BCCI and the Bushes
Lucy Komisar writes about the criminal offshore bank BCCI and the way it connected the Bushes, the Saudis, Saddam and Osama bin Laden 
in her chapter, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad,” in ”A Game As Old As Empire.”
Audio & Video Online
Recent Comments
- Marva Kreuse on The big crime in the Spitzer scandal is money laundering
- Roger Desmoulins on Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket
- Emma Byrne on How Tax Cheats Are Using Your Money to Fund Politicians
- Marietta on Ex-Rock Impresario Tony Defries lost $22 million in offshore tax evasion scheme
- A. Erol on US/Haiti: Top Republicans Leave Telecom Accused of Bribery
Content
Scoops
Ex-Rock Impresario Tony Defries lost $22 million in offshore tax evasion scheme
March 3, 2008
Tony Defries, the rock manager who launched 
David Bowie and who takes credit for managing, marketing and branding such rock stars as Lou Reed and John Mellencamp as well as being “present at the birth of Madonna [and] the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder,” might be making some headlines of his own soon. (He is shown here in 1972 with Bowie’s wife Angie on his right.)
The ex-impresario, a Brit who now lives in Los Angeles and who for a promoter is unaccountably interview- and camera-shy, was one of the beneficiaries of a fake annuity scheme organized by a Swiss bank and its partner, a pseudo insurance company whose main product seems to be tax evasion. But the “benefit” turned out to be a disaster.
Benazir Bhutto in 1987 talked to me of concern about Afghan militants and how she dealt with death threats
Dec 28, 2007
Twenty years ago, on a campaign trip in rural Pakistan in October 1987, Benazir Bhutto told me of her concern about the long-term effect of Afghan refugees who had set up safe houses, stored munitions and created networks in her country.
We talked for an hour in an interview I videotaped. It was the day after I traveled with her on a political procession in Sailkot, in the Punjab, northern Pakistan, where she was mobbed by supporters.
She was prescient about the impact of the Islamic Afghanis who had arrived in Pakistan during the war with the Soviet-supported government.
She said “a long-term domestic fallout” would be that “even if Afghanistan today is solved and guaranteed by both superpowers, what about the future? Because the network has been created.”
Peru: US Gov’t Document Links García to 1980s Death Squads
Inter Press Service (IPS), Dec 5, 2007
There is irony in the recent announcement by Peru’s President Alan García that he would publish the names of 1,800 “freed terrorists”, so that people might recognise and report them if they were participating in anti-state conspiracies. His list includes people imprisoned on false charges or never convicted or sentenced.
One name that is not on the list is that of Alan García. 
However, according to a declassified U.S. government document, García, during his first administration from 1985-1990, gave instructions to terror squads organised by his political party to assassinate suspected leftists. Victims included trade unionists and other civil society leaders.
This writer discovered the document, and it was declassified at her request. It is posted following the full article.
Joseph Stiglitz calls for abolition of offshore bank secrecy
Oct 15, 2007
Click above to see a 6-minute video of Prof. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, former head of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Clinton. The video was made by Lucy Komisar at a meeting in New York co-sponsored by the Tax Justice Network-USA, which she co-chairs, and his Initiative for Policy Dialogue.
Corruption: Another Lead in Siemens Bribery Probe?
Inter Press Service (IPS), Aug 30, 2007
U.S. officials from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Munich prosecutors this week regarding the 1.3-billion-dollar bribe fund run by Siemens, the German multinational technology company.
After talking to the Germans about tracking the financial flows of the largest illicit slush-fund ever discovered, the U.S. investigators would do well to visit Luxembourg on Germany’s western border.
There they could seek information from Clearstream, the international financial clearing house, that might tell them how Siemens moved so much money and where it went. That is because Siemens has the unusual status of being one of only four non-financial companies among 2,500 Clearstream members. It gained membership on the insistence of a former CEO who was fired after a scandal.
Siemens has a $1.3-billion bribe fund; did it move payoffs through Clearstream?
Aug 15, 2007
Siemens, the German-based multinational technology company that made massive payoffs to get international contracts, has, according to the German press, a bribery slush fund of more than $1.3 billion. 
It moved money through a network of front companies, mostly in offshore Liechtenstein and the United Arab Emirates. Siemens is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as by public prosecutors in Germany and Italy.
How did Siemens officials move so much money about? Investigators ought to take a look at Siemens’ transactions through Clearstream, the international financial clearing house in Luxembourg, whose clients do not undergo the same due diligence scrutiny that regular banks apply.
Siemens is one of only four non-financial companies (out of 2500) with Clearstream accounts. Here — published for the first time — are listings of Siemens’ Clearstream accounts for 1995, 2000 and 2001.
Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket
Speech to conference on “Taming the Giant Corporation,” organized by Ralph Nader and The Center for Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC, June 8, 2007
The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It’s run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world’s financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. This talk is about strategy, but first you have to know the target, and most Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don’t know what I’m going to tell you. And that’s part of the problem.
Between 1996 and 2000, of U.S. and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax. Over 90 percent reported owing taxes of under 5 percent. One year, six in ten paid less than a million.
This is the dirty little secret of globalization: the end of controls on capital flows and the expansion of the tax haven system from 25 years ago to where it has more than doubled to about 70 tax havens.
The system is a major reason for the growing inequality in the U.S. and between the West and the developing worlds.
The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.
Previous Scoops
- Politicizing the Justice Department, Bush takes a page from his father
- How Tax Cheats Are Using Your Money to Fund Politicians
- Questions Linger About Bushes and BCCI
- Osama y Saddam, parientes incómodos de Bush
- Exclusive: Sealed evidence in the IDT Haiti bribery case is revealed
- Corporate Profits Take an Offshore Vacation
- Exclusive: Confessions of a Citibanker
- France & UK Ignore Corporate Bribery: One Hand Launders the Other
- Poisoned Russian linked to investigation of possible bribes by ex-Yukos official
- US/Haiti: Top Republicans Leave Telecom Accused of Bribery
Blog
Larry Summers on Robert Rubin and money-laundering
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.
The big crime in the Spitzer scandal is money laundering
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.
Theater Reviews
The Houswife’s Lament
Inter Press Service (IPS) April 22, 2008
Since the 1950s, views in the United States have changed a lot about whether marriage is good for women — or at least about the nature of its serious disadvantages.
Four Broadway plays spanning those decades show one prominent downside: marriage as a smoldering cauldron of unfulfilled sexual desire or betrayal.
The U.S. works are about small-town Middle America: the Midwest, Mississippi, Oklahoma. They are William Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba”, Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County”. The British revival is Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming”, about working class London.
Travel
Climbing down a coal shaft and up a castle keep in Wales
Seeing how both halves lived
We were descending a into 300-foot-deep Welsh coal mine, hard hats firmly in place, watches and anything else with batteries removed because the law requires it to prevent a spark that could set off flammable methane gas. 
Our guide, a former miner, grinned and joked. We laughed nervously. If you want a memorable experience, visiting “The Big Pit,” an hour’s drive north of Cardiff, is high on the agenda!
