I attended a New York press conference sponsored by the French National Tourist Office. One of the speakers, Fabrice Morel, president of Rail Europe Group, told us that French trains were picking up so much speed that Marseilles and Bordeaux were now only three hours from Paris.
A comparison of the best: the Sennheiser and the Bose
Ready for a nice, relaxing airplane ride? You climb into your hard plush seat, fasten the safety belt, pull out a magazine or book and then, as you start the ascent into several hours locked in place, there comes a steady, all-encompassing roaaarrrr! And it won‘t go away. Not while the engines are turning, since that‘s the price of air travel. Or is it?
AlterNet, Dec 22, 2004
How insurance companies are aiding tax evasion by over-charging in America and shipping the money to offshore firms.
Terry Mills was working in Wilmington, DE, for J. Montgomery, one of the largest insurance agencies in the region, when in 1993 he was called in to get to the bottom of a messy insurance problem. Little did he know that he would uncover a story – as yet unreported – about tax evasion through offshore firms, but with a twist. The scheme Mills came across seemed to be taking place with the aid of AIG, a major U.S. insurance giant.
CorpWatch, Nov 17, 2004
In October, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against the world‘s largest insurance broker, Marsh, accusing it of rigging bids and receiving kickbacks in order to defraud clients such as other corporations, city governments, school districts and individuals of billions of dollars through inflated premiums.
“Greedy trial lawyers were the usual excuse for premium increases. Now we know that greedy corporations also have a starring role, Spitzer said, accusing several insurance companies as co-conspirators in making phony or inflated bids and paying kickbacks to the brokerage to get business.
Nov 2004 – Insurance giant AIG, run by powerful international financial player Maurice Hank Greenberg, has used offshore structures in Barbados and Bermuda to circumvent or violate U.S. state laws regarding reinsurance in a way that based on evidence about one crooked client, allows them to evade taxes.
AlterNet, Oct 22, 2004
As a senator, John Kerry was a tenacious investigator and exposed BCCI, an international criminal bank, and its murderous clients. The experience should serve him well in dealing with the international threats we face today.
One gets an eerie sense of déjà vu watching John Kerry battle the Bush clan. He’s done it once before, against the old man, President Bush’s father, though many voters have probably forgotten. That battle involved the first Bush administration’s attempt to put the lid on an investigation that connected a worldwide criminal bank to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and to Middle East money men who helped the Bush family make piles of cash. Those links connect to people now on the U.S. post-9/11 terrorist list.
Corpwatch, Oct 6, 2004
When Phil Gramm came out of the Tavern on the Green one recent August morning, his disposition turned edgy. The former Texas Senator the long-time banking committee chair is now a vice chairman of the Swiss financial corporation UBS. He’d just passed some pleasant hours hobnobbing with comrades in the money trade, all lured to New York by the chance to make profitable connections during the Republican Convention. But Gramm wasn’t keen on talking to waiting journalists, certainly not to the CorpWatch team.
Robert Rubin seemed quite at ease sitting next to Teresa Heinz Kerry at the Fleet Center in Boston, home to the Democratic Convention in July. The Clinton Treasury Secretary, former senior partner at the investment company Goldman Sachs, is now chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup. There was no chance of journalists bearding him in the candidate’s box – at least none who would ask uncomfortable questions.
Pacific News Service, Sept 9, 2004
When none other than President George W. Bush announces that the real rich dodge taxes, is that an inadvertent flash of honesty about the shady secrets of offshore shell companies and tax shelters? The administration is tying itself up in knots to dodge the significance of his statement.
The real rich dodge taxes and small business owners pay the burden. Does that sound like a radical-liberal denunciation of privilege by candidate John Kerry?
Guess again. It‘s a pronouncement by President Bush.
If you are going to London, there‘s a very modern theater you should visit. It‘s not in the center of the city; it‘s in Hampstead in north London, the intellectual heart of town. Or at least that‘s the neighborhood where a lot of writers and theater people live. Giving honor to place, the theater is called the Hampstead Theatre, and its recent incarnation is the creation of Jenny Topper, artistic director from 1988 until 2003, the first woman to hold that post.
Hemingway‘s ghost hovers over an annual confab of literati from all over the U.S. who meet every January in Key West, Florida, for a seminar that has become so successful that some years it closes out early. The Key West Annual Literary Seminar has been going for 22 years, drawing writers, writer wanna-be‘s and fans to hear novelists, essayists and playwrights talk about literary themes and also about how they work. Each year, there‘s another topic; past seminars have focused on the memoir, the novel, the natural world, science, and journalism.
The Russia Journal, July 1, 2004
Three U.S professors, analyzing import and export transactions between Russia and the U.S., have found that phony prices led to as much as $8.92 billion in capital flight from Russia to the U.S. in 1995-1999.
Even with calculations providing the most conservative estimate, at least $1.86 billion illegally left Russia during that period. Assuming a 25 percent average tax rate, the lower figure would mean nearly half a billion dollars in illegal tax evasion, and the higher one more than $2 billion in taxes lost, just in trade involving the U.S.
United Press International (UPI), June 2, 2004
A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein‘s secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaida.
More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources. The documents are the basis of further investigations coordinated in Europe by the prosecutor of Milan.
Pacific News Service, April 9, 2004
As states and municipalities reel from service cutbacks caused by lower tax earnings, big corporations pay virtually no taxes on huge profits. They do it though elaborate “shell” games.
Were you stunned by the revelation, days before your taxes are due, that nearly two-thirds of companies operating in America reported owing no taxes from 1996 through 2000? That over 90 percent of large corporations — with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts — reported owing taxes of only under 5 percent?
Alfred Hitchcock fans walking into the lobby of the old Coburg Hotel must shiver a bit. This was the place in the 1972 thriller “Frenzy” where Dick Blaney (Jon Finch) took his girlfriend, the barmaid Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), after his soon-to-be murdered ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) slipped him some cash. The bellhop led them through the square paneled glass doors, to room 322, “the cupid room.” Ask for the Dome Suite.
Hound-Dogs, March 2004
(Same title but not same article as in Dissent 2003)
This is a story about a massive money-laundering operation run by the world‘s biggest banks. It hides behind the “eyes-glazing over” technicalities of the international financial system. But it could be one of the biggest illicit money-moving operations anyone has ever seen. And it‘s allowed to exist by the financial regulators who answer to Western governments.
In these days of global markets, individuals and companies may be buying stocks, bonds or derivatives from a seller who is Clearstreamhalfway across the world. Clearstream, based in Luxembourg, is one of two international clearinghouses that keep track of the “paperwork” for the transactions.
There‘s a curious silence to the Place Vendome, a sense that this 17th-century architectural gem has successfully defeated the noise and traffic of modern Paris. Yes, cars and pedestrians do move over the cobble-stones, but they seem hardly noticed by the statue of Napoleon sitting atop the bronze obelisk at the center. It‘s as if the elegant stone mansions that ring the square were guarding the place and fending off intruders. And inside those mansions, you can imagine whispering gossips telling the intriguing tales of the past occupants.
Dec 2003
Alexei Golubovich, longtime partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is the target of legal action in Switzerland by his former associate Yelena Collongues-Popova and is being investigated by a Geneva judge on her charge of forgery.
Golubovich has not been indicted by Russian prosecutors, though they are interested in talking to the former Yukos finance director who has reportedly fled to London. However, he could be indicted by the Swiss.
Collongues-Popova, who for half a dozen years ran some 30 offshore companies for Golubovich, got a court order in Switzerland that froze $4.2 million she says represents loans he owes a company she owns. Swiss investigative magistrate, Claude Wenger, is looking into her criminal complaint that Golubovich forged her signature to avoid paying the loans.
The Russia Journal, Nov 28, 2003
Two ex-bankers on Wednesday, Nov. 26, filed a criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev, and Alexei Golubovich, accusing them of money laundering and support for a criminal organization.
The Russia Journal has obtained a copy of the report. The Journal asked Yukos press office to comment on the charge but no comments were received.
The former bankers have requested the federal officials in Switzerland to open an investigation into the charges and to search the records of the Swiss offices of Menatep SA, Menatep Finances SA and Valmet (in liquidation) and of Bank Leu related to investigate claims of fraud against the Russian company Avisma and money laundering by Menatep in Switzerland.
The Russia Journal, Nov 5, 2003
The charges against key shareholders in Yukos are enormous and very varied in scope. The Yukos tale is a long, complex and controversial one, requiring lengthy and painstaking substantiation. Public interest in the Yukos controversy is very high.
However charges and counter charges, mostly of a political nature, are being flung so wildly about in the media that The Russia Journal believes it essential at this stage to focus on the evidence in the accusations against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partners. His innocence of the charges that have been filed against him must be presumed until a competent trial is held.
Those who support his innocence of the charges are invited to review and comment on this, the first in a Russia Journal series on the case against him and others in Menatep Group.
Nov 2003
A business group headed by Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested in October for allegedly defrauding the state of $1 billion, stashed money in offshore centers, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles, Panama and the Bahamas, according to Yelena Collongues-Popova, who worked for one of Khodorkovsky‘s associates. Lucy Komisar, a New York investigative reporter, interviewed Collongues- Popova. This is her story.
PARIS — A French woman of Russian origin, with thousands of papers related to the Menatep business group and its offshore banking and dealings over the past decade, has been providing information to Russian prosecutors who are building a case against oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, who was arrested in October for tax evasion.
She says she set up numerous offshore companies and bank accounts in the Caribbean and Europe to help the Menatep group cheat Russian company shareholders and tax authorities. Her registered agent in the Caribbean was Icaza Gonzalez Ruiz and Aleman in the British Virgin Islands and Bahamas, against which she now has a legal action. She says she used Bank Leu (Bahamas), a subsidiary of Bank Leu, Geneva, to deposit funds in fiduciary accounts to have the benefit of withholding tax exemptions.
Paris has always been stimulating to the artistic soul and also a little outrageous. There are two edgy museums with art that pushes the most controversial boundaries – sex and politics. And both also defy the staid notion that museums are only for solemn daylight viewing. They are he Museum of Erotic Art in Montmartre, and the Palais de Tokyo near the Arc de Triomphe.
Where would you want to live if you lived London? What neighborhood has elegance, charm, sophistication and also sense that it’s for real residents, not for tourists, nor for moguls or diplomats or businessmen on expense accounts? Where do you get a sense of community, but also a location near some of the museums, royal landmarks and parks that London is famous for?
My choice would be Kensington, an upscale neighborhood in West London, just south of Hyde Park, close enough in fact to walk to the park, as well as to Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music, the Albert and Victoria Museum and especially to Kensington Palace.
The American Reporter, May 27, 2003
It hasn‘t been reported in the U.S. press – until here, now – but Milan, Italy’s chief prosecutor has obtained thousands of documents that show how for more than 20 years Saddam Hussein used the Western bank and corporate secrecy system to launder bribes skimmed from oil revenues to pay his security forces and buy Western arms during international embargoes.
The key countries – whose governments openly allow these money-laundering systems to exist – were Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau. Corporate registrations and bank accounts there use straw men and secrecy rules to cover up true owners of companies and accounts.
Dissent Magazine, Spring 2003
In November 1932, deputy Fabien Albertin took the floor of the National Assembly in Paris to denounce tax evasion by eminent French personalities-politicians, judges, industrialists, church dignitaries, and directors of newspapers-who were hiding their money in Switzerland.
The minister of finance knows very well that for ten years, the concern of all his predecessors has been to track down this fraud . . . he declared. However, till now, the information one has gotten has been extremely vague. When documents arrive, they are formless notebooks in which holders of accounts are represented only as numbers. Employees of the banks don’t know the names of account holders. These names are known only to the director of the bank, who the clients forbid to correspond with them, so anxious are they to preserve anonymity.
Multinational Monitor, March 2003
AT A TIME WHEN THE INTEGRITY of global accounting firms is being questioned, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Justice Department are looking into charges that KPMG Zurich, a division of the international audit company, helped Credit Suisse hide hundreds of millions of dollars looted by the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
A KPMG spokesperson confirmed the investigation.
