Investigators find evidence that Siemens (German electronics & engineering firm), Total (French oil company), and BAE (British arms conglomerate) paid multi-millions of dollars in bribes through bank accounts in Switzerland and other offshore centers.
France and the UK argue national security to block inquiries. Concern is more likely the “security” of top officials who got kickbacks.
Spain‘s discovery that funding for Basque terrorist group ETA goes through tax havens is dramatic proof that “national security” lies not in protecting but in dismantling the global offshore secrecy network.
Who might have killed former Russian spy Litvinenko? Julia Svetlichnaya, a Russian living in London, told the press there that she had met Litvinenko and learned that he was collecting information about mega-rich Russian entrepreneurs to use for blackmail.
It has not been reported before that Litvinenko’s collaborator, Yevgeny Limarev, had visited Elena Collongues-Popova (shown here), a Russian woman in Paris, to seek information connecting ex-Yukos official Alexei Golubovich to bribery of the former president of Lithuania. And Svetlichnaya hasn’t told the press that she worked for the very same Golubovich.
Northern California is a magical place that is a model for the sophisticated urban-plus-country living we‘d all have if the world was organized by smart people. Spending a long weekend there in the fall makes one put it on the short list of where to live if you ever moved from where you are. We landed in San Francisco for a taste of classy city chic, then moved on to the wine country, passing through forest and beach on the way.
The company is under investigation by the SEC, the United States Attorney in Newark, New Jersey, and a U.S. federal grand jury for allegedly paying bribes to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former president of Haiti. Five nationally prominent US Republicans, the independent board members of a corporation that has been charged with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get a sweetheart telecom deal in Haiti, are leaving its board. The company is IDT, the world’s third-ranked international phone company.
IDT is run by James Courter (shown here), a former New Jersey Republican congressman. The other Republicans are Rudy Boschwitz, former senator from Minnesota; James S. Gilmore III, former Virginia governor; Thomas Slade Gorton III, former senator from Washington State; Jack Kemp, former congressman from New York and 1996 vice presidential nominee; and Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN under President Ronald Reagan.
The U.S. Justice Department is withholding agreement to share assets seized from Haitian drug traffickers to finance a lawsuit by the Haitian government charging former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with taking bribes.
The suit is based on allegations by a former executive of the telecom company IDT that before Aristide left the country in 2004, he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from IDT, which is connected to prominent U.S. Republicans.
The soul of Athens is embedded in its ancient monuments. The Acropolis and other historic sites are not museum pieces tucked away for tourists‘ visits. They are an integral part of the city‘s life. Visit the National Gallery, and you‘ll see a 19th-century painting of Athenians lounging on a terrace, with the Acropolis in the background, “Athenian Evening,” 1897, by Iakovos Rizos (1849-1926).
The city shows its pride in the venerable stones of the Parthenon and other more-than-2500-year-old temples by designing its streets and buildings with the goal of assuring direct sightlines. That appears to be the de rigueur view from the best hotels.
Come January, there‘s no better place to be than Key West. If the stars are right, you might arrive there as I did early this year, first to bask in the intellectual lights of the Key West Literary Seminar and then to revel in the glories of the annual Key West international regatta.
The seminar was about adventure, travel and discovery. If you were there, you would have heard Kate Wheeler, who trained as a Buddhist nun in Burma and wrote the novel, “When Mountains Walked,” about foreigners adrift in exotic cultures. Or maybe you‘d have chatted with her at the champagne party the seminar throws every year at the Key West Museum of Art and History at the historic red brick Custom House. (That is Kate second from the right at the 2006 party.)
Sept 18, 2006 Is top Justice official protecting a former client accused of bribery?
The Justice Department’s Criminal Division, headed by a Bush political appointee who gave legal advice to a company accused of bribing Haiti’s former president, is blocking an agreement to share seized Haitian drug money that would help Haiti pursue the bribery case in U.S. courts. The accused company is run by a former Republican congressman.
The Criminal Division chief, Alice Fisher, formerly a registered lobbyist for HCA, the healthcare company founded by the father of Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, is a recess appointee. Her approval was blocked by Senators concerned about her qualifications and about her participation in a government meeting on abusive interrogations at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo.
When Andrew Cuomo became HUD Secretary in 1997, he axed a federal program that had saved the US $2.2 billion between 1994 and 1997 and reinstituted a system that lost the government money while earning billions for favored friends.
He used the power of his office to target a former HUD official who had assisted his predecessor in operating the successful program. A HUD legal vendetta destroyed the official’s company before the Justice Department finally admitted there was no case and dropped it.
Now he is running for Attorney General of New York State.
When Andrew Cuomo became HUD Secretary in 1997, he reversed the policy of selling defaulted mortgages so that families could keep their homes. Instead, he chose to foreclose on mortgages, which meant that families lost their homes and insiders cleaned up on fire-sale priced properties. The program he axed had saved the U.S. $2.2 billion between 1994 and 1997. Cuomo fired the former HUD official whose company designed the program.
That wasn‘t the only money big money lost under Cuomo. HUD reported at the time that $59 billion was missing! It couldn‘t say where the money went, because it failed to produce audited financial statements.
Two U.S. lawsuits charge that former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his associates accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from politically connected U.S. telecom companies.
Lawsuits filed this Fall challenge the former priest‘s image of political purity and raise claims that both he and U.S. corporate executives scammed illegal profits off the hemisphere‘s poorest population.
In one suit, a fired executive charged his former employer, the U.S. telecom IDT (Newark, NJ), with corruption, defamation, and intimidation under the New Jersey anti-racketeering law. In the second, the government of Haiti contends that IDT, Fusion (New York, NY) and several other North American telecoms violated the federal RICO anti-racketeering statute. Both suits allege that Aristide, now in exile in South Africa, and his associates, took kickbacks.
Add former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the long list of corrupt and repressive officials who have used Western banks and companies and offshore tax havens to plunder their countries and launder the stolen money.
Aristide and his associates looted government coffers, wrote checks to front companies for nonexistent purchases, padded invoices to get kickbacks from vendors, secretly owned companies that cheated Haiti of taxes, and laundered the money they stole through shell companies and secret bank accounts set up in the United States and the offshore tax havens of Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands.
Nearly $20 million has been documented as stolen between 2001, when Aristide took office as president for the second time, and 2004, when he fled or was forced out of the country according to varying accounts.
In Key West you can have it all — a gorgeous beach town with thrilling water sports — scuba, parasailing, jetskis — and an annual event that draws top writers to talk and schmooze with aficionados from around the country.
Protest at Rosenstrasse by non-Jewish women saved their Jewish husbands and sons —
In a small park just off Karl Liebnechtstrasse in former East Berlin stands an extraordinary group of reddish pink sculptures called Block der Frauen, the block of women. German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, an artistic refugee from the Nazis, chiseled them to commemorate an extraordinary event that occurred at that site in February 1943.
The Nazis had rounded up some 2500 Jewish men and boys, the husbands and sons of non-Jewish women, and imprisoned them at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish Community Center to gather them for deportation to death. The women found out where the men had been taken and converged there. From 600 the protests grew to 6,000. The guards pointed machine guns at them and threatened to open fire. The women held their ground.
After a week, propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who indicated in his diary that he was worried about the protest‘s public relations impact in Germany and abroad, ordered that the Jews with Aryan spouses or parents be released. And then the event seemed to vanish from history.
Why didn‘t we know about this? Why is it still generally believed that no one could challenge the Nazis and live?
Why a French cognac is called Hennessy By Lucy Komisar Ever wonder how a French cognac got a name like Hennessy? Or why a French Bordeaux is called Lynch-Bages? Lynch? Does Ireland, the country of beer and ale imbibers, have a connection to fine wine? I found the answers on a trip that took me […]
There‘s a bit of magic and fantasy in a day along the Mosel River, stopping at villages of half-timbered houses, trying wines from local vineyards, visiting centuries-old castles, and seeing stunning examples of a turn-of-the-last-century style called Art Nouveau.
We picked up the river route in Traben-Trarbach, between Trier (famous for Roman ruins) and Koblenz, arriving in the evening at the Jugendstilhotel Bellevue. Jugendstil means Modern Style as it was called in England, or Art Nouveau as the French named it. The hotel is not only charming and comfortable, but an architectural gem.
Art Nouveau developed as a rejection of turn-of-the-19th-to-20th-century upheaval and industrialization. Artists adopted shapes of nature; flowers with slim leaves and long-stalks were popular. Women were depicted with long flowing garments and hair. Elements of Modern Style are seen in the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec and in some Paris metro entrances.
London, glorious London. I know we Americans (or some of our ancestors) fought them in the 1700s, but they are still our best friends, aren‘t they? For theater, art, and experience, London is like leaving home to visit cousins. (Leaving the colonies to cross the Pond, as the Brits would say.) What I find wonderful about London is the easy fusion of the traditional and the modern. Traditional, by the way, sometimes goes back a thousand years!
Start with the traditional. To get a good grasp of the gory Royals, there‘s no place better than the Tower of London, founded by William the Conqueror in 1066-7 and enlarged and changed by royal houses that followed. The best way to see it is with a guided tour by one of the Beefeaters, those fellows who look like the picture on the gin bottle and take you around the Tower grounds explaining, with delicious, malicious enjoyment, the dreadful incarceration and murder of Anne Boleyn, two child princes, and other enemies of whoever was running the state. It‘s a bit like having your own personal version of a Shakespeare play.
Be sure to get there by the last tour at 3:30 pm; I‘ve done it both ways, and I‘ve learned that you miss too much wandering around without a guide. You can also see the crown jewels at the Tower. It gives you an idea of what the royals were fighting for! And what the republican Oliver Cromwell was fighting against.
A boutique hotel for tourists, a modern one for business travelers By Lucy Komisar I was walking along the rue de Rivoli in Paris and noticed a banner on the huge stone H´tel de Ville, the city hall. It announced an exhibit, “Du Refuge au Pi¨ge (From Refuge to Trap), The Jews in the […]
Weimar and its surroundings represent the best and the worst of the German character and history. On the square is the neoclassical German National Theater, with a statue of poet Johann Goethe (who founded the theater) and his contemporary, dramatist Friedrich Schiller. They were part of the “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress movement, which advocated a celebration of nature and emotion. On the day I visited, a group of theatrical activists in red and white robes were performing alongside the statue, handing passers-by advice cards labeled “Secret Agent: freedom training.” Considering what we would soon see, it was an appropriate idea.
How would you like to spend a few nights in an art museum? Not possible? How about a hotel room that‘s as exciting and original as anything you‘re likely to see in a gallery? You have never experienced anything like the stunning, stylized, avant garde and traditionally elegant one-of-a-kind new “fashion rooms” receiving guests at the luxury Royal Windsor Hotel Grand Place in Brussels. They are 10 veritable works of art by important Brussels fashion designers and they‘ve been open for less than a year.
Brussels is a center of grand couture, although its designers are less recognized – perhaps because of snobbery – than their Paris cousins. The idea for the rooms started with a Belgian designer who mused at a cocktail party that the hotel ought to be a showcase for Belgian design. Claude Dufour, Director Sales & Marketing, originated the concept of the fashion rooms. It fit with the Warwick group‘s resolve to make their hotels individualistic and distinctive.
Sitting on the “Bar Canale” terrace for breakfast, gazing at the 17th century Church of Santa Maria della Salute across the Grand Canal, I could imagine the lazy mornings of the Venice nobles who once owned the Bauer Il Palazzo. They might have finished their coffees and walked the five minutes to the Palace of the Doges, where government business was carried out.
They or their servants might have stepped into a gondola to travel quickly to the Rialto, the market at the site of the famous bridge. That might have happened in the 18th century, when the Palazzo was built.
The citizens of Buenos Aires are called “porteños,” people of the port. Perhaps this connection to the rest of the world contributes to their sophistication. “BA” is a city of grand, classical-style buildings, elegant neighborhoods, scruffy crowded “barrios,” pedestrian malls and even a kitchy tourist waterfront along the RÃo de la Plata, the Platt River. Like other great cities, it‘s a center of contemporary art. Much of that reflects its turbulent political history.
The most riotous time I had in Italy was at Michelangelo‘s David 500th birthday party. Well, not exactly a party, an exhibit at the Academy Gallery (Galleria dell‘Accademia) in Florence. Hmm? Isn‘t David just a piece of white marble, beautiful, yes, but riotous?
I‘m talking about Robert Morris‘ “The Birthday Boy,” an hysterical send-up of two leftwing art historians, each in a separate video talking about “The David.” The American Morris did them in 2003-4. His satire has the art critics (played by actors), typically veering into discussions of international politics, feminism, all the hot-button issues. Or didn‘t you think an art historian discussing “The David” could bring in an attack on George Bush?
Given a choice between a hotel that‘s spiffy modern and one that‘s historic, I‘ll take the historic place every time. And when that history goes back 700 years, staying in a hotel becomes just as exciting as going out to see the sights. I discovered that in Colchester, where I found the oldest inn located in the oldest recorded town in Britain.
I was going to a conference at the University of Essex, just outside Colchester, which is an hour‘s drive or train ride northeast of London. So I did some boning up on local history. I found that Cunobelin, King of the Britons, had lived here from 5 AD. Then the Romans invaded. The gritty Brits fought back! Queen Boudica burned the town and the Roman Temple to the ground in 60 AD.
We were descending a into 300-foot-deep Welsh coal mine, hard hats firmly in place, watches and anything else with batteries removed because the law requires it to prevent a spark that could set off flammable methane gas. Our guide, a former miner, grinned and joked. We laughed nervously. If you want a memorable experience, visiting “The Big Pit,” an hour‘s drive north of Cardiff, is high on the agenda!
![Fees for Friends: Vendetta [Andrew Cuomo Scandal]](https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/catherine_austin_fitts2.jpg "Fees for Friends: Vendetta [Andrew Cuomo Scandal]")
Our guide, a former miner, grinned and joked. We laughed nervously. If you want a memorable experience, visiting “The Big Pit,” an hour‘s drive north of Cardiff, is high on the agenda!