’s brother Mustafa, his eldest son Ahmet Burak, and brother-in-law Ziya Ilgen - each paid $3.75 million into the Bellway account. Close associates reportedly also made payments to this account, including $2.25 million from Osman Ketenci (Ahmet Burak’s father-in-law), and $1.5 million from Mustafa Gündogan (Erdogan’s former private secretary).


Erdogan responded to the allegations: 


> Do you have any proof of your allegations? If so, show them to the public… If Tayyip Erdogan has a penny abroad, in any bank, come out and prove it. When you prove it, I give you the guarantee that I will not stay in the Presidency one more minute.


Photos taken of Kilicdaroglu’s documents with snippets of SWIFT transactions, suggest that the money goes in the opposite direction: the Erdogans and associates didn’t pay but received millions from Bellway Limited.

The Erdogan family owns 2 other offshore company (besides Bellway Limited) - Pal Shipping Trader One Ltd in Malta, and Bumerz Limited (owned by Ziya Ilgen) on the Isle of Man.
Since around 2008, the Erdogan family has operated a network of companies from Malta to Turkey to the Isle of Man. The opaque offshore network is designed to obscure the family’s ownership of the $25 million oil tanker Agdash, built in 2007.
The bill for the Agdash tanker was paid by 2 businessmen close to the Erdogan family. The first is childhood friend of Erdogan Sitki Ayan – mentioned by Kilicdaroglu -, who provided a $7 million “loan” from his Turkish company Som Petrol. The second is Mübariz Mansimov, president of shipping conglomerate Palmali Shipping, who provided the remaining $18 million.
The Erdogans never repaid the “loans”. Instead, they leased the ship to the same billionaire Azeri-Turkish businessman Mübariz Mansimov, who had already paid millions for the oil tanker in 2007.

In November 2011, shares in the Erdogan’s Turkish company, Bumerz Denizcilik, were transferred to Bellway Limited, which was set up by Sitki Ayan using an Isle of Man service company called Equiom. Sitki’s son, Bahaddin Ayan, and employee of Sitki Ayan, Kasim Oztas, appear as directors on several companies in the offshore network - Pal Shipping Trader One, Bumerz Limited, Bumerz Denizcilik, and Bellway Limited: https://theblacksea.eu/malta-files/a...ffshore-update
(archived here: http://archive.is/B9HjT)


*Erdogan – Iran*
In March 2016, Reza Zarrab was arrested by FBI agents in Miami. Zarrab was very close to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Zarrab was arrested for violating sanctions against Iran, with the support of the Erdogan administration, by buying oil and natural gas in exchange for gold.
The Minister for the Economy, Zafer Caglayan, received kickbacks of over 45 million dollars worth of cash and luxury goods from Zarrab.

When police entered the home of Süleyman Aslan, CEO of Halk Bank, which Zarrab used to launder his money, they found shoeboxes filled with 4.5 million dollars.
In March/April 2017, the FBI agents arrested Mehmet Hakan Atilla, deputy CEO of Halk Bank, when he arrived at JFK Airport, New York (obviously not concerned with legal problems…).

Zarrab fired most of his lawyers and hired Rudy Giuliani (close to President Donald) and Michael Mukasey (former US Attorney General).
In March 2017, Trump fired US attorney Preet Bharara, who had prosecuted Zarrab: http://linkis.com/www.newyorker.com/ne/GVArt


*Bayrock, Sater, Arif, Khrapunov – Trump, Bush*
From 1987 – 1993, when Bijan Kian was Vice President of Shearson Lehman/American Express, one Felix H. Sater worked there as a stock trader.
Felix Sater and his associate Tevfik Arif (Tofic Arifov) with their Bayrock Corporation have been partners in crime with the Trump Organization.
In 2007, Bayrock founded the Dutch front KazBay BV, which was in turn owned by the “Dutch” Bayrock BV (of Bayrock Group LLC of Sater, Arif and Trump) and the Swiss Helvetic Capital SA. KazBay was used to launder millions of dollars*.* It was the Bracewell & Giuliani LLP law firm of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, which set-up the KazBay construction: https://zembla.bnnvara.nl/data/files/2033471528.pdf

The wife of Viktor Khrapunov was the owner of Helvetic Capital SA. Former Kazakh minister Khrapunov has been accused by the Kazakh government of embezzlement of hundreds of millions of tax money.
In 2005, Donald Trump owned 18% of Trump SoHo; Bayrock owned the rest of it. In 2013, the Khrapunov family used shell companies to buy 3 apartments in Trump SoHo for $3.1 million.

After it became public knowledge that Felix Sater had been involved in a variety of criminal activity, including money laundering, Donald Trump exploited this situation by demanding more money; see the mail of Sater of 28 January 2008: https://zembla.bnnvara.nl/data/files/3444027513.pdf


The Iceland investment fund FL-Group is a strategic partner of Bayrock. FL was funded by Russian investors close to Vladimir Putin. FL and Bayrock planned to commit tax fraud for $250 million.
The agreement between Bayrock and FL was signed by none other than Donald Trump. 

From the Dutch Zembla (in Dutch): https://zembla.bnnvara.nl/nieuws/de-...rump-de-russen

Sater and a former Trump Organization colleague, Daniel Ridloff, received roughly $20 million — from a case linked to a multi-billion-dollar global money laundering scheme originating in Kazakhstan, and stretching to Russia and the USA.
Felix Sater is also connected to Neil Bush...

In 2013 a complaint filed by a Swiss financier, that accused Sater and Ridloff of absconding with nearly $43 million from the sale of the Ohio shopping mall Tri-County Mall near Cincinnati to American Pacific International Capital (APIC).
One of the directors of the San Francisco based APIC is… Neil Bush.
Bush has denied knowing Sater and says that the mall was purchased for $43 million by APIC at a public auction, and then transferred to a real estate company SingHaiyi Group based in Singapore that he chairs.

In one of those strange coincidences, Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank and the city of Almaty (Kazakhstan) accused 3 Kazakh men - Viktor Khrapunov (former Almaty mayor), his son Ilyas, and Mukhtar Ablyazov (former chairman of BTA Bank) - of disappearing with billions of dollars.
A testimony in the Khrapunov case is by Nicolas Bourg, the same Swiss financier who accused Sater and Ridloff of stealing the $43 million from the Ohio mall deal. Bourg was president of the real estate fund Swiss Development Group (SDG) that was controlled by the Khrapunov family.
The Financial Times has revealed that 3 Trump Soho condos in Manhattan were bought in 2013 with $3.1 million that came from laundering the Khrapunov billions. The beneficiary of the companies that bought the condos was Elvira Kudryashova — the California-based daughter of Viktor Khrapunov. Sater and Ridloff worked closely with Kudryashova in 2012.

In Ridloff’s Linked-In bio he refers to himself as the former vice president of SDG-Investment Fund. Bourg claimed that the shell he created in Luxembourg — Triadou — was wholly-owned by SDG. Bourg states that Triadou was also used to buy the Ohio shopping mall.
Telford International was used to fund Triadou. Telford was allegedly used to move the money to the same FBME Bank that was banned in the US due to money laundering and terror financing allegations: https://www.dcreport.org/2017/05/12/...-of-questions/
(archived here: http://archive.is/nKSQM)

Here’s a bizarre transcript from 2008, where Tevfik Arif explains how they’ve bought 2 coal fields for $400,000-$500,000 that they don’t own.
They also talk about “_Khrapunov and his son_” who own the coal field (if I understand correctly): https://www.scribd.com/document/3482...erpts-May-2008

In Felix Sater’s LinkedIn bio he described himself as a former “_Senior Advisor to Board of Directors_” to TxOil of none other than Neil Bush (TxOil once drilled in Turkmenistan).
Companies he has worked for are Mirax (2008-2010), Trump (2010-2011), TxOil (2011-2013), Regency Investment (1998-present), Rixos (2005-present), Sembol Construction (2007-present), Global Habitat Solutions (2009-present). Bayrock isn’t on this list.
Tevfik Arif owns a majority share in both Sembol and Rixos...


For more on Trump, Bayrock, Arif and Felix Sater (Michael Cohen’s long-time friend): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6529940

----------


## Firestarter

*Firtash, Gazprom - $3 billion*
Gazprom sold more than 20 billion cubic metres of gas below market prices to Dmitry Firtash in 4 years - about 4 times more than the Russian government has publicly acknowledged. Because of the low price, companies controlled by Firtash made more than $3 billion. Gazprom missed out on about $2 billion in revenue it could have made by selling that gas at “normal” prices.

In 2012, Moscow sold the gas to Firtash for $230 per 1,000 cubic metres; and in 2013, for $267 per unit on average. This is at least $100 per unit below the market price in Western Europe.
The gas was sold to Firtash for at least one-third less than what Ukraine’s Naftogaz had to pay.
Firtash’s Ostchem companies in Cyprus and Switzerland resold the gas to his chemical plants in Ukraine for $430 per unit. The 2 offshore Ostchem companies made an estimated profit of $3.7 billion in 2 years.

Kremlin spokesman Peskov said Putin has met Firtash but that they are not close. He said Russia supplied gas at “lower prices” to Ukraine because Ukrainian President Yanukovich had asked for it and Russia wanted to help Ukraine’s petrochemical industry.
According to sources in the energy industry, every major deal that Gazprom signs, is approved by Putin.
The deals were financed by the Russian Gazprombank, which is not directly controlled by Gazprom (that holds only a minority share). It is overseen by people linked to Putin, including Yuri Kovalchuk, a banker, who until March 2014 controlled an investment firm that manages a majority stake in Gazprombank.

Starting in 2002, Eural Trans Gas (registered in Hungary) was transporting gas from Turkmenistan through Russia to Ukraine. Its ownership was unclear, but Firtash represented it.
In July 2004, RosUkrEnergo became the new intermediary for gas deals between Russia and Ukraine. Most of RUE was owned by Firtash and Gazprom.
Firtash imported the Russian gas through a Cypriot company of which he is sole director, and a Swiss one set up by Group DF (Group Dmytro Firtash).

In June 2010, Firtash started Ostchem Investments in Cyprus. A month later, Gazprombank lent the company $815 million. By March 2011, Gazprombank had lent up to $11.15 billion to Firtash companies.
A Gazprombank manager said that the Russian bank had led a consortium of lenders which in 2011 lend about $7 billion to Firtash (I don’t know who the other lenders were…).

In September 2010, Ostchem Investments bought a 90% stake in the Stirol fertiliser plant in Ukraine (gas is needed to produce fertilizer). In 2011, Firtash acquired 2 more fertiliser plants in Ukraine - Severodonetsk Azot and Rivne Azot.
Firtash also bought the Nika Tera sea port, through which amongst others fertiliser is shipped. He also acquired the Nadra Bank and invested in the titanium industry: http://www.reuters.com/article/russi...0TF4QD20141126
(archived here: http://web.archive.org/article/russi...0TF4QD20141126)

On 21 February 2017, Austrian police detained Dmytro Firtash after an EU arrest warrant issued by Spain. In Spain, Firtash was accused of money laundering money laundering $10 million through companies on Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands.
Firtash also has a residence in London’s Knightsbridge: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a7439621.html


*Firtash, RUE – Drake property, Manafort*
According to a writ filed in 2011 by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the _Group DF_ (of Dmytro Firtash) never had any intention to purchase the _Drake property_ for $850 million, but instead used the real estate project as a vehicle to “invest” $25 million in New York bank accounts, for the purpose of money laundering, racketeering and bribes.
Firtash even acquired his own bank, Nadra Bank: 


> 1. This case concerns the arbitrary prosecutions, arrests, and detentions of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other political opposition members in violation of international law, which have been carried out by or with the assistance of Defendants, representing a collection of private and public figures that stand to benefit politically and/or financially by eliminating Ukraine’s political opposition.
> (…)
> 7. From 2004 to early 2009, Defendant RosUkrEnergo AG (“RUE”) received substantial profits for serving as a middleman in natural gas dealings between Naftogaz, a Ukrainian state-owned gas company, and Gazprom, a Russian company. Ukrainian billionaire Defendant Dmytro Firtash a/k/a Dmitry Firtash (“Firtash”), who largely controls RUE, was able to secure profits from the Russia-Ukraine gas deals due to his close relationship with, and payment of illegal kickbacks to, Ukrainian government officials, including then Naftogaz Chairman Yuriy Boyko and Deputy Chairman Ihor Voronin, both of whom were nominated to RUE’s Coordination Committee after securing RUE’s initial brokerage contract.
> (…)
> 35. (…) Manafort played a key role in the defendants’ conspiracy and racketeering enterprise by assisting Firtash to become a major “investor” and silent partner in defendants CMZ Ventures (sometimes referred to as “ZMC Investors”), Group DF and their affiliated companies, through which Firtash and his associates were able to money launder a large portion of the funds that Firtash, Group DF and RUE were skimming from numerous Gazpron/Naftogaz natural gas transactions, as well as the windfall payments and profits worth approximately $3.5 billion that they received as a result of the corrupt transactions and breaches of fiduciary duties that resulted in the Stockholm Arbitration award, as described below in greater detail. These monies were then laundered through various New York based bank accounts under the guise of otherwise legitimate real estate and other investment activities in New York and elsewhere in the United States, and the contracts, agreements, meetings, discussions and electronic communications (e.g., computer, email and fax transmissions) relating to said money laundering and investment activities were primarily conducted through defendants’ offices located at 1501 Broadway, 25th floor.
> (…)
> 83. RUE is owned by Russian state-owned energy company, Gazprom (owning a 50% share of RUE), Firtash (owning a 45% share of RUE through holding company Centragas), and Ukrainian businessman and Firtash associate Ivan Fursin (owning a 5% share of RUE also through holding company Centragas, which is almost wholly owned by Firtash through Group DF).
> (…)
> 100. Firtash, Mogilevich, and their affiliated companies used three U.S. companies in particular—CMZ Ventures LLC, Kallista Investments LLC, and the Dynamic Fund (which were sometimes referred to collectively as “The Dynamic Group)—to launder money in the United States and abroad under the guise of investing in legitimate business ventures.
> ...


 http://freebeacon.com/wp-content/upl...omplaint-2.pdf

According to Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, handwritten ledgers found in the Ukraine show $12.7 million in undisclosed payments to Manafort from the _Party of Regions_ from 2007 to 2012.
Investigators assert that the cash was part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

The network comprised shell companies whose ultimate owners were shielded by the secrecy laws of the offshore jurisdictions where they were registered, including the British Virgin Islands, Belize and the Seychelles.
Oleg Deripaska claimed he had also paid about $7.3 million in management fees to the Pericles fund in over two years: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/u...rump.html?_r=0


*Party of Regions – Manafort, Podesta*
The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECFMU) was formed in 2012 by 3 senior members of the Party of Regions, a pro-Russia party led by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and advised by Paul Manafort.

The Podesta Group arranged meetings with unnamed "_Ukrainian officials_".
In one of those meetings, Ukraine's foreign minister Leonid Kozhara met Senator Christopher Murphy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Europe subcommittee. Kozhara was a founder of the ECFMU and close adviser to President Yanukovych.

The Podesta Group, did not disclose at least 32 contacts with the State Department in a 2012 lobbying report to Congress. At that time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was scrutinising Ukraine's upcoming election.
In April of this year, the Podesta Group filed new lobbying disclosures to augment lobbying reports from 2012 to 2014.
Both the Podesta Group and Mercury have claimed that they believed the ECFMU was an independent group that was not funded or directed by Ukraine's government.

According to David Marin, Podesta’s spokesman, the Podesta Group’s work for the ECFMU was supervised by Manafort's associate Rick Gates: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/09/po...ing/index.html

Over $1.5 million was paid by the _Party of Regions_ to American politicians in 2012 and 2013 alone. The founders of the _ECFMU_, at that time, were 3 Members of the Parliament from the _Party of Regions_, who in 2 years since have moved considerably  up the power ladder — the current Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara, the current head of the Budget Committee of Parliament Ievgenii Hiellier and the current head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Verkhovna Rada Vitaliy Kahlyushnyy.
The reported budget of the _ECFMU_ (located in Brussels, Belgium) is only €10,000. In 2012, the Belgian mediator paid the American lobbyists 80 times that amount — $800,000. In 2013 they have paid American lobbyists 79 times their budget — $790,000.
The following graph explains this story in short.


The Podesta Group, was founded by brothers Tony and John Podesta. John headed the office of President Bill Clinton in 1998-2001, since December 2013 was a senior adviser to President Obama and then campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton. In 2012, 2013 the Podesta Group received $1.02 million from the ECFMU.
The second company that was hired by _ECFMU_, is _Mercury/Clark & Weinstock_, of Manafort and Rick Gates. Mercury is affiliated with ex-Republican congressman John Vincent "Vin" Weber, who was involved in the last presidential election campaign of Mitt Romney. Mercury received $570,000 from Brussels in 2012, 2013.

What’s bizarre about the _ECFMU_ is that it was first reported to be founded by acting Members of Parliament in the Ukraine: Leonid Kozhara, Ievgenii Hiellier and Vitaliy Kahlyushnyy.
The surnames of Kozhara, Hiellier and Kahlyushnyy were taken out of the registry, and replaced by former MP Oleg Nadosha, ex-MP Oleksiy Plotnikov and Kseniya Solovyova (born in 1987).

German Ina Kirsch Van de Vater, was also among the founders for the _ECFMU_. Ina Kirsch claimed that the _ECFMU_ has no relation to the _Klyuyev Foundation_ (suspected of embezzling state money): 


> U.S. companies that cooperate with the ‘European Centre for Modern Ukraine’ have no relation to the Party of Regions. They work exclusively in support of the Center (...) The Center has nothing to do, directly or indirectly, to Klyuyev’s fund.


Strangely Ina Kirsch “forgot” to mention that her husband Robert Van de Vater in 2014 was a Deputy Board Chairman of the _Klyuyev Foundation_: http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2014/02/5/7012902/
(archived here: http://archive.is/GhInS)


*Manafort, Trump, Deripaska - $18 million*
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been charged with tax fraud and money laundering. Manafort surrendered to the FBI and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies. Manafort was also charged with failing to register as a foreign lobbyist.
Rick Gates, Manafort’s long-time partner in crime and a campaign adviser (even after Manafort resigned), was also charged and turned himself in.

Prosecutors say in:



> total, more than $75 million flowed through the offshore accounts. MANAFORT laundered more than $18 million



Manafort spent the money extravagantly, including more than $1.3 million to clothing stores in New York and Beverly Hills: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/u...-indicted.html

Between 2006 and 2013, Paul J. Manafort bought 3 homes in New York — one in Trump Tower, one in Soho, and one in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Using shell companies, Manafort paid for them in full, and then transferred the properties into his own name for no money.
In 2005, Manafort and Davis began pursuing work with Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest “businessmen” in Russia, CEO of RUSAL and close to Vladimir Putin.
Manafort’s 2006 purchase of a Trump Tower apartment coincided with signing a $10 million contract with Deripaska.

In 2012, one of Manafort’s shell companies, _MC Soho Holdings LLC_, purchased a fourth floor loft on Howard Street (on the border of Soho and Chinatown), for $2.85 million. In April 2016, when he was becoming Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort transferred the unit into his own name and borrowed $3.4 million against it.
In 2013, another Manafort-linked shell company, _MC Brooklyn Holdings_, purchased a townhouse at 377 Union Street in Carroll Gardens for $2,995,000. This transaction followed the same pattern: the home was paid in full without a mortgage. On 9 February 2016, after Trump’s victories in Michigan and Mississippi, Manafort took out $5.3 million in loans on the property. 
This looks like a scheme to keep the source of the (dirty) money hidden.

Between April 2015 and January 2017 – including time that he worked on the Trump campaign – Manafort borrowed about $12 million against his 3 New York homes (including the apartment in Trump Tower). That was more than he had paid for them, and more than they’re worth.
Days before Trump was sworn in as President, Manafort transferred the Carroll Gardens brownstone from _MC Brooklyn Holdings_ to his own name and refinanced the loans with The Federal Savings Bank, taking on more debt. He now has $6.8 million in loans on a building he bought for $3 million (in March 2017). According to David Reiss, a professor real estate law, it’s extremely unusual for a home loan to exceed the value of the property.

In August 2016, _The New York Times_ published an article on Manafort, claiming he’d accepted $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Putin, Ukrainian political party between 2007 and 2012. Then Manafort had to resign as campaign manager: http://www.wnyc.org/story/paul-manaf...ate-purchases/
(archived here: http://archive.is/okldW)


For more on Paul Manafort: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-Charges/page3

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## Firestarter

Every week British stories are published to make Brits “fight” for their right to leave the EU. Often these stories focus on George Soros or Theresa May sabotaging Brexit by arranging a new referendum or the art. 50 procedure won’t be finished in time…
I posted that the elite controlled SCL Group staged both the campaign for Brexit and president Trump, with my conclusion that “they” wanted these events to happen: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6605758

At that time I searched in vain for a good motive for why the _Order of the Garter_ wanted Britain out of the European Union. Recently I stumbled per chance on a story that shows that Brexiteers are really “fighting” for the right of the elite to evade taxes and launder money.
Leaving the EU, withdraws Britain from “new” tax avoidance laws that would make the semi-legal offshore bank accounts of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and… Queen Elizabeth problematic.

The following recent Daily Mail piece actually warns that the EU wants to shackle Great Britain to EU tax policies after Brexit. Couldn’t they be more blatant?
The draft documents, written by the TAX3 committee, state: 


> The intention is that they commit to continue to alignment with EU standards, including for their overseas countries and territories.



So the EU wants to stop tax evasion and money laundering through offshore “overseas” bank accounts? I really don’t believe they are!

The Daily Mail continued their money laundering supporting propaganda with the following quote from Leave.EU: 


> Spineless May will inevitably cave in & sell us down the river again.





> Sack her and get someone who will say NO!



They also warn us that the EU doesn’t want Britain to lower taxes: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6298453/EU-wants-control-Britains-tax-policies-Brexit-stop-UK-low-tax-economy.html


The best way to attract business for the money laundering British banks is to introduce EU laws against money laundering and tax evasion when Britain leaves…

In 2015, Britain rejected plans announced from Brussels to combat “_industrial-scale tax avoidance by the world’s biggest multinationals_”. The new EU tax regulations would have clamped down on offshore accounts and removed many of Britain’s competitive tax, money laundering advantages over other EU Member States.

In 2013, David Cameron wrote to the then president of the European council, Herman Van Rompuy, to prevent offshore trusts from being dragged into an EU-wide crackdown on tax avoidance requesting that trusts should not automatically be subject to the same transparency requirements as companies: https://medium.com/the-jist/was-eu-tax-evasion-regulation-the-reason-for-the-brexit-referendum-980ba88a8077


Some of the loudest Brexit supporters have offshore interests.

Lord George Magan was awarded a life peerage in 2011 by Queen Elizabeth.
Magan is the settler of 2 Jersey-based trusts that hold properties and fine art. As a director of the yacht firm Edmiston he is also involved in a Jersey company, which was set up to help clients who want to employ staff through an offshore firm.

Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay live on Brecqhou in the Channel Islands, and Monaco.
In 2004, a structure was set up through the Bermuda-based Reid Finance Ltd, to keep their ownership, including of the Daily Telegraph, hidden.

Robert Edmiston gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to 2 Brexit groups
Edmiston owns 2 Malta-based aviation companies.

MP Jacob Rees-Mogg received $680,000 through an investment firm based in the British Virgin Islands.
James Pockney has worked for Rees-Mogg as a director of Saliston for 22 years. He approached Appleby regarding an Isle of Man company called General & Oriental Investments in 2008.

Some of Andrea Leadsom’s family income comes from offshore interests. Her husband, Benjamin Leadsom, has worked as a director for many years for Peter de Putron, who is married to her sister, Hayley.
De Putron runs a multibillion-dollar hedge fund from Guernsey. In 2000, he also with his wife owned Tyrolese (Malta) Ltd. Incorporated that was the majority shareholder in the UK-registered Tyrolese Ltd.

Brexiteer James Mellon is a proprietor of a “hip” cocktail bar in London.
Mellon and Dattels invested £500,000 each for 25% via the Isle of Man. It was the Manx vehicle that paid out the dividends. If the bar is ever sold by its Manx parent, there would be no corporation tax to pay, because the Isle of Man does not tax company profits.
In 2007, he partnered with his longstanding associate, the Canadian billionaire Stephen Dattels, to run the UK-registered company Calabrese House Ltd, which was entirely owned by the Isle of Man company Calabrese Holdings Ltd: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/09/brexiters-put-money-offshore-tax-haven


Arron Banks donated £8.5 million to Nigel Farage and his campaign to leave Europe and continues to argue for a hard Brexit. He co-owns the Isle of Man-based Conister Bank with his friend and fellow Brexiteer, the Isle of Man resident Jim Mellon.
In 2012, Conister opened accounts for a businessman whose gambling firm, Pokerstars, and business partner, Mark Scheinberg, were accused by the US Department of Justice for laundering billions in illegal proceeds.
After the US outlawed internet gambling in 2006, individuals associated with Pokerstars, including Mark’s father, founder of Pokerstars Isai Scheinberg, had taken money from American citizens via fake websites claiming to sell jewellery or golf balls.
In 2011, the FBI filed charges against Mark and Isai Scheinberg. They were living in the Isle of Man and did not return to the US to evade the charges and arrest. In July 2012, Pokerstars announced it had settled the case with the DoJ for $547 million.
In 2014, Pokerstars was sold to a Canadian group for $4.9 billion.

In 2015, Arron Banks’ insurance business Southern Rock was bailed out, just months before Banks began bankrolling the Leave.EU referendum campaign to which he donated £8.4 million.
One of the 2 campaign vehicles that received Banks’ £8.4 millions, Better for the Country Ltd, was set up by STM.

If Southern Rock Insurance had gone bankrupt this could have made Banks’ UK insurance broker Eldon collapse.
Regulators made Southern Rock promise not to make any payments to Banks without their prior written consent. After in 2014 PwC concluded that Southern Rock wasn’t a healthy company, Banks had to resign as CEO, with his longstanding associate Alan Kentish (another Southern Rock director).
Banks’ ties to Kentish and STM go back to at least 2004, when Kentish became a founding director of Southern Rock. Banks invested in STM and became its largest shareholder before selling his stake in early 2015. More recently, Kentish, Banks and another STM founder invested in Legal Protection Group, a broker of insurance for lawyers and doctors.

ICS Risk Solutions, a holding company on the Isle of Man, pumped £77.7 million into Southern Rock to save it from collapse. Banks owned both ICS and Southern Rock; it is not clear where the money came from.
When the money came, the management of ICS was changed. In April 2015, the day before the initial rescue deal, wife of STM’s boss, Louise Kentish, joined the ICS board. On 24 June 2016, the day after the referendum, Alan Kentish joined her with 2 other new directors (the former and current chairmen of STM).
Banks has said he owns 90% of ICS, with management and staff holding the rest. But the filings showed he owns less than 75% — with no information on the remainder.

A core business for STM is setting up offshore trusts, to make it difficult to trace who ultimately owns the assets.
STM services helped to invest pension savings in the Trafalgar Multi Asset Fund, which collapsed in 2016 and is under investigation of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. STM should have seen red flags before the pension debacle.
In 2015, STM was prosecuted in Jersey for money-laundering compliance failures. STM was eventually acquitted, but it received an official order to clean up its behaviour.

On 19 October 2017, Alan Kentish was arrested in Gibraltar for failing to notify the authorities on money-laundering by one of STM’s clients. Following his arrest, Kentish resigned his directorships of 2 companies linked to Arron Banks.
STM was managing operations for Henley & Partners, whose business includes helping rich foreign nationals acquire citizenship of tax havens; and whose chairman reportedly has ties to Cambridge Analytica.

In 2010, STM through Henley helped Ukrainian politician Viacheslav Suprunenko, son-in-law of the mayor of Kiev and brother of a senior figure in the Party of Regions, apply for a passport in St Kitts and Nevis. Suprunenko asked STM to route his payments through offshore vehicles apparently unconnected to him. STM refused but failed to report this suspicious behaviour to the authorities
Junior STM staff reported on internal suspicious activity for 19 individuals or entities. Only 3 of these were acknowledged by STM’s compliance officer and none was passed to the island’s financial crimes unit: https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/brexitinc/marcus-leroux-leigh-baldwin/brexit-s-offshore-secrets-0
(archived here: http://archive.is/KkN40)

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## devil21

Coincidence that both of the countries obviously moving toward getting out of the EU are the two European countries where the sovereign cities are located?

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## Firestarter

> Coincidence that both of the countries obviously moving toward getting out of the EU are the two European countries where the sovereign cities are located?


It’s a great trick isn’t it? Getting out of the EU, while at the same time using the EU to crack down on the money laundering competition in countries that remain in the EU... The Paradise Papers look like a limited hangout operation to make the EU introduce “stricter” laws on money laundering and tax evasion, so that the (Brexiting) British money launderers have the competitive edge!

According to our wonderful media we have to believe that there are legitimate reasons for the elite to hide their wealth through offshore funds.
Queen Elizabeth by law is exempt from taxes. According to our dumb, deaf and blind media we have to believe that Elizabeth voluntarily pays taxes. If that is the case than why doesn’t Elizabeth have the law changed, so that she is obligated to pay taxes (as this wouldn’t really make a difference)?

The Duchy of Lancaster is a private estate that was set up in 1399 to manage land and investments for the reigning monarch. In March 2017, the Duchy was worth £519 million.
The Duchy of Lancaster has invested £10 million ($13.1 million) from Elizabeth’s private estate into offshore funds in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. This had never before been disclosed. If Elizabeth pays taxes, like she claims, I would like to see evidence that she paid taxes over the income generated from her investments through this Cayman Islands fund.

In September 2005, the Duchy of Lancaster invested $7.5 million (£5.7 million) in Dover Street VI Cayman Fund LP.


The US company running the fund later asked the duchy to contribute $450,000 (£344,000) – 6% of its commitment - into UK retailer BrightHouse and Threshers. The Duchy of Lancaster refused to disclose the size of its original 2007 investment in BrightHouse, which coincided with a boom in its value. The Duchy claims the BrightHouse holding now equates to £3,208.
In September 2007, when BrightHouse began the Duchy contributed $450,000 to five investments (including "Project Bertie"). This included an interest in London-based private equity firm Vision Capital that acquired 100% of BrightHouse and 75% of the Threshers off licence chain.


BrightHouse has since been accused of overcharging customers, and using hard sell tactics on people with mental health problems and learning disabilities. 
In 2015, a UK parliamentary report concluded that BrightHouse was charging interest rates of up to 94%. One in 5 customers was in arrears and one in 10 purchases ended in repossession. In one case, a Samsung freezer cost £644 to buy but £1,716 under a five-year plan from the chain.
In October 2017, BrightHouse was ordered to pay £14.8 million in compensation to 249,000 customers for not handling in their best interest.

BrightHouse has limited its tax bill through a large loan to a Luxembourg holding company. Between 2007 and 2014, it reported £1.6 billion in revenue and made an operating profit of £191 million, but paid less than £6 million in taxes.
The Paradise Papers show only one payout from the fund to the Duchy of Lancaster in June 2008 of $361,367 over which it paid only $1,505 (0.4%) in tax.

Threshers' balance sheet was loaded with debt and it paid no corporation tax for 2 years. When the drinks retailed went bust in October 2009, almost 6,000 people lost their jobs and it owed £17.5 million in UK tax (how much did Queen Liz take?).

The Duchy of Lancaster also invested £5 million in the Jubilee Absolute Return Fund, which invests in hedge funds. At the time of the investment in June 2004, the fund was based in Bermuda. In 2006, it moved to Guernsey.
This investment ended in 2010.

According to our media, we cannot hold it against Queen Elizabeth that her huge fortune is invested in such a dubious way: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41878305
(archived here: http://archive.is/16he2)

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## Firestarter

Arron Banks owns a stake in a South African diamond mine, and donated millions to the Leave.EU Brexit campaign of Nigel Farage.
Russian ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko, met Banks 4 times in about 12 months, in which they discussed Trump’s US presidential campaign. Banks and Yakovenko also frequently sent each other text messages.
At least 2 of the meetings between Banks met Yakovenko were shortly before or after meetings between Trump’s team and Banks and Farage. They met for example on 19 August 2016; and less than a week later, Banks and Farage were talking privately with Donald Trump in Jackson, Mississippi, where Farage also addressed the cheering crowd.

Banks said he and Farage each met once with US embassy officials to describe their contacts.
Banks replied that “_not one shred of evidence has been produced_” that he was working for Russia.
Farage responded: 


> There seems to be a culture of throwing hysterical accusations around without any evidence whatsoever.


 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a8422506.html


While everyday working people have no choice but to pay taxes in their own country, the global elite avoid paying their share by setting up shell companies in exotic tax havens.
Individuals from 200 countries used more than 214,000 offshore entities to help them launder money and evade taxes worth billions in tax. Those implicated included 140 politicians and officials; including the president of Ukraine, the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, and the King of Saudi Arabia.

In October 2017, in the wake of the Panama Papers, the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry into Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion was set up, which recommended for stricter sanctions against banks and intermediaries involved in illegal tax or money laundering schemes.

By leaving the EU, Britain won’t have to face the new EU rules.
This is very relevant, as the UK already had the largest number of offshore entities of any EU nation in the Panama Papers, with 17,973. Only Luxembourg came close with 10,877.

President Donald Trump is slashing taxes and creating even more tax loopholes for the elite: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8007426.html


Another interesting story in this context is that billionaire Brexit supporter Crispin Odey made £220 million because he knew that after the successful Leave referendum the shares would “crash”: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...-a7391841.html

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## Firestarter

*Terry Reed & John Cummings - Compromised*


Here's a book on the drugs for arms pipeline centred in the Arkansas of Governor Bill Clinton.
A large part of the book details the money laundering schemes set-up in Arkansas.

On 24 February 1982, in Oklahoma City; Terry Reed first met Oliver North (who used the name John Cathey at the time). At that time Reed could contact North through the FBI. Reed frequently met North.
Only in 1987, when Iran-Contra hit the press, Reed found out that “John Cathey” was really Oliver North.
On 11 March 1983, North proposed Reed to meet Barry Seal (Adler Berriman Seal) so he could help in supplying guns to the Contras. Shortly thereafter Dan Lasater introduced Seal to Reed.

One of the first tasks for Reed in working for Seal was to make sure that no FAA regulations were violated for the airport they set up near Nella, about 12 miles from Mena, Arkansas (population 5000) which was only accessible by four-wheel drives.
The airport was first used to train Contra pilots in air-delivery techniques for the Contra Air Force.

When the airport became fully operational; weapons were delivered by “special barge traffic” over the Arkansas River to Nella and protected by the US Army Corps of engineers. The arms were temporarily stored there and flown to the Contras.
Cash and drugs were dropped in Arkansas from planes. The cash airdrops amounted to more than 9 million dollars a week.
Terry Reed saw the operation by being involved, but didn’t realise that the cash came from cocaine trafficking. He also knew that the CIA and White House were involved (of course at the time he didn’t know the identity of Oliver North yet).

Planes were “borrowed”, with and without the owners' cooperation, for "sting" operations.

The New Jersey gun-manufacturing company Iver Johnson’s arms Inc. was moved to Jacksonville, Arkansas.
The untraceable parts (without serial number) for the M16 rifles for the Contras were manufactured by the firm Park On Meter Inc. (POM) located in the town of Russellville.
Seth Ward Sr. was a high roller in Arkansas that was involved with POM, together with his son Seth Jr. (Skeeter). The son-in-law of Seth Ward Sr. was Webster (Webb) Hubbell, partner at the Rose law firm where Hillary Clinton was an attorney. Hubbell was also the corporate lawyer for POM and probably the biological father of Chelsea “Clinton”.
Hubbell denied that POM manufactured parts for M16’s, but admitted to a reporter of Time magazine that they had made a nose cone for a rocket launcher.

Barry Seal was one of the biggest US drugs traffickers in the 1980s and had been working as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for years.
Seal told Reed that he was involved in the arrest of Bill Clinton’s campaign contributor Dan Lasater and half brother Roger Clinton. This was done because Clinton had taken 10% of the gross instead of the agreed upon 10% of the profits.

Seal wanted desperately to get out of the game. Seal decided to go public in order to protect himself against an impending Louisiana indictment.
Barry Seal told Reed that George H.W. Bush's kids are in the drug business, when Reed asked for confirmation, Barry answered: 


> Yup, that's what I'm tellin' ya. A guy in Florida who flipped for the DEA has got the goods on the Bush boys. Now I heard this earlier from a reliable source in Colombia, but I just sat on it then, waitin' to use it as a trump card, if I ever needed it. I even got surveillance videos catchin' the Bush boys red-handed. I consider this stuff my insurance policy. It makes me and my mole on the inside that's feedin' the stuff to me invincible.


Seal was of course murdered on 17 February 1986 after the court ordered him to work for the Salvation Army, while prohibiting him to carry a gun or hiring armed protection...

Reed describes a meeting on 19 April 1986 at Juanita's Restaurant in Little Rock.
The "guest list" included Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez (alias Max Gomez), resident CIA agent Akihide Sawahata, Agency subcontractor Terry Reed, and Robert Johnson (lawyer for Southern Air Transport) was in charge of the meeting. Governor Bill Clinton and his aide Bob Nash dropped in uninvited.
This meeting confirmed that Clinton knew all about the drugs for arms pipeline centred in Arkansas.
After the meeting, Clinton invited Reed for a short talk, where Clinton smoked a joint (and inhaled deep!).
At the time they wanted Terry to set up a company for gun parts that would operate as a front in Mexico. Clinton advised Reed to set up this company for Oliver North.

A Classified FBI AIRTEL, dated 18 August 1987, warns the FBI, DEA and CIA of pending media investigation into the CIA activities at Mena, and identified Barry Seal as a CIA operative.



> BOTH THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE TELEVISION NEWS SHOW WEST 57TH STREET ARE PRESENTLY PREPARING STORIES REGARDING ALLEGED CIA ACTIVITIES AT AN AIR FIELD IN MENA, ARKANSAS.
> 
> THE ORIGINAL INFORMATION DATES BACK TO A PILOT, BARRY SEAL, NOW DECEASED, WHO IS PURPORTED TO HAVE FLOWN GUNS TO SOUTH AMERICA FROM MENA AND DRUGS BACK INTO THE UNITED STATES. THE INFORMATION INDICATES THAT SEAL WAS AN INFORMANT FOR THE DEA AT THE TIME BUT ALSO WORKING AS AN OPERATIVE OF THE CIA. DURING THE PAST FEW YEARS, THE ACTIVITY AT THE AIRSTRIP HAS AROUSED THE INTEREST OF LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT WHO THEN ATTEMPTED TO CONDUCT SOME INVESTIGATIONS BUT WERE BLOCKED BY THE U.S. ATTORNEY. IN 1986, SEAL WAS GUNNED DOWN IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA. THIS WAS PURPORTED TO BE A HIT BY COLOMBIAN DRUG DEALERS.


See the following facsimile of the August 1987 "Secret" report.


Lasater & Co. (of Dan Lasater), was handling more than $300 million annually in preferred state bond activity. Then Arkansas Development and Finance Authority (ADFA) was created, directly controlled by Governor Clinton's office. ADFA was designed to compete for the profits generated by the bond issues necessary to “industrialize Arkansas”.
The state was using the Rose Law Firm as its bond counsel for much of this activity.

See the chart that was drawn by Terry Reed in January 1991. It shows the connections between Clinton, the Rose Law firm, Lasater, POM, Seth Ward, Webb Hubbell and Barry Seal.


An example of the dealings of the ADFA, is the deposit of $50 million on an offshore bank account with the Fuji Bank in the Cayman Islands on 29 December 1988. A strange transaction for an organisation founded to lend money for development in Arkansas.
Fuji subsequently took over the loan on behalf of POM, and now presumably made payments directly to Fuji. This was curious since POM gave up a long-term, fixed rate, low interest loan issued by ADFA, which had a guarantor, the bank in Memphis, to back it up.

Clinton started borrowing money from First American in order to make up for their cash shortage, which could have made big problems for everybody involved.
Years later the BCCI scandal reached the headlines. Which showed money laundering and fraud – when at least 8 billions dollars, perhaps more than 12 billion, were missing.
Jackson T. Stephens, the chairman of Stephens & Co. in Little Rock, helped BCCI get started in the USA.
Investigators in New York would accuse First American Bank and Trust in Washington, for having hidden ownership ties to BCCI. This “secret tie” was denied by its chairmen, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, who were both indicted for this connection.
Terry expected that the Arkansas drugs pipeline and money laundering would be blown wide open, but it never did.

Here’s another chart made by the Harkin campaign committee during the 1992 Presidential Primaries. It shows similarities to the one Reed drew in 1991.
It includes the Clintons, ADFA, Rose law firm, Buddy Young, Terry Reed, Felix Rodriguez, the McDougals, Madison Guarantee, Stephens Inc, First American and BCCI.


When Terry Reed was running the gun tool company in Mexico he was contacted by the Hungarian businessman and intelligence operative - George Fenue in July 1987.
Fenue had discovered a crate filled with cocaine and demanded Reed to explain using his company for shipping narcotics. Fenue had already discovered 2 earlier shipments in the logs with probably a similar content.
Reed secretly took 2 bags out before contacting his CIA handler in Mexico - Mitch Marr. Marr quickly took the bait by demanding what had happened to the 2 missing bags. Now Reed had certainty that the CIA had used him to traffic drugs.

Now suddenly Reed had become a liability, and he found himself in legal problems.
On 5 May 1988 a FBI AIRTEL message classified Reed as an "_instant matter now being carried as armed and dangerous due to information developed by the Little Rock division_".
Raymond (Buddy) Young was involved in framing Terry Reed; Reed was wrongfully accused of drugs trafficking (he was eventually acquitted).
Here’s a picture of Hillary Clinton and Buddy Young.


In a strange way this book is really about Barry Seal. Terry Reed doesn’t come close to describing what Seal knew (I believe that Reed is still alive).
Seal was portrayed in the 1991 movie "Double Crossed", and in September 2018 another glossy movie hit the theaters, featuring the little actor Tom Cruise playing the 300 pound heavy Barry Seal.

Terry Reed & John Cummings “_Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA_” (1994): http://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/vi...p?f=218&t=2785


Here’s a 10:16 interview with Terry Reed




For more on the importing of cocaine through Arkansas, using the Nicaragua Contras, by the Reagan/Bush administration: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6451729

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## Firestarter

It’s certainly possible that the same networks used for drug trafficking are used for child trafficking. I try to keep the focus in this post on money laundering. The only stories worth reading about the main topic of this post – Frits Salomonson - include paedophilia.
All of these stories refer to the disinformation campaign – the Joris Demmink affair. In that story the former high government official Joris Demmink is accused of controlling the media, legal system, and even the cabinet and _Raad van State_.

Because it would be impossible for Demmink to do this, I know that everybody that claims to have “researched” this (like Micha Kat) while calling this the “Joris Demmink” affair is a liar. That's not even counting that the state media, including the NOS, revealed Demmink's name!
I certainly don’t claim that everybody that copy-pastes the stories on “Joris Demmink” is lying, but at the very least misinformed.


Maarten van Traa investigated the IRT affair in the Netherlands.
The (final) report of the Van Traa Commission (Appendix X) contains a list of (anonymous) attorneys that were involved with organised crime (including laundering drugs money).
Attorney nr. 25 was laundering money for the Klaas Bruinsma and Etienne Urka organisation in a scheme that involved buying options of _Janzing BV_ below the market price, paying the difference under the table and keeping the profits.
It wasn’t hard to find out that Frits Salomonson was meant and the company _Text Lite_.
Salomonson had been a good friend of Beatrix since they studied in Leiden. Salomonson had been judicial advisor to Queen Beatrix and her husband Prince Claus from 1976 to 1996. He was even a member of the Guardianship Council of Crown Prince Willem Alexander, the son of Queen Beatrix (in case Beatrix would die before Willem-Alexander would be ready to take the throne). He withdrew from his advisory position and moved to Belgium over this affair.
Salomonson also was a subsidiary court judge in Amsterdam.

Maarten van Traa died in a car crash on 20 October 1997.

From 1984 to 1988, Salomonson was head of the advisory board of _Text Lite_ and remained on the advisory until the company collapsed in 1990. The collapse of _Text Lite_ with a deficit of 31 million guilders would grow into a scandal by 1994.
Salomonson had been a partner in the law firm _Boekel de Nerée_ from 1991 to 1995, where Rutger Schimmelpenninck was another partner (since about 1979). Schimmelpenninck became the curator for _Text Lite_, but eventually withdrew as it was a too obvious that he had conflicting interests.

After leaving _Boekel de Nerée_, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck became a partner in _Houthoff Buruma_. He was also a board member of the _ABN AMRO bank_ (affiliated with Rothschild and the Dutch Royal family), head of _Barings Holland_ 1995-1996, and curator for the Dutch branch of _Lehman Brothers_ and the DSB Bank (that was bankrupted with the assistance of former Minister and director of _ABN AMRO_ Gerrit Zalm).

In the 1980s, Frits Salomonson was also on the advisory board of _Banque de Suez_. In and around 1992, he also represented _Banque de Suez Holland_ as a lawyer.
Since 1988, the Suez Group was chaired by Etienne Davignon (later chairman of the Bilderberg Group).
The _Suez Group_ took over _Societe Generale_ - that at the time controlled about one third to one half of the Belgian economy. Davignon and Maurice Lippens also chaired _Societe Generale_ from that point on.

Davignon and Lippens have been named as some of the prominent people in the Marc Dutroux child abuse ring.
Some detectives spoke about a 1998 investigation in the Netherlands into a gay paedophile network of top public officials: 2  district attorneys (from a total of 19 in the Netherlands), a former minister, a professor and a former attorney of the Queen.
Frits Salomonson was of course a former attorney of Queen Beatrix: http://fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/...p?q=1267644687
(archived here: http://archive.is/pVVfa)


In 1994, the FIOD searched the offices of _Boekel de Nerée_ to find a letter from the curator of the Femis bank to Salomonson in which Salomonson was advised to get rid of evidence on bank accounts in Liechtenstein that contained drug money.

Frits Salomonson was also an executive or on the advisory of financial companies: Interborg BV, Ordina Beheer, Allianz Nederland, Barbizon, Amsterdamse Trustee, De Faam, Handelsveem BV, Nestle Nederland and NIM Holdings NV.

Former Minister and member of Bilderberg Neelie Kroes became Director of the investment fund Newtron that was founded by Salomonson, Willem Smit and former director of the CPB (the Dutch department of statistrics) P.M. de Ridder.

In 1994, long-time associate of Salomonson, attorney Oscar Hammerstein (who was also an executive at _Janzing BV_), was “investigated” by the FIOD over laundering 17.5 million guilders drug money for the organisation of Klaas Bruinsma.
The dirty money was labelled as the profits from the trade in wood and rice by Guptar, and transferred to a Swiss bank account.
In July 1995, Hammerstein was acquitted in appeal.

Another company involved in laundering money in a similar way as _Text Lite_ was VHS. They again used _Janzing BV_, where Hammerstein through the Foundation Korf was a major shareholder.

The Amsterdam criminal Charly Wong, who was involved with  Klaas Bruinsma and Steve Brown, tried to blow the whistle on _Text Lite_. Wong talked to Parool journalist Bart Middelburg (that according to Bas van Hout made mostly unfounded claims).
In 1993, Wong disappeared and his corpse was found a couple of months later in the woods near Lelystad (in Dutch): https://www.groene.nl/artikel/advocaat-van-oranje (archived here: http://archive.is/kpS7l)


See Frits Salomonson and the husband of former Dutch Queen Beatrix, Prince Claus, walking....

----------


## timosman

Did Ron ever speak about it? He must have known.

----------


## Firestarter

> Did Ron ever speak about it? He must have known.


I have the impression that you are probably more of an expert on Ron Paul than me. So why would you ask me?

The 2013 Offshore Tactics Workshop by SovereignMan.com in Chile was attended by Ron Paul, Nigel Farage, Jim Rickards, and Jim Rogers, who predict economic chaos, end of the dollar as reserve currency, the imminent fall of Slovenia and end of the Euro.

Former Congressman Ron Paul exclaimed during his opening remarks _The revolution is international_ (which revolution?).
Rogers said: the US government _wont take our bank accounts. They will take our retirement accounts_: https://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10681392.htm

In the following video, Nigel Farage is the one who does most of the talking; he urges people to get their money out of Euro zone banks (offshore!).

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## timosman

Ron never dared to suggest the Federal Reserve is used for money laundering.

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## Firestarter

*Supplying Saddam with arms*

When there was an evil Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had to be supplied with all sorts of weapons to fight the evil Ayatollah Khomeini (that had been put in charge by Britain and the US). Iran was also supplied with weapons from the Western “democracies”...

In the 1980s, UK officials shredded documents after deliberately smuggling Chieftain tank hulls to Iraq via Jordan.
The ECGD gave insurance guarantees that were supposed to cover only civil projects but were used on arms sales to Saddam Hussein’s regime. About £1 billion of money was paid by the British taxpayer to supply Saddam with weapons.

Firms who benefited from this wonderful example of “freedom and democracy” are: the Midland Bank (now part of money laundering giant HSBC); Morgan Grenfell (now part of – once again - the Deutsche Bank); Racal and Thorn-EMI (both sold to the French Thales); and Marconi (acquired by the giant BAE Systems).

The first arms firm to profit was Racal, which was provided with a secret "defence allocation" of £42 million of special ECGD insurance, after getting a contract with Iraq in 1985. Racal shipped sophisticated Jaguar V radios to Iraq´s army on credit.
Racal was building a factory in Iraq when the Gulf war broke out. Then the ECGD had to write Racal's bankers an insurance cheque for £15.7 million.
In 1987, ECGD's secret "defence allocation" had been used up by Racal. So Ministry of Defence officials reclassified the contract as civil.

In 1987 Marconi Command & Control got a taxpayer guarantee for £10 million, to sell Amets to the Iraqi army. The ECGD ended up writing a cheque for £8.2 million when Marconi didn´t get paid.

In 1988, an £18 million deal for Tripod Engineering on a fighter pilot training complex for the Iraqi air force got reclassified as civil. The taxpayer ended up paying £2.9 million on compensation for this deal.
In 1988, Thorn-EMI got ECGD insurance to ship supplies of Cymbeline mortar-locating radar to the Iraqi army and to train Iraqi officers. The taxpayer had to pay out almost £1 million in compensation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...iraq.politics1


It has also been reported that PM Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark Thatcher received $18 million in kickbacks for the help to secure arms sales to Saudi Arabia: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6666858

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## Zippyjuan

With all that laundering, our money should be sparkling clean by now.

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## gaazn

Arts and collectibles.  A perfect Mickey Mantle is worth millions???

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## Firestarter

> Arts and collectibles.  A perfect Mickey Mantle is worth millions???


 Maybe, possibly art could be used to launder money...





> “There are few things better than receiving a sensational gift from someone you admire — and that’s what I’ve received from you,” Trump wrote to Aras Agalarov on June 17, 2016.102 He continued, “I’m rarely at a loss for words, but right now I can only say how much I appreciate your friendship and to thank you for this fantastic gift. This is one birthday that I will always remember.” One week earlier, Agalarov had sent an expensive painting to then-candidate Trump on the eve of his birthday. And just one day before the painting arrived, Agalarov had helped deliver a very different kind of gift to Trump Tower: a delegation from the Russian government with promised opposition research on Trump’s political foe, Hillary Clinton. There are hints that Trump may have been aware of the delegation’s arrival and welcomed whatever boon it might bring; investigators are thus left to speculate for which gift—if not both—Trump was thanking Agalarov.103
> 
> The Trump Tower meeting on June 9 forms the core of collusion allegations to date, as it demonstrates the Trump campaign’s willingness to accept assistance from a foreign government in its bid to win the presidency.104 Campaign finance experts have noted that, simply by virtue of taking the meeting with an envoy from the “Crown prosecutor of Russia,” thought to be the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation, the campaign may have broken federal election laws.105 These laws strictly prohibit soliciting or accepting anything of value, which would include opposition research, from a foreign national or government to advance a domestic campaign.
> 
> Against the background of the Trump Tower meeting, several multimillion-dollar transactions executed through Agalarov’s accounts emerge in stark relief and raise questions as to their purpose. On June 3—the same day Donald Trump Jr. received the email from Rob Goldstone offering assistance from the Russian government—to which he eventually replied, “I love it”—Aras Agalarov initiated a transfer of $3.3 million to the United States.106 According to Buzzfeed News, which broke the story, Irakly Kaveladze, Agalarov’s representative at the Trump Tower meeting, facilitated the transfer.107Specifically, Kaveladze also used his own accounts, thereby making the money trail harder to follow.
> 
> Three separate banking institutions reportedly flagged the relevant transactions as suspicious, a unique instance of collaboration allowed by information-sharing provisions of the Patriot Act. 108 Typically, activity on the accounts of banks’ clients is highly confidential and audited in a siloed fashion. The anti-money laundering provision of the Patriot Act, however, allowed the banks to compare their records to reveal any connections between otherwise obscure accounts. Even after comparing notes, the banks’ investigators could not figure out the purpose for much of the transferred cash. However, $725,000 of it was reportedly used to pay the balance on Agalarov’s American Express credit card.109


https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...ing-the-money/

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## Firestarter

I guess that most people won’t believe that big corporations sometimes pick their executives in order to “create” stories with similar “keywords” as the “real” stories on scandals...

Today I did an internet search with: “_Money laundering, Danske Bank, ABN Amro, Thomas Borgen, resigned, CEO, Estonian, 200 billion euros, 2007 to 2015, suspicious, prosecutors, violation, largest, admitted, Dutch, internal, investigation_”.
All of these keywords are present in this thread. So should find it...

Google.nl finds this thread (25th place); Duckduckgo, Yahoo, and Bing (checked “only” first 5 pages) don’t.

Instead there are many, many results on the new Dutch CEO for Danske Bank, formerly of ABN Amro, Chris Vogelzang.
Vogelzang will replace Thomas Borgen, who resigned as CEO after an internal investigation found suspicious transactions worth 200 billion euros, from 2007 to 2015. Danske admitted massive money laundering at its Estonian subsidiary.

Prosecutors suspect Denmark’s largest bank of violation of the laws: https://www.apnews.com/6743b519e44d48d19211e992b450867e

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## devil21

> I guess that most people won’t believe that big corporations sometimes pick their executives in order to “create” stories with similar “keywords” as the “real” stories on scandals...


I have definitely noticed this.  Intentional blurring of search terms when something needs to be buried.  BLM (Black Lives Matter) and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) was one example.  Conservatives that would have been incensed at the conduct of BLM recently (Malheur, among others) were instead inundated with Black Lives Matter stuff, thus effectively distracting them from one BLM by another BLM.

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## ATruepatriot

> I have definitely noticed this.  Intentional blurring of search terms when something needs to be buried.  BLM (Black Lives Matter) and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) was one example.  Conservatives that would have been incensed at the conduct of BLM recently (Malheur, among others) were instead inundated with Black Lives Matter stuff, thus effectively distracting them from one BLM by another BLM.


Operatives around here spin keywords this way too.

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## Firestarter

> I have definitely noticed this.  Intentional blurring of search terms when something needs to be buried.  BLM (Black Lives Matter) and BLM (Bureau of Land Management) was one example.  Conservatives that would have been incensed at the conduct of BLM recently (Malheur, among others) were instead inundated with Black Lives Matter stuff, thus effectively distracting them from one BLM by another BLM.


If you’ve ever investigated the anthrax hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11, then you must have heard of the Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI) that in partnership with BioPort made a nice profit...

Even more interesting is the  New Jersey-based real estate investment firm Bait ul-Mal Incorporated (BMI Inc.), which is closely associated with computer company Ptech and the Muslim Brotherhood: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/vie...start=20#p5347

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## Firestarter

The American DoJ is investigating if the Deutsche Bank violated anti-money-laundering laws for the 1Malaysia Development Bhd. Fund (1MDB), which included help in raising $1.2 billion in 2014.

This is related to the multibillion-dollar fraud scandal with the Malaysian state investment firm 1MDB that toppled Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and caused Goldman Sachs stock to tumble last year.
The DoJ said at least $4.5 billion was stolen between 2009 and 2014; and used to bribe government officials, including a slush fund controlled by former PM Razak, and buy hundreds of millions of dollars in luxury goods.

The investigation into Deutsche Bank was started after tips from former Goldman Sachs South-East Asia chairman, Tim Leissner.
According to the complaint, Deutsche Bank was involved with 1MDB from its start in 2009, when the bank facilited 1MDBs first big deal, a joint venture with the Swiss PetroSaudi.

Prosecutors have focused on the role of one of Leissners former colleagues, Tan Boon-Kee, who worked with Leissner on business for 1MDB. She left Goldman Sachs to become Asia Pacific head of banking for financial-institutions clients at Deutsche Bank.
Reportedly in 2018 Tan was forced to leave Deutsche Bank, after communication was discovered with Jho Low, the Malaysian financier that was described as the central player in the 1MDB scandal.

The Justice Department alleges that a group led by Low stole some $1 billion from the $1.8 billion contribution by 1MDB, but it isnt clear what specific offences Deutsche Bank is accused of: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...-idUSKCN1U60CR


In Malaysia, criminal charges have been filed against Goldman Sachs for stealing $2.7 billion from the proceeds of 3 bonds worth $6.5 billion that it arranged for Malaysian 1MDB: https://www.malaymail.com/news/malay...r-life/1767910

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## Firestarter

John Ellis Jeb Bush, son of a Bush Sr, was partners in crime with Alberto Duque, who financed Jebs $30 million real estate development project.
Alberto Duque is the same Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali Cartels and Nicaraguan Contras, while being president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia and owner of City National Bank of Miami. In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison.

Duque hired Bush crony Don Beazley, to serve as City National Bank's president. Beazley had previously worked for the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank in Australia.
Former CIA director William Colby was Nugan Hand's legal counsel.
Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. In 1982, this bank was indicted for drug money laundering. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand.

Jeb was appointed by father George H.W. Bush to the board of the _National Republican Institute_, the Republican branch of the _National Endowment for Democracy_ (NED).
Jeb Bush's relationship with City National Bank, whose other senior director was director of the _Anti-Defamation League_ (ADL) Foundation Leonard Abess, ensured that a large slice of NED money flowed to Israeli security firms like Tadiran.

In the 1980s, Jeb Bush was a liaison between daddy George "poppy" Bush´s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, and various Florida-based Nicaraguan and Cuban exile organisations to support the drugs for arms pipeline to the Nicaragua Contras.
Mario Castejon, candidate for president of Guatemala, sought funding for arms to the Contras and other rebel groups in Central America, which would be labelled "_medical supplies_".

Another partner in crime of Jeb Bush was Miami-based lawyer Paul Helliwell, who owned 2 CIA money laundering banks: Great American Bank of Miami (later bought by Nugan Hand and indicted in 1982 for drug money laundering) and Castle Bank & Trust Ltd. of Nassau in the Bahamas.

Jeb Bush was also in business with 2 other Florida banks: Northside Bank of Miami (owned by the Cali Cartel) and the Popular Bank and Trust Company.
Popular Bank was once owned by Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza but transferred to CIA control after his assassination in 1980 by Sandinista commandos in Paraguay. Much of the billions of dollars that the Somoza family stole from Nicaragua ended up in CIA-connected banks that financed Jeb's many real estate and money laundering enterprises.

After Jeb Bush stopped working for the Texas Commerce Bank in Venezuela in 1980, he hooked up with the Cuban-American Miami Armando Codina, who was connected to the CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Florida.
Codina helped Jeb make millions of dollars in the real estate business and eventually launch his political career that made him Governor. Jeb sold high-priced condos and mansions in the Miami area to his connections in Venezuela for handsome commissions.

One of Jeb Bush's Miami associates was Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch. Bosch was a key figure in CIA's Operation Condor, which was an alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that assassinated South American leaders that were considered enemies of the CIA. From Caracas, Bosch helped in the October 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which killed 73 passengers and crew. The Cubana bombing was discussed at a 1976 meeting in Washington between Bosch, another Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, and Michael Townley of the CIA.
Jeb's father, CIA director at the time, knew about this, as well as another plot to kill former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/s...pol_bush61.htm
(archived here: http://archive.is/YZBAE)

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## devil21

Firestarter, have you ever looked into the possibility that some of the public companies traded on the stock markets are being used primarily as money laundering vessels?  Tesla and Uber come to mind as likely examples.  

How Uber loses $5+BILLION in a financial quarter, while having no assets other than a functioning app and maybe some real estate, very little overhead expenses and not much else, defies any reasonable logic.

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## Firestarter

> Firestarter, have you ever looked into the possibility that some of the public companies traded on the stock markets are being used primarily as money laundering vessels?  Tesla and Uber come to mind as likely examples.


Sorry for the late reply...

I consider the stock markets more like a pyramid scheme (I don't know if they call it like this in English).
That's the scheme where for example 1 person recruits 5 people to "invest" a certain amount of money, who recruits 5 more. These "investors" make a huge profit... until the pyramid falls down.
In our Brave New World, however, we have put options to "insure" against the collapse of the stock markets (when people know when the crash comes they make even more money with the crash than with a slow continuing increase).

But then again, it all depends on your definition of "money laundering"...
When you take "money laundering" in the broadest sense, "dirty money" is (can be) first used to inflate stock prices (is there a real difference with a Ponzi scheme?), and if you have enough of it, you can even manipulate crashes up to a certain degree.
The huge advantage of "dirty money" is that it can easily be used "secretly"...

I'm more interested in the money laundering, pyramid scheme of rising real estate prices (that will crash at some time but never as drastically as the stock market).
Even more interesting are the auction prices for art and "football" transfer sums that are skyrocketing in Europe (and likewise for "football", baseball, icehockey and basketball in the USA).
The Doyen Group of the Arif family shows how they use their money laundering, investment fund to inflate transfer sums. As long as the transfer sums keep rising the money launderer cannot lose.

Of course "dirty money" can be used to bribe politicians (dirty money can be used more easily than "clean" money). So in this way the money launderer can use his money to increase profits.
I depends on how broad your definition of "money laundering" is whether these profits can be considered "money laundering".

I'm not sure if all of my arguments in this post can be understood by somebody else...

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## Firestarter

Here´s a nice table, picture that shows the United Kingdom, and its offshore money laundering paradises; are responsible for about 1/3 of global tax evasion.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a distant second, with less than a quarter of the UK´s tax evasion “performance”.

https://corporatetaxhavenindex.org/i...i-2019-results

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## Firestarter

I´ve earlier posted on the fact that Brexit was orchestratedby the Queen Elizabeth controlled SCL Group to keep the UK the money launderingparadise of the world: 


> In 2015, Arron Banks’ insurance business Southern Rock was bailed out, just months before Banks began bankrolling the Leave.EU referendum campaign to which he donated £8.4 million.





> One of the 2 campaign vehicles that received Banks’ £8.4millions, Better for the Country Ltd, was set up by STM.
> 
> If Southern Rock Insurance had gone bankrupt this could havemade Banks’ UK insurance broker Eldon collapse.
> Regulators made Southern Rock promise not to make any payments to Banks without their prior written consent. After in 2014 PwC concluded that Southern Rock wasn’t a healthy company, Banks had to resign as CEO, with his longstanding associate Alan Kentish (another Southern Rock director).
> Banks’ ties to Kentish and STM go back to at least 2004, when Kentish became a founding director of Southern Rock. Banks invested in STM andbecame its largest shareholder before selling his stake in early 2015. More recently, Kentish, Banks and another STM founder invested in Legal Protection Group, a broker of insurance for lawyers and doctors.
> 
> ICS Risk Solutions, a holding company on the Isle of Man,pumped £77.7 million into Southern Rock to save it from collapse. Banks owned both ICS and Southern Rock; it is not clear where the money came from.



In September 2018, the High Court ruled that Vote Leave had broken the law by overspending. It did this by illegally paying £625,000 to Darren Grimes for his BeLeave campaign, mostly through the Canada-based AggregateIQ, partner of the notorious SCL Group.
In July 2018, the Electoral Commission had already ruled that Vote Leave broke electoral law by colluding with Grimes. It appears that the police investigation was stopped from some reason.

In February 2019 the Leave.EU campaign, fronted by Nigel Farage and Eldon Insurance, and owned by Arron Banks, were fined £60,000 each for breaking direct marketing rules: http://archive.is/WiPkS


For some reason the police investigation into multiple criminal offences by Arron Banks and the Leave.EU campaign was stopped.

The Remain campaign was forced to stop its digital advertising on the last day of the June 2016 campaign because it had reached its spending limit but Vote Leave continued, breaking the law after reaching it spending limit 2 days before the vote.

According to Professor Philip Howard: 


> My professional opinion is that it is very likely that the excessive spending by Vote Leave altered the result of the referendum.
> 
> A swing of just 634,751 people would have been enough to secure victory for Remain.
> 
> Given the scale of the online advertising achieved with the excess spending, combined with conservative estimates on voter modelling, I estimate that Vote Leave converted the voting intentions of over 800,000 voters in the final days of the campaign as a result of the overspend.


 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a8668771.html
(http://archive.is/qYo8X)


In the following video lawyer Jessica Simor explains that the Brexit referendum was unlawful because of the conclusion by the Electoral Commission on breaking the law by Vote Leave. The only reason that the referendum wasn´t declared invalid based on by the Electoral Commission findings of overspending is because it’s only “advisory”.
The Court of Appeal denied permission to appeal against the Brexit referendum because this could only have been done within 3 months after the expenses had been lodged at the Electoral Commission in December 2016: https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presente...result-stands/


Arron Banks funded Better for the Country with £6 million in donations funnelled through Leave.EU, and an additional £2 million in loans, of which £2.9 million was spent on funding the Brexit campaign of Leave.EU and other pro-Brexit groups.
Only companies registered in the UK were allowed to make campaign donations. Because the money was channelled through an “impermissible” company called Rock Holdings Limited, which is registered in the Isle of Man tax haven it´s not clear where Arron Banks got the money: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a8612331.html


More recently, Yesterday, 11 justices of the UK's Supreme Court ruled that Queen Elzabeth’s suspension of  Parliament on the “advice” of PM Boris Johnson is unlawful and therefore void so that Parliament had not been prorogued.
Yesterday, several MPs already returned to Parliament: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/poli...-a4244561.html


For more on the SCL Group (the parent company of Cambridge Analytica) that orchestrated both Brexit and President Trump: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6699716

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## Firestarter

The  biggest export deal in British history, the multi-billion pound al-Yamamah deal, involved enormous bribes and kickback of up to 30% from the main seller British Aerospace (now BAE System, which made 43 billion pound in this arms sale).

Middlemen that were paid included Wafic Said, a business partner of the hon. Member for South Thanet, Jonathan Aitken.
Wafic Said gave his friend, son of then-PM, Lady of the Garter Margaret Thatcher, Mark Thatcher, a house and other lavish presents which has made him mysteriously rich.

Another part of the deal was concluded in 1988, when Saudi Arabia ordered minesweepers from Vosper Thorneycroft.
Vosper used as its agent the Saudi Fahd al-Athel, who, like Jonathan Aitken, worked for Prince Mohammed (the current Saudi King?). Vosper made huge payments to al-Athel's company, which were laundered through a front company in Saudi Arabia and were divided: 40% to Prince Mohammed, 20% to al-Athel, and 40% to unnamed others.

For the fourth part of the al-Yamamah deal, Jonathan Aitken was paid by British arms company Astra for an introduction to his business partner, Fahd al-Athel.

Thorn EMI has admitted that it paid 26% bribes on the sale of smart fuses for the bombs carried by Saudi Tornados.
Half of those bribes went to the Saudi princes and the other half went through a small arms dealer, Michael Gay, to offshore bank accounts in the Bank of NT Butterfield in Bermuda to dissapear without a trace.

Douglas Leese was a major player in the  biggest export deal in British history, the multi-billion pound al-Yamamah deal. Douglas Leese used his connections with the offshore NT Butterfield bank in Bermuda to funnel bribes to Saudi Arabia.: https://publications.parliament.uk/p...t/60124-51.htm
(http://archive.is/jilRv)


Steven Hoffenberg was one of the first major business partners of Jeffrey Epstein.
Hoffenberg said about his connections to Trump _Donalds crowd was my crowd_.

In one of those strange coincidences, Hoffenberg said he was introduced to Epstein by Sir Douglas Leese (this confirms that Epstein got wealthy from arms sales): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a9051911.html
(http://archive.is/Pgape)


Since the 1980s, Wafic Said has been a confidant of Jeffrey Epsteins and Ghislaine Maxwells friend, Peter Mandelson: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/07/bae17


Astra and Thorn EMI were also involved in arming Saddam Husseins Iraq: https://www.lawfulpath.com/forum/vie...php?f=7&t=1583


BAE ran a £60m "slush fund" for bribes to Saudi officials in return for lucrative contracts.
The investigation into the al-Yamamah deal by the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was abruptly closed for reasons of national security. The House of Lords unanimously overrruled a high court decision that the SFO shouldnt have stopped the inquiry.

The 1986 Al-Yamamah agreement, was a unique document that wasn´t really a sales contract but a barter deal of Saudi oil for British warplanes.
Al-Yamamah has been, _the smuggling proxy for Shell and BP tankers to loot millions of oil barrels from Ras Tanura to Rotterdam_.

According to a BAE whistleblower, the laundered proceeds of oil sales under the Al-Yamamah agreement have been funneled by BAE, Royal Dutch Shell and BP into various international financial systems.
Proceeds of oil sales were deposited in a secret bank account in London controlled by Prince Bandar and his father Crown Prince Sultan: https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2009/...anking-system/
(http://archive.is/tMro5)


The bribes were shared between the Defence Minister, Prince Sultan and his family, and the sons of King Fand (notably Prince Mohammed).

How did Britain secure these major arm sales in the first place?
In July of 1985, US congressional supporters of [S]Israel[/S] Britain blocked the sale of F-15s to Saudi Arabia. Then the Saudis had no other choice, with the permission of the US, to buy the British Panavia Tornado. 

Some academics estimated that the Saudi purchase of Tornados, rather than the F-15s they preferred, cost the American economy $12 to $20 billion.
When Saudi Arabia bought Tornado aircrafts, they also gave the UK a contract for 2 air bases valued at $4 billion.

In September 1985, the Saudis and Britain agreed on a major aircraft deal as the first part of the Al-Yamamah deal.
In July 1988, the Saudis and Britain agreed on an additional deal, which included 48 Tornados, 50-60 HAWK trainers, 80 helicopters and 4 to 6 mine hunters. This deal was worth an estimated $30 to $34 billion: https://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...af-tornado.htm
(http://archive.is/agBgg)

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## Firestarter

As a strange follow-up to Watergate, the Church Committee did a (what looks) "real" investigation into the crimes of American intelligence agencies in the 1960s, which led to (almost) uncovering the bribes and kickbacks from the giant American arms companies to government officials all over the world.


In the 1970s, *André Donner*, led the commission of three that covered up the millions of kickbacks received by Prince Bernhard from several arms manufacturers, including Lockheed and Northrop, which was labelled the “*Lockheed affair*”.
Bernhard´s friend Hans Teengs Gerritsen helped to funnel the millions. Teengs Gerritsen also regularly met supposed "pesona non grata" Willem Oltmans, who get 8 million euro in compensation for (not) being persecuted for decades by the Dutch state...

See Bernhard with Lockheed executive Robert E. Gross, 1956.


In 1997, then Queen Beatrix selected *Piet Hein Donner* (André Donner’s son) for the “Raad van State” for life (comparable to Elizabeth’s Privy Council). According to the Dutch constitution it’s prohibited for any member of the “Raad van State” to become minister, so in July 2002 Beatrix selected him as Minister of Justice.
After serving as minister for several cabinets led by Beatrix, Piet Hein Donner even served as Vice-President of the “Raad van State” from 1 February 2012 to 1 November 2018.

----------


## Firestarter

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank declared Congo bankrupt in 1994 and forced it into “liberalisation” in the early 2000s.
Congo’s economic crisis forced the government to sign the Millennium Initiative, 
Liberalisation has removed control of economic resources from Congo, which through offshore companies made it possible for the elite to loot Congo of its valuable resources, while bribing politicians and funding violence to keep the population under control. Liberalisation has extended Kabila’s tenure and as such was anti-democratic. Kabila provided a favourable environment for foreign investments (and made a bundle in the process).
Mineral sales contributed heavily to the (second) presidential campaign in 2011 that cost over $1 billion. Most of the funding came from Congo, with 40% coming from international donors. The elections were decried by international observers and Joseph Kabila won from Etienne Tshisekedi.
The third presidential election cost an estimated $1.4 billion. In May 2014 US Secretary of State John Kerry (of Skull & Bones), promised $30 million for the campaign on the condition that Kabila did not run for a third time.

While the international community has spoken on the tremendous corruption in the Congo, it has “forgotten” to address the secrecy of international trade, without which this wouldn’t be possible on such a large scale.
Global Witness’s “_Out of Africa_” report estimates that Congo suffered $1.36 billion in lost revenue during the last election cycle, which were routed out of Congo through British tax havens, with several companies involved listed on the London Stock Exchange.
British Member of Parliament Eric Joyce published a list of 59 shell companies operating in Congo in 2011; 47 of them were registered in the British Virgin Islands. The Panama Papers confirm that offshore companies have been widely used in Congo. The most reported profession in the Panama Papers is “politician”…

Kabila and his aide Augustine Katumba Mwanke (now deceased) were increasingly associated with Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, who is named in more than 200 files in the Panama Papers.
Gertler bought Congolese mining assets and sold them at profits of thousands percentage points to companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.
In 2005, Gertler formed Global Enterprises Corporate (GEC), owned through a company registered in the Isle of Man, the chief assets of which were 75% of 2 huge copper mining projects in the province of Katanga (with 25% for Congo’s defunct state company Gécamines). Gertler’s investment of £3 million was valued at more than £1 billion.
In 2010, Kabila signed a presidential decree granting oil concessions in Lake Albert to Caprikat and Foxwhelp, both associated with Gertler and registered in the British Virgin Islands by Mossack Fonseca.
Since his arrival in Congo in 1997, Gertler has built an estimated $2.5 billion empire.

In October 2016, the US Justice Department and SEC fined the hedge fund Och-Ziff Capital Management Company under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on bribery charges. The company’s front man in Congo, Dan Gertler, alongside Kabila and his aide Katumba Mwanke received over $100 million in bribes.
Barnabe Kikaya Bin Karubi responded: 


> For us an attack on [Gertler] is an attack on the Congo … Mr. Gertler’s businesses are legitimate. He pays his taxes, making a good contribution to our government in monetary terms.


Och-Ziff has pleaded guilty and agreed to a $412 million fine: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full...7.2018.1447373
(http://archive.is/AGzv5)


For more on how the Rwandan genocide was orchestrated to take over the Congo (Zaire): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...ain-and-the-UN

----------


## Firestarter

Or maybe General Qasem Soleimani was killed as a diversion strategy from the limitless amount of scandals the Trump family is involved in?!?
The Trump Organization, Ivanka Trump in particular, was in business with the Baku XXI Century of the Azerbaijani Mammadov family since 2008. The Mammadovs were in turn business partners of the Iranian construction company Azarpassillo of Keyumars Darvishi (since about 2008).

Azarpassillos chairman, Keyumars Darvishi, became the head of Raman after he fought in the Iran-Iraq War. Raman is an Iranian construction firm, controlled by the Revolutionary Guard (that was controlled by Soleimani).

At least 2 of Keyumarss brothers  Habil and Kamal Keyumars  were (are) also associates of the Revolutionary Guard. Ziya Mammadov conspired with the Revolutionary Guard to make overpriced deals that would enrich them both while using shell companies to launder the money and circumvent sanctions against Iran.

Trump spokesman Alan Garten admitted that the Trump Organization learned in 2015 about the possibility that the Mammadovs had ties to the Revolutionary Guard, but the company didnt end the Baku deal until December 2016 (after Trump was elected US president): http://archive.is/9pqcZ





> Azerbaijani partners in crime of US president Donald Trump since 2012, in a project to build a Trump Tower in Baku, also appear in the Laundromat scheme.
> The $35 million project was controlled by Baku XXI Century of Elton and Anar Mammadov, the brother and son of the country's transport minister Ziya Mammadov. They hold seats in parliament and have ties to Azerbaijani President Aliyev.
> The Mammadovs Baghlan holding company is linked to Laundromat transactions.
> 
> Ziya also has connections to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard and with Iraq-Iran war veteran Keyumars Davishi, the chairman of a company which Mammadov awarded transportation contracts to in 2008.
> In February 2017, defense and intelligence officials warned the White House against designating Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation.
> 
> Anar founded The Azerbaijan American Alliance. Between 2011 and 2015, he spent almost $13 million for lobbying in the US.
> Anar Mammadov lives in London and considers Ivanka Trump a dear friend (see them together).
> ...

----------


## Firestarter

It looks like the money laundering giant bank HSBC has helped some of the crooks plundering the Congo of its natural resources
Diamonds are a great way to launder money and evade taxes.


Dan Gertler reportedly got his big start trading arms for diamonds in African civil wars during the 1990s in violation of UN embargoes.
Gertler, who is represented by the notorious London law firm Mischon de Reya, is listed in the HSBC files under an account under the name of the Concordia Marketing Group Inc. The other beneficial owner of the Concordia account was Daniel Steinmetz of the Steinmetz family. The Steinmetzes are maybe the biggest HSBC diamond clients with nearly half a billion dollars at HSBC in 2006/2007.
The Swiss resident Beny Steinmetz and Gertler are of course business partners.

Omega Diamonds is involved in plundering Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After David Renous blew the whistle on Omega Diamonds helping Russian-Israeli Arkadi Gaydamak to launder arms money, in 2006 its executives Sylvain Goldberg, Robert Liling, and Ehud Arye Laniado had to flee Belgium.
Belgium claims Omega owes it 4.6 billion. In 2013, this was settled for (only) $195 million (the largest ever settlement involving a Belgian company).
Goldberg is also in the HSBC files.

Goldberg and Laniado were also partners in the Angolan diamond monopoly Ascorp, which is controlled by Russian-Israeli billionaire Chabad-Lubavitcher Lev Leviev, the associate of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Ron Lauder. Leviev also had several numbered accounts at HSBC.
Among Ascorps shareholders was the Angolan dictators daughter Isabel dos Santos, the richest African woman with nearly $4 billion. Her mother, Tatiana Cergueevna Koukanova Regan, had 2 numbered HSBC accounts with $4.5 million: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/...orld-1.2097146
(http://web.archive.org/web/20190825172853/https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/hsbc-revelations-shine-light-on-secretive-diamond-world-1.2097146)


For more on the Rwandan genocide and the plundering of the Congo: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6897624

----------


## Firestarter

On 30 April 2020, Geoffrey Berman announced a deferred prosecution agreement against Israel's largest bank Bank Hapoalim, for helping to hide assets in offshore accounts and helping to bribe FIFA officials (the body that controls international soccer).
Bank Hapoalim settled the 2 cases for more than $900 million. Berman commented: 


> Israel's largest bank, Bank Hapoalim, and its Swiss subsidiary have admitted not only failing to prevent but actively assisting U.S. customers to set up secret accounts, to shelter assets and income, and to evade taxes. The combined payment approaching $1 billion reflects the magnitude of the tax evasion by the Bank's U.S. customers, the size of the fees the Bank collected to provide this illegal service, and the gravity of the illegal conduct.


In the first case, Bank Hapoalim helped launder millions in bribes and kickbacks paid to officials in FIFA. Between 2010 and 2015, Hapoalim’s Miami branch laundered illicit payments to FIFA officials, including former head of Colombian football and a member of FIFA’s executive committee Luis Bedoya. In 2015, Bedoya was banned from international soccer and was (is?) awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty pleading guilty to racketeering and wire fraud.
Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowsk commented: 


> For nearly five years, Bank Hapoalim employees used the U.S. financial system to launder tens of millions of dollars in bribe payments to corrupt soccer officials in multiple countries.


In the second case, Bank Hapoalim pleaded guilty to aiding U.S. customers in setting up accounts under false names to evade taxes on more than $7.6 billion in deposits.
For this second case alone, Bank Hapoalim agreed to pay $874 million in penalties, tax arrears and forfeited assets: http://archive.is/KOtzE


For more on the firing of US attorney Geoffrey Berman for investigating Trump’s associates: http://ronpaulforums.com/showthread....-Trump-cronies


In 2010, Israeli authorities “investigated” a money-laundering case of Bank Hapoalim that involved the Katsyv family. Millions of dollars were transferred through Katsyv-controlled accounts at the bank. According to Israeli prosecutors, Hapoalim bank managers concealed the real beneficiaries of these accounts in violation of anti-money-laundering rules.
The bank blamed Katsyv’s business for these violations, so the bank managers were found not guilty.

Prevezon Holdings Ltd was registered in 2005 and is owned by Denis Katsyv and Martash Investment Holdings Ltd from the British Virgin Islands that is also owned by Denis Katsyv. 

On 5 February 2008, Bunicon received $9.4 million from the correspondent account of the Krainiy Sever bank. The next day Bunicon sent $410,000 to Prevezon’s account at the Swiss bank UBS AG. 
On 13 February 2008, Elenast received $800,000 from the same account and then transferred more than half that amount to Prevezon.

Katsyv is also in business with Russian oligarch Lev Leviev: https://www.reportingproject.net/pro...agnitsky-money
(http://archive.is/44HQS)


For the inevitable Trump links...
Rotem Rosen was the "right hand man" of diamond magnate Chabad-Lubavitcher Lev Leviev.
In December 2007, Zina Sapir, daughter of (the late) Tamir, married Rotem Rosen, in a wedding hosted by Donald Trump at the Mar-a-Lago.
The Sapir Organization (that was founded by Tamir Sapir) partnered with Bayrock and the Trump Organization in the Trump SoHo project.

Lev Leviev also bought Israeli media companies together with Donald Trump’s close friend Ronald Lauder.

And links to Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.



> In 2015, Kushner’s company purchased the former New York Times Building in Times Square from an entity called Africa-Israel Investments, headed by Russian oligarch Lev Leviev.
> Leviev was a business partner of the Russian Prevezon Holdings that was accused of money laundering by the DoJ. Prevezon was represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya and got off with a “slap on the wrist” of $6 million.
> Leviev told the New York Times that he was a “true friend” of Vladimir Putin, largely through his work with the Moscow Jewish Museum, the Russian Jewish Congress and his close ties to Russia’s Chief Chabad Rabbi, Berel Lazar.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6601209


The following story is quite good... see some excerpts (including Hapoalim, Leviev, Denis Katsyv and Preet Bharara).



> Trump fired Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey primarily because Comey asked for additional resources from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to beef up the FBI's "follow-the-money" investigation of the Trump campaign. The FBI's receipt of data from the Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) regarding the money laundering involving Trump and Kushner businesses, accounts maintained by the Bank of Cyprus, HSBC, Bank Hapoalim of Israel, and other banks, and the Trump presidential campaign are what lie at the heart of the FBI's investigation of Trump. The FBI is reportedly focused on Trump's associates' financial dealings with banks in Cyprus.
> (...)
> 
> Bayrock was linked as a partner to another business syndicate, the Sapir Organization, headed by Donald and Ivanka Trump's and Jared Kushner's good friends Rotem Rosen and Israeli citizen Alex Sapir. The Sapir Organization is involved in major hotel projects in New York and around the world, including the Trump Tower in Toronto. Others involved with the Toronto Trump Tower include Uzbek-Israeli diamond tycoon Lev Leviev, accused of trafficking in African "blood diamonds" and Canadian-Russian-Israeli businessman Alexander Shnaider, owner of Talon International Development Inc, and co-owner of Midland Resources Holding Inc. with his partner Ukrainian-Russian billionaire , who is also vice-president of the World Jewish Congress*.*
> (...)
> 
> According to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, none other than Preet Bharara, who Trump fired, the Trincher criminal syndicate, known as the "Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization, ran a major illegal sports betting operation in the United States. Bharara's indictment specified the "Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization (the "Organization") was a criminal enterprise with strong ties to Russia and Ukraine. The enterprise operated a high-stakes, illegal sports gambling business out of New York City that catered primarily to Russian oligarchs living in Ukraine and Russia." In other words, the same tower that Donald Trump called home was the center of a major illegal sports betting operation. Given Trump's own ties to gambling casinos and professional sports, there is little wonder why Trump viewed Bharara and Comey as threats.
> (...)
> 
> ...


http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2017/0...ed-kosher.html
(http://archive.is/CjiZz)

----------


## devil21

$150m fine should cover it, don't you think?  Everyone involved gets fired, some bankers go to jail.

Oh wait....

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/busin...ine/index.html




> New York (CNN Business)New York regulators fined Deutsche Bank $150 million Tuesday and slammed the lender for "mistakes and sloppiness" in its relationship with accused sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. 
> ....................
> The penalties, which also relate to Deutsche Bank (DB)'s ties to scandal-ridden financial institutions Danske Bank Estonia and FBME Bank, are the first enforcement actions by regulators against a bank for dealings with Epstein.
> ......................
> In a statement, Deutsche Bank acknowledged its "error of onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings." The bank said it immediately contacted law enforcement to offer assistance after Epstein's arrest. It has also invested nearly $1 billion in training, controls and operational processes and has hired more than 1,500 people to its financial crime team.


DB CEO Sewing was just asked on CNBC if any personnel changes were being made.  His reply, "I don't want to comment about any of that."     (translation: LOL hell no.  Bonuses all around!  And we hired more people!) 

The actual end result is a cracking down on "money laundering" detection for _everyone else_.

eta:
I have a suspicion that they're going to somehow use Epstein and Maxwell as a giant smear campaign against cash usage, since these articles continually highlight how much cash he was withdrawing and using.  Don't you want to stop pedophiles like Epstein?  Let's ban cash to fix that and ensure all transactions are tracked and red-flagged.  Watch.

----------


## RonZeplin

Money laundering is way of life in the Deep State Swamp.  




End the FED   

End the D&R party swamp

----------


## Firestarter

In March, it was reported that former Spanish King Juan Carlos had received $100 million dollars (90 million Euros) from Saudi Arabia's late King Abdullah in 2008.
The money was deposited in an account at Genevas Mirabaud bank in the name of the Panamanian Lucum foundation, described as a donation from the king of Saudi Arabia. According to Juan Carlos (former) mistress Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein $65 million of that sum was given to Juan Carlos.

King Felipe VI of Spain tried to put a stop to the media hysteria, by promising to strip his dear daddy of his annual allowance of over 194,000 Euros ($216,000) and claiming that he would renounce what he would inherit from him. Anything you say Felipe (no need to verify of course)...
Didnt Felipe inherit the title King of Spain from Juan Carlos?!?

Swiss prosecutors also found another offshore fund, Fondation Zagatka, tied to Juan Carlos.
For some reason, the Spanish parliament didnt investigate this prime example of money laundering by former king Juan Carlos.

Im (almost) sure its just another coincidence, but then the coronavirus pandemic was used to lockdown Spain in one of the most brutal ones in the whole wide world
According to former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont, now in exile, the Spanish Royals are using the coronavirus pandemic as a cover: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-offshore-fund
https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/...it-father.html


See Juan Carlos and Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein at the Laureus Award in Barcelona, 2006.


Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in her meeting with retired police officer José Manuel Villarejo said that Juan Carlos used her to hide assets and properties abroad. The kings Swiss lawyer Dante Canónica created opaque "structures" in the name of third parties, like her.
Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein also claims Juan Carlos had Swiss bank accounts in the name of his cousin Álvaro Jaime de Orleans-Borbón.

Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein says she has been pressured by CNI to transfer these assets to the name of others close to Juan Carlos.
According to Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in the summer 2012 she was threatened by the director of the CNI, Felix Sanz Roldán, with the death of herself and her children. This happened with the kings knowledge. Sanz Roldán has denied threatening her.
Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in also told in the recording that mercenaries burglarised her homes in London and Monaco to steal documents: https://www.elnacional.cat/en/news/k...87055_102.html
(http://archive.is/TKjD3)


Dont believe everything lying lawyers tell...
In June, Spains Supreme Court announced that they will investigate whether former King Juan Carlos I was bribed by Saudi Arabia as part of the construction of the Medina to Mecca bullet train by a Spanish railway company: https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/12503...m-saudi-arabia


The following didnt get much attention from our wonderful media...

In another coincidence, in May, just one month before the previous announcement, it was reported that Juan Carlos I was given (another) $1.9 million (1.7m) in 2010 by the king of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa al Jalifa.
Juan Carlos gave a suitcase with the cash to his former fund manager to deposit in a Swiss bank account at Switzerlands Mirabaud bank on the offshore Lucum foundation in name of Juan Carlos: https://www.spainenglish.com/2020/05...n-switzerland/
(http://archive.is/cTlze)

----------


## Pauls' Revere

Bump

----------


## Firestarter

In November 2010, Lord David James created quite a stir when he said: 


> I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money. My biggest client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1bn of its money. I have also had extensive connections with North African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.


Not worrisome of course that a Lord for life was laundering money for the IRA and North African terrorists, because David James claimed that he is "_a money washer, not a money launderer_" (maybe somebody could explain to this piece of sh*t that “money washing” is “money laundering”).

David James was doing this dirty business at the direction of the Bank of England, who brought him into 5 companies between 1989 and 1997/98.
Lord James ran the 5 IRA companies down and liquidised the assets after they had been identified as conduits for IRA pension funds.

In the same speech David James also made a bizarre claim about some shadowy group “Foundation X” that offered to solve the UK's economic problems, by giving £5 billion immediately and another £17 billion for schools, hospitals and London's crossrail project.



> For want of a better name, I shall call it Foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, 'We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate'


I couldn’t find more information on these strange but interesting tales: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/n...-28569215.html
(https://archive.is/VqE1Y)


For more on the British Intelligence controlled IRA: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6976413

----------


## Firestarter

This is another interesting tale that involves Donald Trump, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Prince Andrew and money laundering...


Michael Cohen was involved in at least 3 attempts to build Trump properties in the former Soviet Union.

Cohen was the main force behind the failed attempt to construct a Trump tower in Batumi, Georgia, through his “dear friend” Giorgi Rtskhiladze, the head of the Silk Road Transatlantic Alliance.
Cohen, among others, met Yerkin Tatishev, a board member of Silk Road Group suspected of illegally funnelling money to another company he owned, and Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili.

The Silk Road Group got most of its funds from the Kazakh government-owned BTA Bank, whose assets were directed by Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev: https://themoscowproject.org/explain...ontextualized/


When Georgia wasn’t doing too well economically, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev came to the rescue. In 2005, Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili and Nazarbayev announced that BTA Bank was providing 300 hundred million dollars in loans to develop Georgia.
In a strange twist, all the loans went to subsidiaries of the Silk Road Group. BTA’s deputy chairman, Yerkin Tatishev, selected one of his employees at the Kusto Group, Talgat Turumbayev, to represent both BTA and him on the boards of 2 of those subsidiaries. Some legal experts conclude that if Tatishev was financially involved in businesses funded by the BTA Bank loans, then he and the Silk Road Group have committed bank fraud (self-dealing).
Not surprisingly one of Silk Road’s subsidiaries receiving loans, Batumi Riviera Holding, B.V., was registered in the Netherlands.

In 2009, when Nazarbayev was planning to take control of BTA Bank, its chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, fled to London (where else?). Ablyazov took billions of dollars in bank funds out of BTA, by giving dozens of offshore companies under his control loans from B.T.A., which weren’t paid back.
Starting in 2009, Mukhtar Ablyazov was sued in the UK by the Kazakh government to reclaim ten billion dollars that he had siphoned out of the country.  The UK courts ordered him to repay more than four billion dollars to BTA (so that he could keep almost six billion dollars). According to Judge Nigel John Martin Teare, Ablyazov had committed “fraud on an epic scale”.

In 2010, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen began negotiating with the Silk Road Group about a Trump Tower in Batumi, Georgia.
When Donald came to Georgia for a speech, he pointed to Tatishev and Ramishvili and said: “_We have two great partners. And they’re going to do a fantastic job_”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-of-corruption
(http://web.archive.org/web/20200904050950/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/trumps-business-of-corruption)


Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of Nursultan Nazarbayev, had an affair with Kazakh socialite Goga Ashkenazi (that produced a bastard child). Goga had previously been married to heir to the L’Ermitage hotel group Stefan Ashkenazy.

Goga Ashkenazi introduced Timur Kulibayev to her good friend, Prince Andrew (who was rumoured to be another one of her bed partners).
See Goga with Prince Andrew in 2010.


The divorced Andrew had been trying in vain for years to sell Sunninghill Park for which he asked £12 million.
So Timur Kulibayev bought the property for £15 million. Prince Andrew as a personal favour introduced Kulibayev to his mother, Queen Elizabeth.

Other friends of Goga Ashkenazi include former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev and Saif Gaddafi, the son of the late Libya’s dictator: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...aire-Goga.html

Goga Ashkenazi was educated in England (where else?) at the Royal-Maxwell linked Stowe school, before she went on to study at the University of Oxford.
She was also friends with none other than Nat Rothschild and Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill (probably at Oxford).

After Oxford, Goga worked as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley in London and the Dutch ABN AMRO (once again!) in Hong Kong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goga_Ashkenazi

----------


## devil21

Whatever ya do, don't blame the banks for money laundering.  They just worked within the system they were given......by the money launderers.  All of the "financial crime monitoring" watchdogs are headed by launderers themselves.  This method of appointing conspirators to head up departments and/or creating the watchdog groups themselves is how nothing is ever enforced, except for the occasional scapegoat trotted out for public consumption or the little people who try to use the same methods.  We see it in everything from money laundering to kid trafficking to arms sales.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/22/blam...erts-urge.html

.....

(and the solution will be tighter clamps on everyone else, coming in the form of digital currencies and the tracking of all transactions.....AFTER all the "official" money laundering has been successfully completed, of course)

----------


## Firestarter

> Whatever ya do, don't blame the banks for money laundering.  They just worked within the system they were given......


And certainly don't blame the politicians, who love some of that "dirty cash"!!!


On 16 September I posted.



> In 2009, when Nazarbayev was planning to take control of BTA Bank, its chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, fled to London (where else?). Ablyazov took billions of dollars in bank funds out of BTA, by giving dozens of offshore companies under his control loans from B.T.A., which weren’t paid back.


Then suddenly on 20 September, the ICIJ found it convenient to report on some (already known) money laundering cases. For some reason Mukthar Ablyazov is mentioned, but they “forgot” to detail the case...

It is a report on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) reported by banks to the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen), between 1999 and 2017. The suspicious transactions total more than $2.7 trillion.
They show banks transferring cash for clients that have already been publicly exposed as financial frauds and for shell companies controlled by people they can’t identify. Some banks take hundreds of days (on average) to report “suspicious” transactions to the authorities.

The SARs in the FinCEN Files were mostly filed by: Deutsche Bank (982), Bank of New York Mellon (325), Standard Chartered Bank (232), JP Morgan Chase (107), Barclays (104) and HSBC Bank (73). Together they filed more than 85% of all SARs in the leak.
Deutsche Bank reported more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions.


The most interesting bank in this story is, NOT Deutsche Bank but, JPMorgan Chase (the largest bank in the United States).
JPMorgan was involved in money laundering for the previously mentioned Mukthar Ablyazov - former chairman of Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank (previously named Bank TuranAlem).

JPMorgan also helped Paul Manafort transfer more than $50 million in over a decade. How much of that was funnelled through to Podesta?!?
JPMorgan even made $6.9 million in transactions for Manafort in the 14 months after he resigned from the Trump campaign in a swirl of money-laundering and corruption allegations.
NoviRex secretly paid $4,190,111 to Manafort’s lobbying operation on behalf of Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions (for which Podesta was subcontracted).

JPMorgan laundered money for people massively looting in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine (where else?).
JPMorgan also moved more than $1 billion for the fugitive financier behind Malaysia's 1MDB scandal.
JPMorgan transferred more than $2 million for a company that has allegedly cheated Venezuela's Government.

Banks are legally prohibited from discussing filed SARs (but we really don’t need to know all that is going on or we might lose sleep), so JPMorgan declined to comment.
Likewise the Treasury Department and its subsidiary FinCEN refused to answer questions: https://www.icij.org/investigations/...nd-terrorists/
(https://archive.is/GYiWG)


I found the following story more interesting than the previous that didn’t really disclose anything “new” (I couldn’t find this by searching the internet for a link to Bayrock, Arif or Sater, to Mukthar Ablyazov).

More than $30 million of the looted billions from Mukhtar Ablyazov was invested in the US with the help of none other than Tevfik Arif’s and Trump’s gopher, Chabad-Lubavitcher Felix Sater.

Eesh Aggarwal had worked for Ablyazov’s son-in-law, Ilyas Khrapunov, to use a network of a dozen or more offshore companies to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through accounts in the Tanzania-based bank FBME.
Ilyas Khrapunov — under the codename “Elvis” — was the ultimate beneficiary of the offshore network that handled close to $440 million through accounts at the FBME bank.

Bayrock's and Sater's links to the Khrapunovs date back to 2007, when Trump SoHo was under development. They set up a Dutch joint venture with Arif’s Bayrock called KazBay. Bayrock and the Khrapunovs also partnered on a project in Switzerland in 2008.
Sater was also directly involved with 2 members of Ilyas Khrapunov's family.
From 2012 to 2014, Ilyas Khrapunov and Elvira were helped by Sater and another ex-Trump Organization employee, Daniel Ridloff, to transfer millions of dollars to the US.  Part of this cash was used to buy 3 Trump SoHo apartments: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nat...213846794.html
(https://archive.is/r2cHF)


For more on Trump, Bayrock and (paedophile) Tevfik Arif: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6529940

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## Firestarter

Because of helping the Dutch State to destroy the DSB Bank, together with none other than Gerrit Zalm, which made many people lose part of their savings deposited at that bank, I didn't have high expectations of Pieter Lakeman – _Frisse zaken_ (1987).
But I was pleasantly surprised that the book explained some corruption scandals in the Kingdom of the Netherlands that prove how the corrupt elite can use their influence over the government to become filthy rich.

The most interesting scandals involved the longest-serving prime minister in the Netherlands (from November 1982 to August 1994) – Ruud Lubbers.

In 1994, Frits Hirschland accused Ruud’s brother Rob Lubbers, and Antillean politicians Maria Liberia and Rufus McWilliam of laundering drug money on the Dutch Antilles.

This money laundering also involved Slavenburg Bank, which was shut down over another money laundering scandal.
The prosecution of the directors of the Slavenburg Bank was shut down by Minister Korthals Altes, who before he became minister under PM Lubbers until 1982, had represented the Slavenburg Bank as attorney: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...=1#post6983531


See more recently, Ruud Lubbers (on the left) with Israel’s favourite Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

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## Firestarter

The money laundering case against Dutch bank ABN Amro has been settled for 480 million euros ($574 million) - a fine of 300 million euros and 180 million euros as disgorgement.
The Dutch prosecution service (Openbaar Ministerie) claimed that "its investigation" into the criminal activities of 3 former board members was ongoing (yeah sure!).
The ABN Amro promised that by the end 2022 they have made changes to prevent money laundering (no need to check of course).

Danske Bank's Dutch CEO Chris Vogelzang, who previously served on ABN Amro's board, also resigned after being investigated in another money laundering probe by the Dutch authorities.

Even though the OM had already admitted that the responsible directors of the Dutch ING bank wouldn't be prosecuted after a similar settlement, a Dutch court in December 2020 released a statement stated that a criminal investigation into the role of former CEO Ralph Hamers would be started (yeah right!): https://archive.is/EObEk

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## merkelstan

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m...laundering.asp

Thanks for the wealth of information there firestarter.  While most of the cases of 'laundered' money you cite appear to be from things libertarians _would_ consider crimes, profits from voluntary transactions such as buying and selling between legitimate owners is another thing entirely

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## Firestarter

Now that the evil Putin has invaded the innocent Ukraine, we ar all cheering for the blue and yellow flag, Ukrainians and president Zelensky in particular.


Just last year there were still stories on the blatant corruption by corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs and their puppet politicians.
One of the most interesting corrupt oligarch is one Ihor Kolomoisky, who not only financed the show business, politicial career of Volodymyr Zelensky, but also controlled the PrivatBank, that in turn owned the Burisma at a time that it hired a fellow named Hunter Biden...

On 5 March,  none other than senile Joe's State Secretary Antony Blinken issued a statement designating Ihor Kolomoisky as ineligible to enter the US because of his "significant corruption".
The story is pretty bad as far as money laundering scandals go...

Zelensky’s childhood friend, Ivan Bakanov, was chosen as head of the security service that in 2021 started an investigation, spearheaded by Kolomoisky, of the Indian giant ArcelorMittal that owns steel plants in Ukraine.
We shouldn't feel too sorry over executive chairman of ArcelorMittal, Lakshmi Mittal, an "acquaintance" of Prince Charles of Britain, and business partner of Trump's Commerce Secreatry Wilbur Ross: https://seekingalpha.com/article/442...-arcelormittal
(https://archive.ph/UpsBC)


Here's the promised scandal...

In the 1990s, Igor Kolomoisky and Hennady Boholyubov founded PrivatBank, which became Ukraine’s largest financial institution and the vehicle they used to steal billions of dollars and launder it through US real estate.
The scheme started with people in a “Shadow Bank” generating millions in fraudulent loans for Kolomoisky. Those loans went to offshore shell companies controlled by the 2 partners in crime. To keep the money flowing, the “Shadow Banks” kept rolled out new loans to pay off the old ones.

Kolomoisky siphoned these billions of dollars from PrivatBank through a money laundering scheme, in which (once again!) Deutsche Bank played a key role. From 2007 to 2013, Kolomoisky transferred more than $750 million to the US, most of it was used to buy up Midwest properties.
Most of the loans were transferred to a Cyprus bank account of Pavanti Enterprises Ltd., a British Virgin Islands shell company; the money then transferred to Deutsche Bank in the US.
By the end of 2015, Kolomoisky and associates owned at least 22 large properties. The flow of Kolomoisky dollars into the US finally ended in December 2016, coincidentally at the end of the Obama presidency, when Ukraine regulators nationalized PrivatBank and accused it of widespread fraud.

Kolomoisky and associates left a trail of empty, boarded-up buildings, unpaid property taxes, dangerous factory conditions, and at least 4 steel mills that filed for bankruptcy, owing hundreds of millions of dollars,
Several employees were apparently seriously injured as a result of the dangerous factory conditions: https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-...-of-ruin-in-us
(https://archive.ph/P8r6b)


For more information on Kolomoisky, Zelensky, and their ties to (among others) Ronald Lauder and pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. They're so close that Putin is the godfather of Medvedchuk's daughter Daryna.



> In 2020, Viktor Medvedchuk controlled 3 television news channels - 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK - but he also owned 25% of 1+1 (that effectively launched Zelensky career), with the rest owned by Kolomoisky!


.
And more information on Kolomoisky, and his connections to Burisma.



> Now it appears that Volodymyr Zelensky's sugar daddy Ihor Kolomoisky controlled Burisma through the PrivatBank. I haven't been able to confirm this beyond all doubt, but I find it all the more convincing as this was already reported in 2012.


Zelensky-Kolomoisky-Putin-and-more

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## Firestarter

After this scandal broke, in the late 1990s, it was called the biggest money laundering scandal of Argentina (or even in history).
Reportedly more than $10 billion was laundered by the Mercado Abierto Group, through its M.A. Bank shell company that was licensed in the Cayman Islands, using the Citibank.

Millions of dollars were wired from Argentina into Citibank accounts in New York and then withdrawn in cash in Argentina to a local real estate agent, who was a representative for the then "Mexico's biggest drug trafficker", Amado Carrillo Fuentes: http://web.archive.org/web/202205200...dow-banks.html


What makes this money laundering scandal much more interesting to me, is that it implicates the Zorreguieta family, of our beloved Queen Máxima (Zorreguieta), who even worked for Mercado Abierto, when she was a student from 1991 to 1993.
There is no evidence that she was directly involved, but the money laundering started in 1992, and she was working on sophisticated financial software to transfer money... the kind of software that was used for the money laundering.

Máxima's dad, Jorge H. Zorreguieta, was directly responsible as a director of the Banco República from 1986 to 1996. It's very unlikely that he didn't know, which makes it more probable that his daughter Máxima was also involved.
Even another daughter of Jorge, Dolores Zorreguieta, was named as one of the prominent Argentinians in the "malditas cajas" scandal that used this money laundering construction. Jorge H. Zorreguieta was also named in the "malditas cajas" scandal.

The money laundering was initiated by the Banco República owned by Raul Moneta, who also owned the offshorebank Federal Bank that was also involved.
They also used the offshore Mercado Abierto Group subsidiairy, and obviously the Citibank was also involved.
There were also offshore accounts used located in Bermuda and the Dutch Antilles.

The scheme was used to launder money for the Mexican Juarez drug cartel.
They also laundered money to illegally buy arms (in violation of UN arms embargos) for Croatia and Ecuador.
And of course for bribes and kickbacks for Argentinian officials.

According to Luis Balaguer, who was involved in the investigation of US senator Carl Levin into the Citibank money laundering, Jorge Zorreguieta wasn't charged for his involvement because of the corruption in Argentina and the influence of the Dutch royal family.

Jorge Zorreguieta's mentor, José Martinez de Hoz, got Jorge appointed on the board of Banco República.
While Jorge Zorreguieta was a mere Secretary for Economics, Martinez de Hoz was even a minister during Videla's junta. Martinez de Hoz was also a member of Prince Bernhard's 1001 Club.
In 2010, Martinez de Hoz was placed under house arrest for his role in Argentina's "dirty war" in which more than 30,000 people were murdered. He died in 2013.

Aldo Luis Ducler was the chairman of the Mercado Abierto Group. Dulcer had also been involved with the Videla junta.
In June 2017, after another scandal surfaced, Dulcer suddenly died. According to his son Juan Manuel Ducler, he was poisoned like Argentian special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in 2015 to prevent him from talking.

And then new president of Argentina, Mauricio Macri, covered the whole scandal up. It has been rumoured that he was installed as president through the influence of the Dutch royals.
Máxima’s younger sister, Inés Zorreguieta, was even installed by the Macri admnistration in an official functions, before she died of a reported suicide in 2018: (in Dutch) https://tpo.nl/2016/06/30/zorreguiet...panama-papers/
(https://archive.ph/9e5tA)

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## Firestarter

Who could have guessed that once again all the trails lead to the Bush family.
Prescott Bush wasn't only a member of Skull & Bones, but during WW II was also a director of the Nazi financing UBC Bank that was ultimately controlled by Queen Wilhelmina through the BHS Bank: Dragon-court





> The money laundering was initiated by the Banco República owned by *Raul Moneta*, who also owned the offshorebank Federal Bank that was also involved.
> They also used the offshore Mercado Abierto Group subsidiairy, and obviously the Citibank was also involved.


'.



> Moneta turned over his CEI shares to Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst.
> Tom Hicks wasn't only a close friend of Moneta, but also owner of the Texas Rangers and major funder of George W. Bush's presidential campaign.
> 
> In June 2001, former Argentine President Carlos Menem was accused for his involvement in illegally selling 6,500 tons of arms to Croatia and Ecuador between 1991 and 1995, in violation of international arms embargoes.
> One of Menem's first acts as President was to give Enron a $300-million sweetheart pipeline deal to Enron. Enron was (of course) a big contributor to George Bush Jr's presidential campaign and its founder and CEO, Kenneth Lay, was a close friend of the George Bush Sr.
> 
> It has been argued that Menem was very close to George Bush Sr. (and other sons of Bushes)


Greetings-from-Holland

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## Firestarter

Here's an interesting 9 1/2 minute video on money laundering by/in the UK.
Of course it's nonsense to blame it all on the "Russian oligarchs" though...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1500739979164667906

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