Two U.S. lawsuits charge that former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his associates accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from politically connected U.S. telecom companies.
Lawsuits filed this Fall challenge the former priest‘s image of political purity and raise claims that both he and U.S. corporate executives scammed illegal profits off the hemisphere‘s poorest population.
In one suit, a fired executive charged his former employer, the U.S. telecom IDT (Newark, NJ), with corruption, defamation, and intimidation under the New Jersey anti-racketeering law. In the second, the government of Haiti contends that IDT, Fusion (New York, NY) and several other North American telecoms violated the federal RICO anti-racketeering statute. Both suits allege that Aristide, now in exile in South Africa, and his associates, took kickbacks.
Add former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the long list of corrupt and repressive officials who have used Western banks and companies and offshore tax havens to plunder their countries and launder the stolen money.
Aristide and his associates looted government coffers, wrote checks to front companies for nonexistent purchases, padded invoices to get kickbacks from vendors, secretly owned companies that cheated Haiti of taxes, and laundered the money they stole through shell companies and secret bank accounts set up in the United States and the offshore tax havens of Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands.
Nearly $20 million has been documented as stolen between 2001, when Aristide took office as president for the second time, and 2004, when he fled or was forced out of the country according to varying accounts.
An aggressive European investigation of international crime has revealed alleged Russian mafia leaders operating in the United States. The U.S. Justice Department dropped the ball three years ago during the Bank of New York scandal, which now threatens to explode.
NEW YORK–Nearly three years ago, the Justice Department called the Bank of New York (BoNY) money-laundering scandal just a Russian tax-evasion scheme. Now, European investigations show that BoNY was a channel for organized crime. And according to a document obtained by Pacific News Service, some of the alleged Russian mafia leaders have operated freely in the United States.
Von Lucy Komisar*, Beat Kraushaar Und Henry Habegger, Mitarbeit: Laurent Duvane SonntagsBlick (Zurich) 9 Dezember 2001 BERN – 600 Kilo nukleares Material wollten Ex-SVP-Nationalrat Bernard Rohrbasser und Notar R. verkaufen – an die Saudis. Verwickelt in den dubiosen Handel ist auch das Departement für auswärtige Angelegenheiten. Jetzt ermittelt die Bundesanwaltschaft. Diesen Mittwoch erhielt die Bundesanwaltschaft […]
For Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, 53, called Taivanchik (the Taiwanese) because of his Asian features, the plot to get an Olympic gold medal for Russia’s top figure-skaters was small-time.
The Russian mafia don who was arrested July 31 for fixing skating contests at the Salt Lake City summer Olympics reminds one of Al Capone, who was put away for tax evasion, because the government couldn‘t get enough evidence against him for murder, extortion and criminal racketeering.
PARIS — OECD Secretary General Donald Johnston says he is pleased about the OECD commitment to try to stop companies from its own member states from bribing public officials in other countries. But, he added, that effort needs to be extended to cover bribery of corporate officials as well.
The Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions entered into force in February 1999. It commits 34 signatory countries, including all the world’s biggest economies, to adopt common rules to punish companies and individuals who engage in bribery.
