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
- Robert Magill on AIG's Past Could Return to Haunt
- Stanley Richards on Crisis Pits Vatican Against Offshore Bankers
- fi on Bono the tax dodger wants others' taxes spent on Africa
- Fred Kenniston on Fees for Friends: Vendetta [Andrew Cuomo Scandal]
- Stanley Lucas on Courter to leave IDT; NYSE threatens delisting; stock in free fall
Content
Scoops
Crisis Pits Vatican Against Offshore Bankers
Inter Press Service (IPS), Dec 22, 2008
The financial crisis has the U.S. swirling with charges about the immoral greed of some corporate executives who recklessly bet their companies’ futures to line their own pockets. The popular fix for this international calamity stops at the nation’s borders: decouple top-line salaries and bonuses from stock prices and institute more transparency and regulation.
However, last month, the Vatican, in a groundbreaking statement, linked the financial crisis to a much deeper problem largely ignored in discussions of the crisis here. It underlined the need to consider carefully “the hidden but crucial role of the offshore financial system in light of the emergence of the global financial crisis”.
The Vatican now gets it, but U.S. corporations don’t. The U.S.-based multinationals that signed on to yet another ethics pledge included General Electric, The Hartford, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Accenture, Dell, and United Airlines. Their ethics, according to their pledge, does not include rejecting the use of the offshore system to evade regulation as well as taxes.
AIG’s Past Could Return to Haunt
Inter Press Service (IPS) Dec 19, 2008
American International Group (AIG) operated a captive insurance scam that involved fraudulent use of offshore tax havens. Currently, the U.S. government has invested over $40 billion in AIG, with the U.S. getting nearly 80 percent of its stock. 
This puts the U.S. in a unique position to investigate the internal operations of a giant corporation with a reputation for using the offshore system for tax evasion.
U.S. authorities could begin their investigations with a look into a very curious practice that was revealed 15 years ago in a case that was never exposed by the mainstream press and which insurance insiders say is endemic.
AIG would keep a portion of a client’s inflated insurance premium and send the rest to the client’s offshore reinsurance company. AIG would earn a higher commission. The client would write off the entire amount as a business expense and enjoy the extra cash offshore, tax free.
This story tells how notorious fraudster Victor Posner made an AIG deal to stash reinsurance profits in Bermuda.
Courter to leave IDT; NYSE threatens delisting; stock in free fall
Oct 6, 2008
From alleged kickbacks to Aristide to a company that’s tanking.
Jim Courter, the former New Jersey Republican Congressman who quit as a McCain national finance co-chair after IDT, the global telecommunications company he heads, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission, now has much bigger problems. IDT announced Friday that Courter will quit the company. IDT’s filing with the SEC the same day shows the company in a free fall. Its stock is tanking, and the New York Stock Exchange has threatened to delist it.
The FCC fine imposed for IDT’s failure to file its contract with Haiti was first reported by the author in July. The contract revealed that IDT was sending Haiti fees to a Turks & Caicos shell company instead of to a Haiti Teleco account. A whistleblower charged kickbacks.
The company said Courter would leave as CEO when his contract expires next October. In the meantime, his 2009 salary will be paid entirely in stock, which he cannot cash in till his departure. That could mean paltry pickings. IDT stock has fallen to 69 cents from more than $24 in 2004 and $1.93 in June.
IDT could be in for some more trouble with the FCC if a new administration decides to enforce its regulations. According to FCC responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, IDT has never filed its contracts with any of the 140 major international carriers to which it claims to supply service. This violation could bring fines of $7,000 a day for each case, but the agency has given the company a pass on obeying its rules.
Palin campaign operations chief was VP of IDT, telecom investigated for bribery
Sept 2, 2008
Michael Glassner, in charge of Republican Vice-Presidential nominee 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 says the missing money represented kickbacks to former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Glassner joined IDT in April 2001 and would have known the details of the contract and the investigations. Since inquiries began in 2004, all the top IDT officials except CEO James Courter, a former Republican New Jersey Congressman, have resigned. After the FCC fine was revealed by this reporter, Courter quit as a McCain national finance co-chair.
Corruption: Laundromat Royale
Inter Press Service (IPS), July 18, 2008
It sounded like the plot of an action thriller. A U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings Thursday on how UBS/Switzerland, the world’s largest private bank, and LGT (Liechtenstein Global Trust), owned by the royal family of that micro-tax-haven state, organised complex tax evasion schemes for U.S. clients, and used spy-type tactics to avoid being detected.
LGT bankers allegedly used code names and public phones instead of making calls that could be traced. UBS agents carried encrypted laptops and business cards that didn’t mention they were in the “wealth management” division. According to testimony and records, both banks took care to disguise their activities because moving and hiding the money of tax evaders and other criminals is very lucrative, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
Evasive Tactics
Condé Nast Portfolio, July 16, 2008
Code names, secretive European royalty, encrypted computers. A spy novel? Nope. Nope. It’s how two European banks helped rich Americans duck the taxman, a Senate probe found.
The Newport regatta has always drawn America’s moneyed class, and the Art Basel show in Miami is hot on the
But UBS, one of the world’s largest banks, had another goal in mind when it shelled out money for the UBS Regatta Cup in Newport or the Art Basel Art Fair in Miami, or performances in major U.S. cities by the UBS Vervier Orchestra.
Off the Trail
Condé Nast Portfolio, July 15, 2008
Jim Courter, one of Senator John McCain’s top fundraisers, has resigned from the McCain campaign just days after Lucy Komisar reported on portfolio.com that Courter’s company had been fined by regulators.
The Federal Communications Commission last week levied a fine of $1.3 million against IDT, a New Jersey telecommunications company headed by Courter, for failing to disclose its 2003-04 long-distance phone agreements with Haiti.
Previous Scoops
- McCain ‘Trailblazer’ Burned
- Ex-Rock Impresario Tony Defries lost $22 million in offshore tax evasion scheme
- Benazir Bhutto in 1987 talked to me of concern about Afghan militants and how she dealt with death threats
- Peru: US Gov’t Document Links García to 1980s Death Squads
- Joseph Stiglitz calls for abolition of offshore bank secrecy
- Corruption: Another Lead in Siemens Bribery Probe?
- Siemens has a $1.3-billion bribe fund; did it move payoffs through Clearstream?
- Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket
- Politicizing the Justice Department, Bush takes a page from his father
- How Tax Cheats Are Using Your Money to Fund Politicians
Blog
Harold Pinter: a dinner party in Turkey where the playwright challenged the U.S. ambassador
Dec 25, 2008
British playwright Harold Pinter died last night. He was a man committed to political freedom and did his part to promote it.
In 1990, I visited Turkey and learned about a dinner in his honor given by the U.S. ambassador in 1985 that left the host quite out of joint.
Pinter had gotten into a heated argument with one of the guests about torture in Turkey. U.S. Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé declared that such free discussion proved there was democracy in Turkey.
“There can be lot of opinions about anything,” he later remarked over coffee.
“Not if you’ve got an electric wire hooked to your testicles,” riposted Pinter.
The smoking gun: the IDT-Haiti contract
July 29, 2008
Articles I wrote this month about the resignation of IDT CEO James Courter as John McCain’s finance co-chair provoked supporters of former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to noisy denials and personal attacks.
I wrote that Courter had resigned after I reported that the Federal Communications Commission had fined IDT $1.3 million for failing to file its contract with Haiti.
Why would IDT fail to file the contract? Maybe because it shows that in this Aristide-administration deal, payments were below the legal 23 cents a minute set by the FCC (money that would have gone to Haiti) and that IDT payments were ordered sent to a shell company account in the Turks & Caicos instead of to a government account in Haiti.
Read the contract.
Theater Reviews
Undead GIs Pay a Visit to Bush
Inter Press Service (IPS) Dec 5, 2008
It might seem odd at first to compare them, but “Beast”, a brutal, surreal black comedy about the Iraq war, 
has something in common with “The Files”, a stunning, sardonic docudrama about the repression of cultural freedom by the Polish communist secret police.
They are theatres of the absurd, though in the Poles’ case, the tales they tell are very literally true. Both plays, staged off-Broadway in New York, are attacks on criminal acts of governments.
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!
