Barclays forced to name executives on Libor list

LONDON (Reuters) - Barclays was forced to name former heads Bob Diamond and John Varley, finance director Chris Lucas and other top executives and traders linked to a global rate-fixing probe, despite their calls for anonymity.

A UK judge ordered the bank to reveal their identities on Thursday during a preliminary hearing for a British test case on the mis-selling of interest rate swaps brought by a residential care home operator.

Guardian Care Homes alleges Barclays mis-sold interest rate hedging products based on Libor (London interbank offered rate)in a case that is shining a light on those involved in the bank's interest rate-setting process.

"The cat is out of the bag," said Judge Julian Flaux, as he dismissed requests by 104 former and current Barclays staff for anonymity, citing the public interest.

Barclays was the first bank to be fined for trying to game Libor, a central cog in the global financial system and a benchmark for around $550 trillion in contracts ranging from interest rate derivatives to home loans and credit cards.

The judge told the court that the release of the names was necessary in order to have an "informed debate" during the case. He also said that documents lodged with the court ahead of the trial, due to start in October, "showed some debate at a fairly high level in the bank" about the setting of Libor.
The judge instructed Barclays to release more minutes from board meetings at which Libor was discussed than those already provided.

Addressing the court, Tim Lord, the lawyer representing Guardian Care Homes, cited documents which referred to communications from "the 31st floor" - the part of Barclays headquarters in Canary Wharf, London, occupied by senior executives.

Barclays lost three of its most senior staff - Chief Executive Bob Diamond, Chairman Marcus Agius and Chief Operating Officer Jerry del Missier in the fallout from the Libor affair.





Other banks remain under investigation in a probe stretching from the U.S. to Japan that is triggering lawsuits from those alleging rate-rigging pushed up their loan costs.

Barclays released a list of staff on Thursday whose email accounts it had previously disclosed to regulators.

The list includes a subset of 24 people who have been named in regulatory documents referring to Barclays' attempted rigging of Libor. That shorter list was not immediately available.
None of those named is necessarily implicated in any wrongdoing.

"There is a legitimate public interest in the true picture in relation to the manipulation of Libor by banks generally, not just Barclays, being brought fully to light," Flaux said.

"In my judgment, fair and accurate media reporting of all aspects of Libor manipulation, including the involvement of employees and ex-employees of Barclays and their identity, is an important aspect of the public obtaining that true picture."

NAME CALL

Those named include Rich Ricci, head of Barclays' investment bank and former compliance head Stephen Morse, who was notified in 2008 about problems brewing, according to documents that were made public last year. He left to lead the compliance department at Canada's Toronto-Dominion Bank.

Benoit de Vitry, the current treasurer who used to run commodities and emerging markets, Ivan Ritossa, now retired, who ran currency and prime services business, money markets desk head Mark Dearlove and former group treasurer Jon Stone were also named.

Others include Ryan Reich, a 30-year-old former Barclays swaps trader based in New York who was fired in 2010. U.S. prosecutors are investigating Reich's activities while at Barclays between August 2006 and March 2010, according to several people familiar with the situation.

Ritankar "Ronti" Pal, who oversaw desk trading since 2006, was also on the list. He recently left Barclays.

Other names included Eric Bommensath, a French bond trader who became global head of fixed income and a member of the bank's executive committee, and Harry Harrison, a UK banker in charge of dollar-denominated fixed-income trading in New York who is now head of rates.
\
Lawyers welcomed the publication of the names.

"This shows the judges will not allow the banks to escape scrutiny," said Rich Eldridge of law firm Manches. "Borrowers will be encouraged by the issue being given such importance that it outweighs the risk of innocent people being named."

Barclays was fined $450 million by U.S. and UK authorities last June for allowing traders to try to rig Libor and its euro cousin Euribor and for low-balling rates during the 2007/08 credit crunch.

Switzerland's UBS was fined $1.5 billion in December and Royal Bank of Scotland is expected to be penalized shortly.

Barclays says it has fired five employees and disciplined eight others after an internal investigation into how it submitted Libor rates. Many identified in that investigation have also left the bank, it told lawmakers in November.

"This started as an alleged mis-selling case which the bank considers has no merit," Barclays said in a brief statement on Thursday. "The addition of a claim based on what happened with Libor does not change the bank's view.

"The fact that someone's documents were reviewed by the bank during its review of millions of documents does not mean that such person was involved in any wrongdoing."

(Additional reporting by Steve Slater, writing by Kirstin Ridley; Editing by Erica Billingham and Helen Massy-Beresford)

Will JPMorgan Chase Be Held to Account for Money Laundering “Lapses” by US Regulators?

by Tom Burghardt / January 14th, 2013

As a sop to outraged public opinion over Wall Street’s looting of the real economy, criminal banksters are coming under increased scrutiny by federal regulators. 

Scrutiny, however, is not the same thing as enforcement of laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act and other regulatory measures meant to stop the flow of dirty money from organized crime into the financial system.

And never mind that President Obama and his hand-picked coterie of insiders from Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo (all of whom figured prominently in recent narcotics scandals) are moving to impose Eurozone-style austerity measures that threaten to ravage the social safety net, the American people are spoon-fed a pack of lies that this cabal will protect their interests and enforce the law when it comes to drug money laundering.

Late last week, Reuters reported that “U.S. regulators are expected to order JPMorgan Chase & Co to correct lapses in how it polices suspect money flows … in the latest move by officials to force banks to tighten their anti money-laundering systems.”

In December, the Department of Justice cobbled together a widely criticized deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, over charges that the institution, founded in 1865 by British drug lords when the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China in the wake of the First Opium War, knowingly laundered billions of dollars in drug and terrorist money for some of the most violent gangsters on earth.




Despite the fact that DOJ imposed a $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) fine which included $655 million (£408m) in civil penalties, not a single senior officer at HSBC was criminally charged with enabling Mexican drug cartels and Al Qaeda terrorists to illegally move money through its American subsidiaries.

More outrageously, even when stiff fines are levied against criminal banks and corporations, as likely as not “some or all of these payments will probably be tax-deductible. The banks can claim them as business expenses. Taxpayers, therefore, will likely lighten the banks’ loads,” The New York Times disclosed.

“The action against JPMorgan,” Reuters reported, “would be in the form of a cease-and-desist order, which regulators use to force banks to improve compliance weaknesses, the sources said. JPMorgan will probably not have to pay a monetary penalty, one of the sources said.”

Read that sentence again. America’s largest bank, responsible for some of the worst depredations of the housing crisis which tossed millions of citizens out of their homes and fined $7.3 billion (£4.53bn) for doing so, will not be fined nor will their officers be criminally charged for presumably washing black money for organized crime.

Despite the recklessness of senior officials at JPMorgan, including CEO Jamie Dimon, former CFO Doug Braunstein and former CIO Ina Drew over the bank’s massive losses in the credit derivatives market last year, Bloomberg News reported that the board will only “consider” whether to release a report on the fiasco which wiped out close to $51 billion in shareholder value at this “too big to fail” bank.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), severely criticized by the US Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in their 335-page report into HSBC, along with the Federal Reserve are expected to issue the cease-and-desist order as early as this week.

Last April, however, when OCC issued a cease-and-desist order against Citigroup for alleged “gaps” in their oversight of cash transactions similar to those of drug-tainted HSBC and Wells-owned Wachovia, which laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for narcotics traffickers through dodgy cash exchange houses in Mexico, no monetary penalties were attached.

A “person close” to Citigroup “attributed part of the problem to an accident when a computer was unplugged from anti-money-laundering systems,” according to The New York Times.

While such bald-faced misrepresentations may pass muster with America’s “newspaper of record,” Citigroup’s sorry history when it comes to facilitating criminal money flows is not so easily swept under the rug.

Late last year investigative journalist Bill Conroy reported in Narco News: “In the 1990s, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, tapped US-based Citibank to help transfer up to $100 million out of Mexico and into Swiss bank accounts. Although US authorities investigated the suspicious money movements, ultimately no charges were brought against Raul Salinas or Citibank–a Citigroup Inc. subsidiary.”

“Again,” Conroy reported, “in January 2010, Citigroup popped up on banking regulators’ radar, this time in Mexico, when a Mexican judge accused a half dozen casa de cambios (money transmitters) of laundering drug funds through various banks, including Citigroup’s Mexican subsidiary. In that case, Citigroup again was not accused of violating any laws.”

However, despite that fact that the OCC’s cease-and-desist order against Citigroup accused the bank of systemic “internal control weaknesses” that opened the institution up to shady transactions by “high-risk customers,” presumably including flush-with-cash narcotics traffickers, the bank was not indicted for criminal violations under the Bank Secrecy Act and did not admit wrongdoing, instead promising to “institute reforms.”

As with Wachovia and HSBC, OCC charged that Citigroup’s “lapses” included “the incomplete identification of high risk customers in multiple areas of the bank, inability to assess and monitor client relationships on a bank-wide basis, inadequate scope of periodic reviews of customers, weaknesses in the scope and documentation of the validation and optimization process applied to the automated transaction monitoring system, and inadequate customer due diligence.”

Additionally, Citigroup “failed to adequately conduct customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence on its foreign correspondent customers, its retail banking customers, and its international personal banking customers and did not properly obtain and analyze information to ascertain the risk and expected activity of particular customers.”

According to OCC auditors, Citigroup “self-reported” that “from 2006 through 2010, the Bank failed to adequately monitor its remote deposit capture/international cash letter instrument processing in connection with foreign correspondent banking.” As I have pointed out, correspondent and private banking are gateways for laundering drug and other criminal money flows.

In other words, replicating patterns employed for decades by the world’s leading financial institutions, organized criminals and terrorist financiers were enabled, with a wink-and-a-nod by the US government, above all by US secret state agencies which siphoned off part of the loot for covert operations, to wash black cash through the system as a whole.

Already stung by billions of dollars in losses due to risky trades in credit derivatives as noted above, MoneyWatch reported “CEO Jamie Dimon can’t blame this on a ‘flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed and poorly monitored’ strategy, like he did when the bank lost $6.2 billion on the so-called ‘London Whale’ trade.”

“In many ways,” reporter Jill Schlesinger wrote, “the current potential regulatory action is worse than any trading loss, because it indicates a systemic lapse in controls.”

According to MoneyWatch, regulators “appear to have found a company-wide lapse in procedures and oversight connected to anti-money-laundering (AML) surveillance and risk management. AML controls are intended to deter and detect the misuse of legitimate financial channels for the funding of money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal acts.”

But there’s the rub; federal regulators are loathe to police, let alone hold to account, those responsible for such illicit transactions precisely because the infusion of dirty money into the system is a splendid means to keep failed capitalist financial institutions afloat, a process which Global Research political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has termed “the criminalization of the state.”

In fact, as former London Metropolitan Police financial crimes specialist Rowan Bosworth-Davies recently wrote on his website: “These institutions exist … to handle and facilitate the through-put of the staggering volume of criminal and dirty money which daily flows through the financial sector, because the profits there from are just so incredibly valuable.”

“The biggest problem for these banks,” Bosworth-Davies observed, “is that by far the greatest amount of this money is illegal to handle under international money laundering laws. All banking institutions are now effectively subject to international laws which prohibit the handling or the facilitation of criminally-acquired money from whatever source, and that money includes the proceeds of drug trafficking, all other criminal activities (including tax evasion), and the proceeds of terrorism.”

Indeed, “The money they were moving was so huge … that it became very easy to persuade Governments to turn a blind eye, while regulators were encouraged to look the other way, when the banks began engaging in a series of wholesale criminal activities.”

Until OCC reveals the content of its cease-and-desist order pending against JPMorgan Chase we do not know the extent of the bank’s potential criminal “lapses” under the Bank Secrecy Act.

However, as Reuters reported although “no immediate action is expected from US prosecutors,” it is a near certainty that the federal government and complicit media will disappear whatever dirty secrets eventually emerge down the proverbial memory hole.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/will-jpmorgan-chase-be-held-to-account-for-money-laundering-lapses-by-us-regulators/#more-47218

Olympus fraud leads to banker arrest

Alleged accounting fraud at Olympus Corp has resulted in the arrest of a former Singapore banker. 

Chan Ming Fon, who once served as a bank vice-president, has been accused of helping liquidate hundreds of millions of dollars as part of the scandal, Asian Legal Business reports.

Camera and medical equipment maker Olympus has admitted to concealing considerable investment losses by using improper accounting methods, with the practice first beginning in the 1990s.

According to US court papers, former banker Chan received $10 million from Olympus for his involvement.

George Venizelos, FBI assistant director-in-charge, said: "The defendant had a direct role in the secret liquidation of hundreds of millions of dollars of Olympus investments."

Mr Venizelos explained Mr Fon attempted to hide his involvement in the episode by telling auditors that, even years after liquidation, the investments were still in existence - a campaign of lying that lasted for around six years in total.

By Gary Cooper

http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2012/Dec/27/olympus-fraud-leads-to-banker-arrest.html

The Rolling Jubilee Mails its First Debt Forgiveness Letters

Strike Debt activists with the first debt-forgiveness
package they're sending out.

When the debt activism group Strike Debt began planning its Rolling Jubilee, the goal was relatively modest: They would raise $50,000, use it to buy distressed medical debt on secondary debt markets, and then, rather than hounding the debtors like the collection agencies that buy most of this sort of debt, they would wipe it out.

But that was before the Rolling Jubilee caught fire in the public imagination, garnering attention from the likes of Boing Boing, the New York Times, and Fortune Magazine. Even before the group had webcast its star-studded telethon, it had already surpassed its fundraising goal. To date, they've raised nearly half a million dollars -- enough to buy and forgive nearly $10 million of debt.

Most of that money is going to go to purchasing a big hunk of distressed medical debt next month, but as a sort of proof-of-concept, Strike Debt has already spent $5,000 to buy $100,000 of distressed medical debt owed by 44 people in upstate New York.

Yesterday, the activists gathered to send out the notifications to the unsuspecting recipients of this first round of debt forgiveness. Since aggressive collection mailings often drive debtors to ignore envelopes they don't recognize, the forgiveness letters are packaged in a small box wrapped in festive paper.

"We want to make sure they open it," said Yates McKee of Strike Debt. "We also like the idea of it having a holiday feeling to it."

"Seasons Greetings from Strike Debt!" begins the letter.

"We write with good news: the above referenced account has been purchased by the Rolling Jubilee Fund, a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. The Rolling Jubilee Fund is a project of Strike Debt. The mission of this project is to buy and abolish personal debt. We believe that no one should have to go into debt for the basic things in our lives, like healthcare, housing, and education.

You no longer owe the balance of this debt. It is gone, a gift with no strings attached. You are no longer any obligation to settle this account with the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else."

After the first flush of positive press, the Rolling Jubilee has encountered some skepticism. Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog has called it "a gimmick with a tax risk." The jubilee puts borrowers at risk, Smith argues, because forgiving the debt could be counted as a taxable windfall for the debtors, potentially making their situation worse rather than better. Strike Debt's claim that the jubilee won't have tax implications are dubious, Smith argues, because 1) by buying the debt in the first place, Strike Debt is engaging in commercial activity, 2) the recipients are likely to be middle class, and therefore ineligible for tax exemption as a "charitable class." She concludes:

"Sophisticated taxpayers get tax opinions from law firms with recognized expertise in tax matters, or ask for rulings from IRS (a non-starter here), or document their positions with heavily researched memos. Rolling Jubilee should get one of its sympathetic celebrites to write a check to a serious tax lawyer to take a proper look."

Rolling Jubilee organizers say that's exactly what they've done. "I'm a little mystified by the critiques based on the tax implications," says the tax lawyer who has been advising Strike Debt. (The lawyer works in the tax department at a top international law firm -- her employer knows she is advising Strike Debt, but doesn't want its name attached to the project.)

A debt-forgiveness box ready for mailing.

The tax lawyer dismisses the concern that the Rolling Jubilee is engaged in commercial activity: "It doesn't make a great deal of sense to me," she said. "When Habitat for Humanity is helping people build houses, someone still has to buy the lumber. It doesn't change their tax status. The critical thing is that this is a not-for-profit organization, and it's not engaged in trying to make money."

Furthermore, the lawyer says, recipients don't have to be poor to receive tax-free debt forgiveness. "This is focused on medical debt," she says, "and people with health problems can be categorized as distressed. You don't need to show that they're impoverished."

Even if it doesn't run afoul of tax laws, the campaign's organizers acknowledge that $10 million of debt is a drop in the bucket, hardly a system producing every greater amounts of crushing debt. The larger goal, they say, is to start a conversation about the way that debt plays in society. "This is a social hack," says Laura Hanna of Strike Debt. "A lot of people didn't know that their debts were on fire sale, that their debts could be bought for pennies on the dollar, just not by them."

What the Strike Debt will do with the conversation it has started is something they're still figuring out. In recent months chapters have sprung up in cities across the country, and organizers are planning a national conversation about next steps pegged to Martin Luther King's birthday.
In the meantime, they have at least two more debt buys planned in the coming months.

[npinto@villagevoice.com] [@macfathom]

Go to Runnin' Scared for all our latest news coverage.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/12/the_rolling_jub.php

BREAKING: Two Former UBS Traders Face Felony Charges, Prosecutors Say

Two former UBS AG (UBSN) traders face felony charges for their alleged roles in the rigging of a key global interest rate, the U.S. Justice Department said. 

By Phil Mattingly - Dec 19, 2012 10:35 AM CT

Tom Alexander William Hayes and Roger Darin were charged with conspiracy in a criminal complaint unsealed today, the Justice Department said. Hayes also was charged with wire fraud and a price-fixing violation for activity with another bank aimed at manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, the department said.

“Make no mistake, for UBS traders, the manipulation of Libor was about getting rich,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said a news conference in Washington.

UBS was ordered to pay about $1.5 billion to U.S., U.K. and Swiss regulators for trying to rig global interest rates, including Libor, over a six-year period. Regulators found that traders at the Zurich-based bank made more than 2,000 requests to its own rate submitters, traders at other banks and brokers to manipulate rate submissions through 2010.

To contact the reporter on this story: Phil Mattingly in Washington at pmattingly@bloomberg.net
 
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Maura Reynolds at mreynolds34@bloomberg.net

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-19/two-former-ubs-traders-face-felony-charges-prosecutors-say-1-.html 

Audit Says Kabul Bank Began as ‘Ponzi Scheme’

KABUL, Afghanistan — Kabul Bank became Afghanistan’s largest financial institution by offering the promise of modern banking to people who had never had a saving or checking account. What it really dealt in was modern theft: “From its very beginning,” according to a confidential forensic audit of Kabul Bank, “the bank was a well-concealed Ponzi scheme.”

The chief judge in the Kabul Bank case, Shams Rahman Shams, at center behind desk, listened to a defense
lawyer during a hearing this month. The United States has pressed for prosecutions.

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

Afghan and American officials had for years promoted Kabul Bank as a prime example of how Western-style banking was transforming a war-ravaged economy. But the audit, prepared this year for Afghanistan’s central bank by the Kroll investigative firm, gives new details of how the bank instead was institutionalizing fraud that reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars and obliterated Afghans’ trust after regulators finally seized the bank in August 2010 and the theft was revealed. 

Going further than previous reports, the audit asserts that Kabul Bank had little reason to exist other than to allow a narrow clique tied to President Hamid Karzai’s government to siphon riches from depositors, who were the bank’s only substantial source of revenue. 

At one point, Kroll’s investigators found 114 rubber stamps for fake companies used to give forged documents a more legitimate look. And the auditing firms used by the bank never took issue with loan books that were “almost entirely fraudulent,” Kroll found, recommending that the Afghan government explore suing the last such auditor, A.F. Ferguson & Co., a private Pakistani firm with a franchise under PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

When Afghan regulators, aided by American officials, first discovered the extent of the fraud at the bank in the summer of 2010, “we never imagined that the criminality was as deep as it was, that it was so widespread and that it included high-ranking officials and their relatives,” said Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, at the time the governor of the Bank of Afghanistan, the country’s central bank. 

“At the beginning, I received information from the U.S. Embassy that maybe $150 million or $200 million is gone in bad loans to powerful people,” he said. The number soon climbed close to $900 million, though “we did not know who took the loans and that they were all tied to a few individuals.” 

What Kroll’s audit found is that on Aug. 31, 2010, the day the Bank of Afghanistan seized Kabul Bank, more than 92 percent of the lender’s loan portfolio — $861 million, or roughly 5 percent of Afghanistan’s annual economic output at the time — had gone to 19 related people and companies, according to the audit. 

Among the largest beneficiaries were a brother of Mr. Karzai and a brother of First Vice President Muhammad Qasim Fahim who each owned stakes in the bank that had been bought with loans from the bank, according to the audit and regulatory officials. For their part, both have insisted that they never took part in any fraud at the lender. 

Reached for comment, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Aimal Faizi, stressed that the president considered the audit incomplete: Mr. Karzai still believes Kroll has to find out where all the missing money has gone, to which countries it was sent and to which accounts if the firm wants the report to be seen as credible, Mr. Faizi said. 

The New York Times obtained a copy of the 277-page audit report, which Afghan and Western officials have confirmed was the one Kroll prepared.

The two men that Afghan prosecutors, Western officials and the Kroll audit accuse of profiting most from the fraud were the bank’s principal owners: Sherkhan Farnood, its chairman and a former World Series of Poker Europe winner, and his former bodyguard, Khalil Fruzi, who served as the bank’s chief executive. 

Working with the bank’s executives, they devised simple, yet effective, schemes to fool weak and reluctant regulators, and the Americans who were advising them, the audit says. 

The owners kept two sets of books, and hid loans to themselves and their shareholders by taking them in the names of friends, relatives and even domestic servants, according to the audit and Afghan officials. They grouped related loans together to better keep track of who owed what. Hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit loans were routed to Dubai through a money exchange controlled by Mr. Farnood, who founded the bank. 

Kabul Bank employed people to forge documents for fictitious companies, which were then audited by accounting firms that appear to have been complicit, according to Kroll. That is where the rubber stamps came in: they bore the names of those false companies, like Abdul Mahmood Trading and Ali Jan Abdul Hadi Ltd., to lend an air of respectability to fake documents. 

Toward the end, Mr. Fruzi even expensed foreign shopping sprees at stores like Louis Vuitton and Versace in Dubai and New Delhi. Mr. Farnood was snapping up villas in Dubai with bank money, though he has maintained they were investments gone bad, nothing more. 

Bailing out depositors cost the cash-strapped Afghan government more than $825 million, and Afghan and Western officials say that only between $200 million and $400 million, depending on how assets are valued, has so far been recovered from shareholders. 

For many Afghans, the scandal surrounding Kabul Bank, a linchpin of the economic order established here by Americans and their allies, has cemented the opinion that the United States brought crony capitalism, not free markets, to Afghanistan. The audit is likely to reinforce that view while raising potentially troubling questions about who is being prosecuted here in connection with the scandal, and who is not. 

The United States and its allies have pressed hard for prosecutions, threatening to cut aid if no action was taken. The completion of the forensic audit, which was financed by international donors and delivered in March, was another demand by the international community, as was a separate report, due later this week, by an Afghan government-funded but largely independent corruption watchdog commission composed of Afghan and foreign experts. 

Mr. Farnood and Mr. Fruzi top the list of 22 defendants charged so far, and both are on trial in Kabul. Many others on the list are Kabul Bank executives who are accused of helping to carry out fraud, though it is unclear whether they personally profited.

Few officials have any problem with those prosecutions. But there are questions about the charges brought by Afghan prosecutors against a few officials at Afghanistan’s central bank. Western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed worries that those cases appeared to be intended to end further investigation into Kabul Bank. Kroll has said it has no evidence that the Bank of Afghanistan’s staff members were complicit in Kabul Bank’s collapse. 

In the most prominent such case, the former chairman of the Bank of Afghanistan, Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, has been indicted primarily for failing to warn the Afghan government about Kabul Bank and concealing the fraud there — an accusation that one Western official called “laughable.” Several Western and Afghan officials insist that Mr. Fitrat had actively pressed inquiries of Kabul Bank, and believed he had been indicted in order to scare him off. He fled the country last year. 

Even Mr. Farnood said Mr. Fitrat had done nothing wrong: “Fitrat was the one person who was not involved in any bribing,” he said in a telephone interview. 

The situation was particularly galling, the officials said, because apart from Mr. Farnood and Mr. Fruzi, the other “high-value beneficiaries” — each of whom still owes at least $5 million to the bank, Kroll estimates — have yet to face any legal action. That group includes Mahmood Karzai, the president’s brother, and Haseen Fahim, the vice president’s brother. 

In an interview, Mahmood Karzai said he had repaid all the money he originally owed, an amount he put at $5.3 million. He insisted that Kroll had miscalculated and included assets he never owned, like a villa in Dubai, when it tallied his liability at $30.5 million. 

He called Kroll “a piece of puke” and said it had relied too heavily on evidence provided by Mr. Farnood, who in the summer of 2010 began cooperating with American officials and, subsequently, Afghan investigators after a dispute with his fellow shareholders. 

Neither Mr. Fahim nor Mr. Fruzi responded to phone messages seeking comment. 

Kabul Bank did serve some legitimate functions — for instance, the United States paid the salaries of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and teachers through it. 

But many of the bank’s practices seemed tailor-made to lure depositors by any means available. One popular gimmick detailed by the audit was known as a Bakht account, which offered those who opened them a chance to win houses, cars and jewelry at glitzy prize drawings. 

The only real winners, however, were the bank’s senior managers and their friends, the audit found. The new depositors’ money was used principally “to provide free financing to the other business interests of senior management and a group of connected persons.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/world/asia/kabul-bank-audit-details-extent-of-fraud.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Judge orders Barclays to reveal names of 208 staff linked to Libor probe

Barclays faces having to reveal the names of 208 staff linked to attempts by the bank to manipulate Libor at a London High Court hearing.

By Harry Wilson, Banking Correspondent
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/libor-scandal/9676289/Judge-orders-Barclays-to-reveal-names-of-208-staff-linked-to-Libor-probe.html
Lawyers for Barclays will on Wednesday disclose the names after a High Court judge ordered the bank to hand them to the legal team of a care home operator that is suing the bank for mis-selling it complex interest rate derivatives.

The disclosure follows an attempt by Barclays to argue against the need for disclosure. However, Mr Justice Julian Flaux said on Tuesday that it was “unacceptable” to deny access to the names.

Guardian Care Homes is claiming £38m from Barclays over interest rate swaps the company alleges it was mis-sold. Barclays said: “It would be premature to comment on proceedings before the Judge has made his decision.”

The case came as former chairman Marcus Agius and ex-Lloyds chairman Sir Victor Blank were quietly dropped from David Cameron’s Business Ambassadors programme amid criticism about the body’s effectivness.

Occupy Wall Street Has An Ambitious Plan To Buy Distressed Consumer Debt And Forgive It

by Adam Taylor

Occupy Wall Street has been out of the headline for a while now, but the group has launched a new plan that could gain them traction again.

Rolling Jubilee is a plan to use money pooled from donations to buy distressed consumer debt at marked down prices. Then, instead of collecting it like a debt agency would, the group would forgive the debt.

Here's how the group describe it:

 

One of the organizers of the project, David Rees, offers more explanation on his blog:

OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT.(If you’re a debt broker once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)

This is a simple, powerful way to help folks in need — to free them from heavy debt loads so they can focus on being productive, happy and healthy. As you can see from our test run, the return on investment approaches 30:1. That’s a crazy bargain!

That test run does sound impressive, and the idea of helping people in dire financial straits through unfortunate circumstances (for example, medical bills) is a noble one.

Could it work? Alex Hern at the New Statesman points out that, while the law is on OWS's side, the banks may not be. Hern points to Felix Salmon's discussion of the American Homeowner Preservation, which sought to buy up distressed mortgages and find ways for the homeowners to stay in there homes and pay off their debt.

Here Salmon explains why that plan didn't work:

The idea might have been elegant, but it didn’t work in practice, because the banks wouldn’t play ball: they (and Freddie Mac) simply hated the idea of a homeowner being able to stay in their house after a short sale, and often asked for an affidavit from the buyer saying that the former owner would certainly be kicked out.

Regardless of these pitfalls, OWS seems to be putting a lot of effort into the project (a benefit concert with big name indie rock stars will take place in NYC next week). The plan will formally begin November 15th.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-rolling-jubilee-works-2012-11#ixzz2Br5j0yKx

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On a sidenote: it just so happens I was visitor #4,444 :)

HSBC investigation: Drug dealers, gun runners and Britain’s biggest bank

Britain’s biggest bank is at the centre of a major HM Revenue and Customs investigation after it opened offshore accounts in Jersey for serious criminals living in this country, The Telegraph can disclose.

Reuters - An HSBC bank sign is seen outside a branch in central London August 2, 2010. REUTERS/Toby Melville

The tax authorities have obtained details of every British client of HSBC (LSE: HSBA.L - news) in Jersey after a whistleblower secretly provided a detailed list of names, addresses and account balances earlier this week.

The Telegraph understands that among those identified on the list are Daniel Bayes, a drug dealer who is now in Venezuela; Michael Lee, who was convicted of possessing more than 300 weapons at his house in Devon; three bankers facing major fraud allegations and a man once dubbed London’s “number two computer crook”. A series of other accounts containing six-figure deposits are also registered to modest addresses in relatively poor parts of the country.

The disclosures raise serious questions about HSBC’s procedures in Jersey, with the bank already preparing to pay fines of around $1.5 billion in America for breaking money laundering rules.
The bank is legally obliged to report to the authorities any suspicions about the source of money deposited in its accounts.

HM Revenue and Customs is now understood to be trawling through a list of the names and addresses of more than 4,000 people based in Britain who had bank accounts at HSBC in Jersey.
This work is expected to lead to the identification of hundreds of people who are evading tax as the accounts have not been previously disclosed.

Last night, a spokesman for HMRC said: “We can confirm we have received the data and we are studying it. We receive information from a very wide range of sources which we use to ensure the tax rules are being respected.

“Clamping down on those who try to cheat the system through evading taxes and over claiming benefits is a top priority for us and we value the information we receive from the public and business community.”

The Telegraph has established from public records that HSBC has opened bank accounts in Jersey for several people who are wanted by the police or have serious criminal convictions.

The information obtained by HMRC is thought to be the biggest data leak identifying holders of offshore accounts ever obtained by the British tax authorities.




The list identifies 4,388 people holding £699 million in offshore current accounts and they are also likely to have billions of pounds more in investment schemes. Several celebrities and other well-known figures are understood to be identified in the client data.

Tax authorities around the world are involved in an increasingly aggressive race to obtain details of their citizens with offshore bank accounts, many of which are suspected to be linked to tax evasion or other criminal activity. An insider at HSBC in Switzerland has already sold details of the bank’s clients in Geneva to tax authorities in 2008. This led to the creation of the so-called “Lagarde list”, named after the then French finance minister, with about 2,000 Britons identified. Last week, a Greek journalist was threatened with prosecution after disclosing details of Greek account holders on the Lagarde list.

The leak of the Jersey data, which is understood not to have involved HMRC paying for the list, is expected to have global ramifications as more than 4,000 residents of other countries are identified, although British residents account for more than half of all the clients.

The HSBC Jersey client list is understood to be heavily dominated by senior figures in the City. Dozens of bankers are understood to have deposited six-figure sums offshore with some institutions said to have “clusters” of employees taking advantage of the accounts.

Doctors, mining and oil executives and oil workers are also heavily represented in the list. More unexpectedly, a greengrocer in the East End is understood to have more than £80,000 in his HSBC current account in Jersey.

Although some of the individuals may have declared the offshore holdings, HMRC is currently understood to be comparing the new documents with tax records to identify anomalies.

One investment manager has more than £6 million in his account, while the average amount held is £337,000. Under Britain’s non-domicile rules, those with foreign roots only have to pay tax on money entering Britain provided it is earned abroad. However, more seriously for HSBC, dozens of people with no obvious legal source of substantial income are holding large sums in Jersey.

Daniel Bayes was branded “monstrous” for refusing to return from Venezuela after £500,000 of cannabis was found growing at his farm in 2006.

His father was jailed for three years in his absence. Mr Bayes is understood to have deposited £250,000 in an offshore account, although police said they would still like to question him.

A couple who live in a small house in Teignmouth, Devon, deposited £85,000 in an offshore account. More than 300 firearms, including Israeli Uzi submachine guns and pump-action shotguns, were found in their house after a police raid in 2001. Michael Lee was jailed for two years in 2002.
Around the world, HSBC has faced repeated accusations that it was not maintaining sufficient controls over the source of money deposited in its accounts. Money laundering rules demand that banks monitor the source of money and report any suspicions to the relevant authorities. Most banks take an active approach to this duty.

In July, a US Senate investigation found that money-laundering controls were largely absent in HSBC’s operations in Mexico. The bank has also faced serious criticism for hiding Iranian transactions.

One analyst called HSBC’s practices “a wink/nod business model” that showed “a profound lack of controls”.

Stuart Gulliver, the chief executive of HSBC, previously admitted: “We failed to spot and deal with unacceptable behaviour.” He insisted the bank would begin to operate at “a single standard globally that is determined by the highest standard we must apply anywhere”.

A spokesman for the bank said last night: “HSBC has a duty of confidentiality and cannot comment on clients even to confirm or deny they are clients. We have good relationships with our regulators and co-operate with investigations when required to do so.”

Whistle-blowers helping authorities chase tax evaders 

TAX authorities around the world are involved in an increasingly aggressive and often clandestine race to gain information on the identities of those with offshore bank accounts.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to whistle-blowers in return for information about offshore account holders. German authorities reportedly paid €2.5 million (£1.9 million) to an unnamed individual for a CD containing details of HSBC clients in Switzerland in 2010.

The data contained information that led prosecutors to believe that more than £1 billion of undeclared income had been deposited by 1,100 wealthy Germans.

Last week, a Greek magazine published a list of HSBC’s Swiss bank account holders. It is known as the “Lagarde List”, because the then French finance minister Christine Lagarde — now the International Monetary Fund director — handed it to Greek authorities in 2010.

HMRC also received details of British residents from this list and has investigated 500 of those identified.

HMRC is understood not to have paid for information about HSBC’s Jersey clients but the data it has received is thought to be the single biggest disclosure of a bank’s offshore customers.

The Daily Telegraph understands that the whistleblower who has obtained the information also has further lists of offshore HSBC clients with addresses outside Britain, including 602 in Israel, 527 in France, 333 in Spain and 117 in the US. In total, the leaked HSBC Jersey client list is thought to contain the names and addresses of 8,474 people. More than half are based in this country.

The use of tax havens by British residents and citizens to minimise tax is legal but subject to a range of complex rules and regulations. British taxpayers have a duty to report to HMRC details of money held offshore that is liable to tax.

RBS, UBS Traders Said to Face Arrest in Libor Probe

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) headquarters in London.

U.K. prosecutors are poised to arrest former traders and rate setters at UBS AG (UBSN), Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) and Barclays (BARC) Plc within a month for questioning over their role in the Libor scandal, a person with knowledge of the probe said.

Police, directed by Serious Fraud Office prosecutors, will act in the next month, said the person, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public. Arrests in the U.K. are made early in investigations, allowing people, who may not be charged, to be questioned under caution.

The SFO has 40 people working on the probe into manipulation of the London interbank bank offered rate, a benchmark for financial products valued at $360 trillion worldwide, and has involved the City of London Police, said David Green, the agency’s director.

“Significant developments” in the case are coming “in the near future,” Green said yesterday in an interview at his office in London, without giving further details and declining to comment on possible arrests.

The SFO opened the investigation in July at the request of British politicians after Barclays was fined a record 290 million pounds ($462 million) for rate manipulation. Regulators across the globe are investigating claims banks altered submissions used to set Libor in an effort to benefit traders, or so the lenders would appear financially healthier.

The arrests could be temporarily delayed because of disruptions to the SFO’s schedule caused by a move in offices.

Egregious Attempts

Green said the agency is focusing on the most egregious attempts to manipulate Libor and other related benchmarks. Investigations into firms, managers, traders and rate setters at lesser offenders will come later.

Regulators in the U.S. and U.K. are looking into how derivatives traders and bankers who submitted interest-rate data colluded to rig benchmarks to benefit their own trades, and whether lenders low-balled submissions in 2008 to hide their true cost of borrowing. Criminal probes by the SFO and U.S. Department of Justice are running in parallel with civil investigations being conducted by the DOJ’s fraud division, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.K. Financial Services Authority.

Barclays spokesman John McGuinness, UBS spokesman Richard Morton and RBS spokesman Michael Strachan all declined to comment.

UBS and RBS are next in line to settle with the regulators, people familiar with the case have said. Edinburgh-based RBS fired four traders following an internal probe.

UBS Review

More than 25 people have left UBS after an internal review of interest-rate manipulation, a person familiar with the matter said. Robert Diamond, who stepped down as Barclays chief executive officer after the fine, said 14 traders were involved in wrongdoing at the bank.

The SFO has “hoovered up all the stuff from the FSA and loaded it onto our computers,” Green said. It has also received evidence from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and some of the banks.
The SFO is cooperating with the DOJ on a request for access to information from the U.K., Green said. That could include U.S. investigators sitting in on SFO interviews with suspects, or having access to evidence the agency has gathered.

The request, which came under a mutual legal assistance treaty, or MLAT, was initially stalled while the SFO sought to get up to speed on the case. The DOJ submitted an amended request in recent months with “very substantial” information sought, Green said.

‘Anxious to Execute’

“Obviously when we first received it there was anxiety that execution of the request could mop up SFO resources,” he said. “We are anxious to execute it” and will “certainly” assist, he said.
Green said the agency, while working closely with the DOJ, is also competing to bring charges first in order to handle the prosecution of any British citizens in the U.K., reducing the chance of extradition.
The SFO’s previous director, Richard Alderman, declined to get involved in the case. Green took over as director in April.

The agency, which is considering bringing charges of conspiracy to defraud, is unlikely to conduct raids on banks in the case, Green said. It’s mostly targeting individuals and are also considering whether they can bring charges against firms. In order to do so, the SFO would have to prove that a “controlling mind” at a bank knew of the behavior, Green said.

The agency doesn’t have any cooperating witnesses yet in the case, but that’s a possibility, he said. The DOJ is working with several and is basing part of their case on the evidence gained from them, a person familiar has said previously.

Jane de Lozey and Matthew Wagstaff are overseeing the Libor investigation, with staff from external consultancy, accounting and law firms, and with two people from the Crown Prosecution Service,

Green said. The Treasury has earmarked 3.5 million pounds for the SFO’s Libor investigation.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lindsay Fortado in London at lfortado@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-09/rbs-ubs-traders-said-to-face-arrest-in-libor-probe.html 

Roadmap to Redressing Economic Terrorism in America (archival by demand)

We Weren’t Going to Stay Stupid Forever
by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

When the Cold War ended, a secret fund planned for by President Ronald Reagan had been set aside to rebuild America, pay off the national debt and reward Americans for decades of sacrifice.

Now Hunting Economic Terrorists Closer to Home

This was the real accomplishment of his presidency, one few knew of.
As the funds finally came together, during the first years of the Clinton administration, instead of going to America, the man chosen to secure this legacy for America was put in a Swiss dungeon, then a mental hospital and eventually railroaded into prison on charges now admitted to have been “manufactured.”

Of the funds, only $4.5 trillion remain (plus interest, less taxes), belonging to Ameritrust Corporation, held for the American people. This is some of the story of those funds and continuing attempts by politicians and bankers to continue destroying the United States through economic terrorism.

Many who read this will already know part of the story, some were involved, I am sure, in related operations. I am part of that group. The facts, documents, secret operations carefully vetted, confirmed, all now ready for release to those cleared for such, others are public domain.

It is our job to put out a story we are largely unauthorized to tell.

Of those who work in Special Operations and such things, I am one of the very few with a background in international finance. This is not written for public consumption but I will publish it anyway, do with it as you will. I am writing to our “community.” You know who you are.

Whose Money Were They Lending? – Stolen Money?

Over the past few years, amounts of money and practices none of us had imagined have been hitting the news.

We hear one day that the Federal Reserve secretly lends out trillions of dollars illegally, yet these criminal acts by the Federal Reserve, though reported, are never investigated.

In fact, there is no agency empowered to audit or control the Federal Reserve whose very existence itself no one understands and, if they did, none would approve of.

It doesn’t say whose dollars or where they went or what America got in return. We are led to believe they came out of thin air, went to places that are “none of our business” and were or were not paid back, also none of our business.

What happened? America got screwed.




Years ago, I had been asked to look after a former Reagan official named Lee Wanta. Some of you will understand this sentence, who does the asking, and what “look after”means.

I knew he had been kidnapped in Switzerland and, though a diplomat, sent to the US and imprisoned on criminal charges we knew to be a total invention.

His personal attorney was Chief Legal Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency.

My retiree job is as an intelligence contractor working with pro-US clients. I “brief,” not interview. I am not a journalist by trade. I am one of the thousands of Americans that middle age has turned from a “knock in the back of the head” guy to someone who can talk his way out of a dozen foreign jails.

I am simply one of many Americans that few know exist, a Marine, a Vietnam veteran and someone who spent much of his life with his head upside down.

What Happened to Lee Wanta Actually
Happened to All Americans

Ambassador Wanta has court documentation that he is owed $7.2 trillion dollars, private capital designated for one purpose, rebuilding the American economy.

The money was garnered through exploiting insane errors in the pricing of currencies and exploiting the economic policies of the former Soviet Union. Some of the profits had ended up in the Bank of China and were, according to legal agreement, repatriated to the United States, what remained anyway.

Initially, $4.5 trillion was transferred to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond while issues of law and taxes were negotiated. This is the remainder of a larger fund, transferred into the US while litigation was to determine tax liability and little else.

Secretly, a group of individuals has been using and diverting these funds.

Why does the fund exist? Wanta worked for Reagan, National Intelligence Coordinator and then was nominated by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa at Reagan’s request to take over as Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

Instead, Reagan assigned Wanta to a project to raise huge amounts of money trading currency. Some of this is on the internet and much of it is correct. The total amount raised, based on collateral supplied by the US Department of Treasury in a secret intelligence operation was 27 trillion USD.

Over the years, all but $4.5 trillion was stolen, much of it by a previous US president, some by the CIA, much by banks. Years ago, I was sent account numbers on some of the money and tried to locate it in concert with foreign intelligence agencies.

I would have returned the funds to the US government. Included is 2000 tons of gold, and dozens of bank accounts around the world. I have the account numbers, talked to the bankers and even, in one case, went directly to a chief of state.

What Has Been Stolen by the MegaCrooks
is Beyond Imagination

Stolen cash is impossible to recover when half of it is paid out in bribes. As most of what I am writing is probably classified, let’s pretend I am making this all up.

Anyway, back to Wanta. During this time, Wanta had gone to court to recover his funds, which had grown to over $7 trillion.

The rest of the money, much of which came from currency trading at the largest scale in world history, we will never find.


Now a court has ordered Wanta to receive his money.

The company to receive the money is Ameritrust. The board members of Ameritrust are well known public people, a former Vice President, senators, generals and admirals and, of course, me.

The money is, officially, in the Federal Bank of Richmond and the order to return the funds was signed by the President of the United States based on an agreement with the Federal Courts.

Involved, over a period of years, is a group of people every American will know, from presidents and vice presidents to the heads of the Federal Reserve, Secretaries of Treasury, names like Bush and Cheney, Paulson, Bernake, Al Gore, some names working for America and too many trying to steal part of the money for themselves.

(Fax header from “deep cover” classified memo directly to President Bush)

Some tried to steal all of it.

Federal Reserve

When you heard news stories about the Federal Reserve making secret loans to the crooked “bail out banks” that weren’t authorized by congress, they were lending out the $7.2 trillion “Wanta dollars” ordered paid by President Obama and the Federal Courts.

If you wondered how the Federal Reserve, that couldn’t print a few billion dollars without authorization from congress, lent out trillions that technically didn’t exist with no permission at all and there was no investigation, no questions asked and the story forgotten a day later, you will begin to understand by the end of this.

You will be extremely upset and angry also.

Thus far, here is part of that settlement I can tell you of but first, I had Wanta checked out.

To do that, I went to a top army intelligence officer from the Pentagon, one who had been Defense Attache to Israel and who had worked in Special Operations, war plans, clandestine operations and such since he was an A Team leader in Vietnam. I put him on with Wanta for hours and had Wanta interrogated.

Wanta knew dozens of the highest classified operations in US history, knew every Pentagon official including much highly detailed personal information. To our top Army intelligence officer, we were able to confirm that he was, unquestioningly, working for years at the highest levels of US intelligence.

The man who grilled him still hangs up the phone whenever I mention 9/11, a close personal friend of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

This is the deal:

Ameritrust agrees to buy $1 trillion in 10 year treasury bonds, which will finance America’s national debt for the next year.

Ameritrust, as outlined by the court, agrees to pay $1.7 trillion in income tax, reducing the national debt significantly overnight.

Ameritrust has set aside $6 billion for disbursement, under my advisement, monies for two purposes:

1. Development of a program to end veteran homelessness and save a generation of young veterans. This is entirely privately donated money. A non-profit entity exists and programs can start today. Not one cent will be stolen or diverted.
2. Fund efforts to aid in closing the US border and put a 100% end to illegal immigration and drug trafficking. This involves billions of dollars, carefully administered, with the full cooperation of state and local officials who have already been consulted and are onboard.

Ameritrust has set aside, minimally, $1 trillion USD to build a high speed rail system for the United States with almost all components domestically constructed. This system includes stations, hotels and much more. The minimal impact will include:

1. Initial employment will begin at 80,000 with full employment in the manufacture, installation and security of this system 400,000 new jobs, all privately financed without one cent of taxpayer money.
2. Veterans will receive preference on all jobs but, as is obvious, employment goes well beyond our available veteran community.
3. Required technologies and the entities that control such will be purchased and manufacturing facilities will be located within the United States.

The economic impact on other transportation systems, particularly airlines, has been predicted and funding is available to minimize disruption.

America, of course, will become the world’s tourist destination, travel costs for top domestic destinations will lower by a minimum of $65% and no debt will be involved.

The Great West of America – Grand Canyon

Four hundred thousand paychecks will put a dent in the recession, produce tax revenue to allow additional pay down of national debt and, for the first time in decades, actually raise the standard of living in America.

This is all documented.

Studies showing lowered emissions and freedom from oil imports are almost frightening.

All this does, of course, is give Americans things that other nations around the world have had for years but at lower cost, financed through the foresight, frankly, of President Ronald Reagan.

This entire project was his plan. He entrusted the currency trading critical part of it to Lee Wanta, who some now considered the greatest intelligence coup of the Cold War. I had no idea.

That we are dealing with it now is because criminal elements within our government and financial industry including the Federal Reserve System have subverted this plan, ignored court orders and violated so many laws we can’t even count. They believe they can claim immunity and hide behind an national security justification.

This money is here today, it is 20 years old, it requires no new currency issue, it pays down debt and adds nothing but jobs, revenue and hope.

To stop this from moving forward, Wanta was kidnapped and jailed, court cases involving the top lawyers in the United States have gone on for 6 years and millions have been spent to either keep this out of the press or misrepresent facts that exist on enough legal documents to fill a Fed Ex van.

More than that, laws of diplomatic privilege have been violated and, a more serious security threat, Wanta was protected by federal statutes that protect intelligence agents, statutes misused by Oliver North and others. Wanta’s prosecution, on no evidence at all other than requests from governmental elements tied to organized crime, human trafficking and narcotics, moved forward despite motions to dismiss filed that any court would have immediately accepted.

Laws meant to protect America are now laws of convenience, used when they serve the banks or own our politicians, violated when patriots need to be silenced.

Lee Wanta

At one point, Wanta was put in a mental institution. He gave the psychiatrist a telephone number to call. Vice President Al Gore answered and confirmed Wanta’s identity.

Vice President Gore also confirmed that he had been informed that Lee Wanta was dead. When Gore learned Wanta was alive in the room, we suspect this is why Wanta is here and the Reagan/Ameritrust program is coming back to life.

The psychiatrist ordered Wanta’s release. Instead of release, he was jailed and the psychiatrist “warned” and then fired. We can prove this.
You have heard these stories a dozen times, Sibel Edmonds, John Wheeler III, Susan Lindauer and a hundred names you will never hear. Ask why Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and his family are dead.

This is the real world we live in, why we pay so much for gas when the world money markets have crashed, when demand is nothing but prices rise daily and nobody ever asks anything.

We Want to Know

What we want to know and “we” is not a harmless bunch of cranks. “We” means many of the people who formerly and currently represent key “capabilities” that protect and defend the United States.

We want to know why, for years, the Federal Reserve illegally “loaned” trillions of dollars to banks that claimed they were insolvent, money in escrow and not under their authority for distribution.
We want to know why, for years, the Secretaries of Treasury authorized these illegal acts which have been reported in the news but never investigated.

We want to know where the trillions of dollars are in profits that were generated by using this currency to collateralize offshore transactions never listed by the banks who received the illegal loans.

Read that one again until you understand the extent of what I am saying and how obvious all of this is.

The money has been there to put America on her feet. Nobody ever explained how the Federal Reserve could lend trillions of dollars “illegally,” money never under their official control but rather under the supervision of the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia.

In addition to funding existing legal authorities to end illegal immigration overnight and begin a real war on drug trafficking, at some point there will be unpaid state income taxes totaling over $200 billion dollars.

We have the full backing of state governors, select members of congress and those financial leaders who choose to profit from honest business instead of insider trading and financial scams. This means “change.”

What we demand?

We want monies owed and ordered to be paid as law requires to be paid. All we are demanding is restoration of rule of law in accordance with existing court orders and legal judgements, nothing more.
We also have law enforcement and intelligence officials who tell us that they will never sleep another night until they have hunted all these people involved down and have seen justice done.
They say they are willing to spend their lives hunting assets, even to the ends of the earth, beginning with vacation homes, yachts, family trusts, safe deposit boxes, anywhere on the planet and that existing laws covering money laundering and terrorism give them the needed tools.

How Many Were Involved in Cooking the Books?

The term I keep hearing is “continuing criminal enterprise.” I am more a builder than one to seek retribution but others are not so forgiving. We believe this is why funds are being held up, out of fear.

As there is enough money here for Ameritrust to be the most powerful congressional lobby, being a “corporate person,” the richest ever imagined, think of the irony.
The laws meant to deprive Americans of their rights being used to restore democracy and rule of law. The idea is frightening.

This is What These Mega Thieves are Doing to America

As billions are assigned for veterans relief at a time of extreme national emergency, failure to do so is unthinkable.

America was never intended to be what it has become. We have the funds, the plans and the people to begin a rapid and well conceived turn-around of America.

This is a plan of investment in America, of hard work, of the most extreme form of financial conservatism thinkable.

This is about work and paying taxes and building in America for America by Americans.
 
Ask yourself who has been blocking this, who is above the law? Court documents on all of this, as required by law, are in the public domain.

Welcome to any who think this is less than we say
Editing: Jim W. Dean

Dear Folks, You may get tired of hearing this by I am going to say it once again. We have to take ownership of this problem. If we let them get away with this and keep their ill gotten gains there is absolutely nothing they will fear doing do to us in the future. Only a conquered, defeated people would accept such a humiliation.

Fortunately, as the WOT has expanded the Special Operations Forces to 50,000, many are becoming aware of this situation and needless to say are more than a little unhappy about it. Add in legions of ole time civilian and military Intel people and we have a multi-generational trained and well motivated group of leaders ready. Repeatedly, we have seen mental health facilities, most on military bases, used as prisons, used to discredit, used to drug, experiment on clandestine agents and even public officials who refuse to submit to participation in illegalities.
Does the term “gulag” come to mind?