Nov 30, 2010 – I went on CTV, the Canadian News Network, to debate Martin Collicott, a former Canadian ambassador, over the WikiLeaks document release. Here’s a link to the video, done live yesterday, and then the text of what I said.
Nov 7, 2010 –
[Update, by Dec it’s 60 countries and more than 460 signers.]
Journalists from every region of the world have joined together to support the whistle-blowing organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange who, they say, have provided an extraordinary resource for journalists around the world and made an outstanding contribution to transparency and accountability on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
I am one of the organizers of the campaign.
The journalists, many of whom are prominent investigative reporters, come from countries as diverse as Russia and Namibia, and Israel and Indonesia, plus many from European countries and North America. The journalists, who are linked through investigative journalism networks, decided to speak out publicly after watching a growing campaign of threats and unfair criticisms against Assange and Wikileaks.
Sept 27, 2010 –
China is the major international power blocking a global solution to the offshore bank and secrecy problem. It is doing so because of its own secrecy jurisdiction, Hong Kong, says José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission.
He said some countries hadn‘t been reacting positively to efforts to change the system , to establish a level playing field.
After the meeting, I asked him why the major financial powers hadn’t been able to achieve a solution. He said the problem was China, because of Hong Kong.
Sept 24, 2010 – Last Saturday, 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.
July 21, 2010 –
The global food services company Sodexo, which I exposed last year for exacting rebates from suppliers and charging clients full price, has agreed to a $20 million settlement with NY Attorney General for that illicit practice.
June 30, 2010 – Last night I accepted a Gerald Loeb award trophy for the Allen Stanford investigation. The Loeb awards are the highest honors in U.S. financial journalism. I and my colleagues, Miami Herald reporters Michael Sallah and Rob Barry, won in the category of medium & small newspapers. The prize submission was entitled Keys to the Kingdom: How State Regulators Enabled a $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme.
June 25, 2010 – Another award for the Stanford investigation, this time from the National Press Club in Washington DC, bestowing the prize for Newspaper Consumer Journalism.
The NPC award categories are consumer reporting, Washington correspondence, press criticism, regional, diplomatic and environmental reporting, online journalism, freedom of the press, political journalism, animal reporting, and geriatric writing.
May 5, 2010 –
I have won the Sigma Delta Chi journalism award for Non-Deadline Reporting (Daily Circulation 100,001+) for “Allen Stanford’s Miami Connection.” This is the exposé I brought to the Miami Herald that told how the Florida Banking Department allowed Stanford to set up an unregulated office to move money offshore. I worked with two Herald reporters, who shared the award. It is one of the country’s major journalism prizes.
According to the Society of Professional Journalists, which presents the award, Judges chose the winners from over 1,300 entries in categories covering print, radio, television and online. The awards recognize outstanding work published or broadcast in 2009. They will be presented Oct. 2 during the 2010 SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference in Las Vegas.
RALEIGH, North Carolina, Inter Press Service (IPS), April 27, 2010 – Robert Moses, 75, a legendary leader and organiser in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, was huddled with a dozen people discussing plans for a campaign to make quality education a constitutional right. On one side was his son Omowale, 38. Next to Omo was John Doar, 89, head of the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department in 1960-67 and prosecutor of the major civil rights cases of that era.
The age differences were noticeable at the conference they attended this month in Raleigh, North Carolina, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was a moment for the elders – as high school and college students at the conference called them – to pass the torch to a new generation of activists.
April 19, 2010 –
Last week, I was at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, for the 50th anniversary conference of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led the sit-in movement of the 1960s. I attended SNCC’s founding conference at Shaw in April 1960.
That meeting had been called in response to the February 1,, 1960 protest in Greensboro, NC, when four black students sat at an all-white Woolworth’s lunch counter, demanded to be served and were arrested.
March 23, 2010 –
I’ve been awarded a National Headliner Award for the story on Ponzi-schemer Allen Stanford I took to the Miami Herald last year. It exposed how the Florida Banking Department ignored the strong advice of its own lawyer and allowed Stanford to set up an unregulated office to move money offshore.
Dec 14, 2009 – The man who isn’t there: whatever happened to Paul Volcker?
President Obama appointed him Chairman of the new Economic Recovery Advisory Board which is supposed to advise the president on jump-starting the economy and stabilizing financial markets. But the former Federal Reserve Chairman has been cut out of key discussions, including one taking place today with officials of a dozen big banks.
Inter Press Service (IPS), Nov 14, 2009 – To end poverty, you have to know how it began – with globalisation. No, not the 20th century variety engendered by multinationals and their friends at the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They just codified practices that kept developing countries poor.
French filmmaker Philippe Diaz, in an illuminating documentary opening in New York Friday, traces globalisation back 500 years to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. Diaz shows how the colonial North used the South’s resources to build its industrial base and how its continued control over resources, global trade and debt rules prevents developing countries from ending poverty.
Nov 8, 2009 – The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has called forth a plethora of memories and celebrations. Here are mine.
I visited West Germany in 1983 as it held massive demonstrations against the U.S. plan to station medium range missiles on German territory. The peace movement – objecting to the Ronald Reagan hard line against the East — had another view of how to bring down communism from within. The German government Ostpolitik – East politics – though denounced by the Reagan politicians, was ultimately successful.
Oct 17, 2009 – When he was interviewed for the investigative story I did in March on Sodexo’s practice of demanding rebates (ie kickbacks) from suppliers, Sodexo deputy counsel Tom Morse argued that working only with “compliant” vendors was necessary to assure health and safety. (Compliant means they pay rebates.)
He said that “the first thing we vet our vendors for is safety” against food-borne illnesses …”
Aug 3, 2009 –
In January 1986, I went to the Philippines to chronicle the growing movement against the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. I was there for the people power revolution, a non-violent massive street protest that in February finally drove Marcos from power. I remember being outside the presidential palace that night and racing through the streets when gunfire erupted. The U.S., which had supported him for decades, flew him and his wife Imelda to Honolulu. Along with documents that detailed how they had looted the country and where the money was.
March 17, 2009 –
There’s a mysterious Bank Madoff, New York that U.S. authorities don’t appear to know about. International securities clearing houses move trillions of dollars a year for banks and brokerages and are a natural way for crooks to launder 
and hide ill-gotten gains. So it would be natural for investigators to check the paper trails of Madoff accounts in CSDs (central securities depositories) around the world.
They already know about the one listed in the name of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC New York, US broker/dealer.
But they don’t seem to know about Bank Madoff, New York. It appears on a list published by Clearstream, the international clearing and settlement house in Luxembourg. That bank has not been publicly mentioned by investigators.
(See the listing on its full page.)
Feb 11, 2009 –
The U.S. government might finally get a powerful tool against offshore tax evasion by mega-wealthy individuals and corporations. The worst most miscreants face now is negotiated pay-ups years after they are caught.
A bill introduced last week by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would make tax evasion using international transfers a criminal money-laundering offense.
The law aims at cases in which money passes through tax havens. It targets not just the evaded taxes, but any money that is part of the scam.
Feb 8, 2009 –
At a time when New York State’s budget is reeling from Wall Street tax losses — Wall Street pays 20 to 30 percent of revenues — you’d think Governor David Paterson would want to recoup all the evaded taxes he could get. That doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to corporations that launder their profits offshore.
Paterson refused to deal with the issue and instead answered a question I hadn‘t asked. I wonder why. Does that mean he won’t go after corporate tax evaders? Here is the exchange from the Council‘s transcript of David Patterson meeting.
Sept 2, 2008 –
Michael Glassner, in charge of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin‘s campaign operations, was till April 18th a vice-president of IDT, the New Jersey-based telecom fined $1.3 million by the FCC in July for failing to file its Haiti contract.
The contract, effective in 2004, revealed payments to an offshore shell company in the Turks & Caicos which sent only part of the fees to Haiti‘s phone company. The case is under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. A former IDT insider, Michael Jewett, who managed the company’s Caribbean region, says the missing money represented kickbacks to former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
June 18, 2008 –
I never thought I‘d hear those words, certainly not at the Council on Foreign Relations. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico spoke at a Council lunch today. The subject was immigration. Before the talk, several people, including this reporter, stopped at the speaker’s table to chat. 
I was standing there when Maurice Tempelsman approached Richardson. The Governor greeted him and said, “Where‘s Mobutu!”
Well, that was a conversation stopper! Tempelsman, a very very rich man, and a generous donor, frequently gets a place of honor at the Council head table, though not today. Nobody raises the question of how he got his money.
March 26, 2008 –
Lawrence Summers spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations last week and was a bit uncomfortable about my question regarding Clinton administration anti-money-laundering policy.
I pointed out that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (who happens to be one of the Council‘s co-chairs) had not acted against money-laundering because he didn‘t want to stop the free flow of cash into the US – in effect, into Wall Street. But when Summers succeeded Rubin in the job, he had taken action.
The facts are important because Rubin is poised to move into a Democratic administration — especially if Clinton wins — as a high-level Wall Street influential.
March 10, 2008
It‘s not just about buying or selling sex. It’s also about money 
laundering. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s downfall began with an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. That‘s because when people move money for illicit purposes, they try to disguise the flows. And US banks are required to report suspicious transfers to the Treasury Department.
The IRS gets involved, because those transfers could be effected to hide income from taxes. So it responded to bank reports of suspicious transfers by Spitzer, who was paying thousands of dollars for call girl services. The money was being sent to QAT consulting, a shell company owned by the Emperor‘s Club V.I.P. prostitution ring.
Then the FBI joined the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigative Division, looking into what appeared to be at first possible government corruption but then turned out to be payments to an organization running prostitution. And also laundering money in the United States and Europe.
Dec 13, 2007
I chatted for a few minutes with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano 
after he spoke this morning at a Council on Foreign Relations breakfast. He agreed that there is a problem posed by offshore financial centers and pointed to concern in Europe reflected in a recent joint letter on the subject by the UK, France and Germany.
Napolitano is an extraordinary man who served nearly 40 years in the Italian parliament and was a leader of the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, helping to move it out of the Stalinist camp to social democracy.
Richard Gardner, US ambassador to Italy 1977 to 81, who presided over the meeting, told me that he had tried to persuade Henry Kissinger that Napolitano was a social democrat. Gardner said that Kissinger never could grasp that.
Dec 1, 2007
When there’s a financial crisis tied to lack of transparency, follow the culprits offshore. Evidence comes out now that this is true about the subprime debacle.
Reuters reports that a German bank is implementing accounting changes including consolidation of an offshore conduit whose soured investments triggered a government-led rescue. The offshore operation was set up to invest in subprime mortgages.
Pam Martens in Counterpunch points out that, Citigroup, is discovered to have stashed away over $80 billion of Byzantine securities off its balance sheet in secretive Cayman Islands vehicles with an impenetrable curtain around them.
Among those securities count subprimes. Citigroup has $55 billion of subprime exposure and in November said it would write down up to $11 billion in subprime losses. Goldman Sachs said that won’t be all, that the bank may have to write off $15 billion.
