http://www.thekomisarscoop.com Reports & Analysis by Investigative Journalist Lucy Komisar Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:33:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2011/01/ex-employee-who-claimed-firing-over-opposition-to-haiti-bribery-settles-suit-against-idt/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2011/01/ex-employee-who-claimed-firing-over-opposition-to-haiti-bribery-settles-suit-against-idt/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 02:06:53 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=5581 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2011/01/ex-employee-who-claimed-firing-over-opposition-to-haiti-bribery-settles-suit-against-idt/feed/ 0 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/09/idts-imaginary-ethics-letter/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/09/idts-imaginary-ethics-letter/#comments Fri, 24 Sep 2010 17:02:24 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=4919 Barron's ran my story in which IDT CEO Howard Jonas admitted for the first time a suspect deal with then Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide that involved sending payments due Haiti to a law firm in the Turks and Caicos. Jonas told me the company had gotten a lawyer's "ethics letter" clearing the deal. But he wouldn't provide it. A day before the story was to run, Barron's got a call from a lawyer of the firm representing IDT in a lawsuit by former IDT executive D. Michael Jewett, who says the company fired him for objecting to the offshore deal. He promised to provide the ethics letter. It was the end of day, Friday. The magazine noted that promise when it published the next day. Days later, the lawyer called to say he couldn't provide the letter because it was sealed. Hard to believe: there is no sealing order for the letter in the case docket. ]]> http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/09/idts-imaginary-ethics-letter/feed/ 0 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/07/sodexo-exposed-by-komisar-for-kickbacks-agrees-to-20m-settlement/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/07/sodexo-exposed-by-komisar-for-kickbacks-agrees-to-20m-settlement/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:40:13 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=4662 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/07/sodexo-exposed-by-komisar-for-kickbacks-agrees-to-20m-settlement/feed/ 1 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/05/the-wall-street-icecapade/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/05/the-wall-street-icecapade/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 03:04:10 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=4282 The American Interest, July-Aug 2010 (online May 18, 2010) - As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating a major financial reform bill in which the credit default swap, a kind of derivative, plays a significant part. An amendment to that bill, proposed by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), would ban banks from proprietary trading. There are a lot of high-rolling bankers who do not want that amendment to pass, because it will mess up their plans to repatriate foreign profits into the United States, untaxed, by trading in derivatives on their own accounts. The clearinghouse ICE Trust U.S. forms a central part of these plans. What is ICE Trust U.S., and who owns it? ICE US Holding Co., which was established in 2008 as the parent of ICE Trust U.S., is located in the Cayman Islands. Yet none of the owners of ICE US Holding Co. are based in the Caymans. Among the owners of the Cayman’s company are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which are headquartered in New York. Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. ]]> http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/05/the-wall-street-icecapade/feed/ 1 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/03/idts-voodoo-economics-inside-the-justice-department%e2%80%99s-probe-of-telecom-bribes-in-haiti/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/03/idts-voodoo-economics-inside-the-justice-department%e2%80%99s-probe-of-telecom-bribes-in-haiti/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:38:28 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=3772 The Big Money, March 11, 2010 - When the devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January, IDT, the New Jersey-based global phone company, moved fast to help. It announced it was setting up calling stations at hotels and other sites so Haitians could use its Internet calling-service to reach family and friends around the world. It cut rates on its U.S. prepaid calling-card to 2 cents a minute to Haiti (at least for 12 days), donated 4,000 $2-prepaid calling-cards to Haitian community groups in New York and Florida, and said it would give some proceeds from prepaid calls to Haitian Red Cross relief. Such a warm, fuzzy response from a U.S. corporation often wins plaudits, though, of course, IDT has a business interest in the impoverished island. In 2005, in its latest publicly available figures, the company reported $4 million in profits from $17 million in revenues for routing calls there. ]]> http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2010/03/idts-voodoo-economics-inside-the-justice-department%e2%80%99s-probe-of-telecom-bribes-in-haiti/feed/ 1 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/10/former-u-s-attorney-chris-christie-gop-candidate-for-nj-governor-gets-from-idt-nj-telcom-investigated-by-justice-dept-for-bribing-haitian-officials/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/10/former-u-s-attorney-chris-christie-gop-candidate-for-nj-governor-gets-from-idt-nj-telcom-investigated-by-justice-dept-for-bribing-haitian-officials/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:22:17 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/?p=2039 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/10/former-u-s-attorney-chris-christie-gop-candidate-for-nj-governor-gets-from-idt-nj-telcom-investigated-by-justice-dept-for-bribing-haitian-officials/feed/ 0 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/the-real-aig-scandal-how-the-game-is-rigged-at-wall-streets-casino/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/the-real-aig-scandal-how-the-game-is-rigged-at-wall-streets-casino/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:36:24 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/26/the-real-aig-scandal-how-the-game-is-rigged-at-wall-streets-casino/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/the-real-aig-scandal-how-the-game-is-rigged-at-wall-streets-casino/feed/ 8 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/cafeteria-kickbacks/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/cafeteria-kickbacks/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:57:56 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/03/cafeteria-kickbacks/ How food-service providers like Sodexo bilk millions from taxpayers and customers In These Times, March 2009 - The Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute provided generous support for this article. At the end of the 2006 school year, children’s nutrition advocate Dorothy Brayley had a disturbing conversation with a local dairy representative. He had come to her office to discuss participation in the summer trade show of food providers she runs as director of Kids First Rhode Island. At the time, the state’s schools were buying 100,000 containers of milk each week. The salesman for Garelick Farms, New England’s largest dairy, told Brayley that Sodexo—a food and facility management corporation that managed most of the state’s school lunch programs—was paying Garelick more than competitors in order to get a bigger rebate. That’s just a taste of the hundreds of millions of dollars of “rebates”—or kickbacks from suppliers—that Sodexo, a $20 billion-a-year global leader in the food and facility management industry, has taken while operating cafeterias and other facilities for schools, hospitals, universities, government agencies, the military and private companies across the country, according to evidence provided by whistleblowers and internal company documents.]]> http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/03/cafeteria-kickbacks/feed/ 5 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/02/exclusive-how-one-funds-profits-ended-up-in-the-caymans/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/02/exclusive-how-one-funds-profits-ended-up-in-the-caymans/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:59:42 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2009/02/05/exclusive-how-one-funds-profits-ended-up-in-the-caymans/ Why would a New York investment fund manager run operations through an office in the Caymans? "This type of structure is for optimising taxes," explained Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands official of the global Julius Baer Group (Zurich). He told IPS that "generating" the income where a company was actually based, "you would pay much more taxes". Obrist was describing a company shifting claimed earnings to tax havens to evade home taxes. He allegedly helped Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) New York do just that. ]]> http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/02/exclusive-how-one-funds-profits-ended-up-in-the-caymans/feed/ 1 http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/01/swiss-bank%e2%80%99s-crafty-strategy-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-clamp-down-on-tax-havens/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/01/swiss-bank%e2%80%99s-crafty-strategy-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-clamp-down-on-tax-havens/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:20:02 +0000 Lucy Komisar http://thekomisarscoop.com/2009/01/05/swiss-bank%e2%80%99s-crafty-strategy-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-clamp-down-on-tax-havens/ http://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2009/01/swiss-bank%e2%80%99s-crafty-strategy-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-clamp-down-on-tax-havens/feed/ 2