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Banned
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Okay, now this is becoming more complicated. It appears that the British defense contractor, BAE, entered into an secret agreement in 1985, under the Thatcher ministry, to trade 600,000 bbls per day of Saudi oil, as payment for a series of waepons contracts, beginning with about 100 BAE warplanes. BAE was required to pay bribes to a number of individuals, including the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar, and to Thatcher's son, Mark. Riggs Bank, HQ'd across from the white house, was involved in accepting and laundering some of the billions of dollars in bribes, during the time when president Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush, was an executive at Riggs Bank. Riggs also held significant deposits of the dictatorial government of Equatorial Guineau, in Africa, and Mark Thatcher was arrested for and convicted of helping to plot and finance a coup in that country.
Prince Bandar and his wife were found, also during the time when Jonathan Bush was an executive in the private equity investment section of Riggs, to have sent payments from Riggs bank, of $3500 per month, which was traced to two Saudis who lived in California and provided aid to several of the 9/11 hijackers.
This mess is back in the news now because US officials took several BAE executives into cistody to compell their tesitmony in a civil suit broguht by a US pension fund that had invested in BAE and complains that it was defrauded of a portion of the return on it's investment that BAE was secretly paying in bribes.
It seems that the bribes, over 22 years, amounted to more than $100 billion and were used to fund secret covert "Ops", along the lines of Iran-Contra, probably in a partnership with US, UK, and Saudi intelligence officials, with the blessings of the leaders in all three countries.
What remains to be seen is if 9/11 was an intentional act of intimidation against US interference or objection to the direction that the Saudis want the activities financed by these funds to head towards.
Tony Blair revealed that Prnce Bandar threatened to withhold information collected by Saudi intelligence that could avert a future London tube bombing, as happened in July 2005. President Bush and his father enjoy close relations with Prince Bandar, and Colin Powell accepted a surprise gift of a ten years old Jaguar automobile from Bandar, shortly after Powell resigned as US seccretary of state.
We can't know yet what all of this amounts to, but at the center of the money, there is Jonathan Bush. Yhe vast sums of money seem to have bought a foreign policy conducted in secret and not accountable to the representatives of the US and the UK people.
Quote:
http://www.forbes.com/reuters/feeds/...INTERVIEW.html
US said pressuring Britain's BAE in bribery probe
05.21.08, 4:55 PM ET
United Kingdom - By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is pressuring BAE Systems Plc (other-otc: BAESF.PK - news - people ), Britain's top arms maker, to cooperate in a high-stakes corruption probe of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, a former top U.S. Justice Department official said Wednesday.
"DoJ (the Department of Justice) is sending the loudest possible message that it can to the company," said Joshua Hochberg, a former fraud section chief who supervised investigations and prosecutions of overseas bribery charges until leaving in 2005.
The U.S. investigation took a dramatic turn over the weekend when BAE disclosed that Mike Turner, BAE's chief executive, and Sir Nigel Rudd, a non-executive director, were served with subpoenas on their arrival in the United States last week.
"The fact that subpoenas were issued by surprise clearly reflects the government's dissatisfaction with the extent of BAE's cooperation," said Hochberg, now a partner at McKenna Long & Aldridge in Washington.
For years, BAE has denied allegations it made illegal payments in the mid-1980s to Saudi potentates to clinch a deal worth up to $80 billion for its Tornado fighter jets and other military hardware.
Among those alleged to have received bribes were Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former Saudi ambassador to the United States who now heads Saudi Arabia's national security council. A lawyer for Bandar did not return a telephone call seeking comment.
In June 2007, BAE said it had been notified that DoJ had begun investigating its compliance with anti-bribery laws, including dealings with Saudi Arabia.
If convicted under the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company could face everything from criminal fines to a ban on doing business with the U.S. government, Hochberg said.
The law has great reach. It bars U.S. companies, as well as foreign companies doing business in the United States, from bribing foreign officials to grease the skids for business.
Britain's Serious Fraud Office dropped its own inquiry into the matter in December 2006 amid reported Saudi threats to shelve plans to buy another 72 BAE Eurofighter jets and crimp anti-terrorism cooperation.
Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the time the British probe threatened national security....
...By examining personal electronic gear, investigators also made clear that DoJ "is willing to use all available resources in investigating this case," Hochberg said.
A British court ruled on April 10 that the Serious Fraud Office investigation was ended unlawfully, a matter due to be heard on appeal by the House of Lords later this year.
Loren Thompson, a prominent consultant for a number of arms makers, including BAE, played down the possibility BAE could end up being barred from U.S. government business.
As the sole supplier of Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and other systems used in Iraq and by U.S. intelligence, "severing their business ties would almost immediately undercut U.S. forces in the field," he added. (Editing by Andre Grenon)
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Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...ews/838867.asp
9-11 Hijackers: A Saudi Money Trail?
The Feds probe a possible new Saudi link to Al Qaeda
By Michael Isikoff
NewsWeek
Friday, 22 November, 2002
The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian government--using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat--sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.
The bureau, they say, has uncovered financial records showing a steady stream of payments to the family of one of the students, Omar Al Bayoumi. The money moved into the family's bank account beginning in early 2000, just a few months after hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within days of the terrorists' arrival in the United State, Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid $1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is possible that the hijackers later repaid the money.
Sources familiar with the evidence say the payments--amounting to about $3,500 a month--came from an account at Washington's Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the daughter of the late Saudi King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the country in July 2001--two months before the September 11 terror attacks--payments for roughly the same amount began flowing every month to Osama Basnan, a close associate of Al Bayoumi's who also befriended the hijackers. A federal law-enforcement source told NEWSWEEK that Basnan--who was recently convicted of visa fraud and is awaiting deportation--was a known "Al Qaeda sympathizer" who "celebrated the heroes of September 11" at a party after the attacks and openly talked about "what a wonderful, glorious day it had been."
Administration officials stressed repeatedly in interviews that they do not know the purpose of the payments from Princess Haifa's account. It is also uncertain whether the money was given to the hijackers by Al Bayoumi or Basman. White House sources also raised a number of other cautionary notes, saying that it was not uncommon for wealthy Saudis to provide financial assistance to struggling Saudi families in the United States. "The facts are unclear, and there's no need to rush to judgment," said one administration official.
But other sources describe the financial records as "explosive" and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed--especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq. "This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States," said another administration official, who cited the need to prevent a rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
A spokesperson for Princess Haifa said "she will cooperate fully with the United States." The princess hasn't been asked about the payments by any representatives of the U.S. government, and she wasn't aware of the allegations until today, her spokesperson said.
Administration officials expressed concerns that premature disclosure of the evidence of the financial payments could jeopardize the ongoing FBI probe, especially the bureau's efforts to apprehend and develop a case against Al Bayoumi. Upon leaving the United States last year, Al Bayoumi flew to Great Britain where he enrolled in a graduate-level business program at Birmingham's Aston University. He was arrested by New Scotland Yard after September 11 but adamantly denied any connection to the attacks or knowledge of the hijacker's links to Al Qaeda and was released a week later for lack of evidence. He is now believed to be back in Saudi Arabia. Law-enforcement officials say they are still intensely investigating his activities, suspecting that he may have served as an "advance man" for the hijackers.
The leaders of a joint House-Senate Intelligence Committees investigation have vigorously pushed for the release of a classified report that lays out the evidence of the Saudi money flow. But Bush administration officials, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, have adamantly refused to declassify the evidence upon which the report is based. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Bob Graham declined to discuss the evidence gathered by the joint inquiry, but he said he was upset over the Bush administration's intransigence. "This one stinks of people using classified information" for political purposes, said Graham.
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And the investment advisors for high net worth individuals at www.riggsbank.com , circa November, 2002?
Bush's Uncle Jonathans's group:
Quote:
http://web.archive.org/web/200210021..._advisors.html
...J. Bush & Co.: J. Bush & Company manages assets for high net-worth individuals, corporate benefit plans and foundations. J. Bush seeks to build wealth on behalf of clients primarily by investing in growth-oriented stocks and endeavors to develop long-term relationships with clients. J. Bush accepts accounts of $1 million or more. To contact J. Bush & Co., call...
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...04Jun22_5.html
The Bank of Dad
....Former president George H.W. Bush has attended Allbritton's post-Alfalfa brunch. <h3>When George W. Bush's inaugural parade passed the Riggs branch on Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton and said, "Hey Joe, how are you doing?" </h3>
But Allbritton has never sought to enhance his public profile. He rarely publicizes his extensive philanthropy, which can be gauged only by checking publicly available IRS documents. He has endowed a $9 million art institute and his foundations give more than $1 million a year to an eclectic list of recipients, including churches, hospitals and schools. "I do not think of myself as shy," he says. "However, I think the things I've done . . . can speak for themselves."
His role at the bank was inevitably more public. Bank analysts think he missed opportunities. In 1985, interstate banking became legal, and large out-of-town banks invaded the city and suburbs, grabbing customers and gobbling up smaller banks. Riggs slipped to the fifth- or sixth-largest bank in the region.
"We still shake our heads and say, 'Boy, what could have been done with that franchise?' " says Rockville-based bank consultant Arnold Danielson. "They thought getting on airplanes and flying to England was what it was all about, and they didn't recognize that Fairfax County and Montgomery County were where it's at."....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004May26.html
A Shift in Strategy for Riggs
Bank Struggles to Find Focus for Investment Advisory Business
By Terence O'Hara and Kathleen Day
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 27, 2004; Page E01
....This upper-crust vision of Riggs, cultivated by former chairman Joe L. Allbritton to attract Washington's unique class of moneyed demi-celebrities, guided many of the bank's strategic moves under his tenure.
One of these moves was the 1997 purchase of J. Bush & Co., a Connecticut money-management firm founded, owned and run by Jonathan J. Bush, the former president's brother and the current president's uncle, for an estimated $5.5 million.
At the time, Riggs was positioning itself as a personal bank and investment adviser to the wealthy after it lost ground in its core retail banking operations to larger, out-of-state competitors. J. Bush & Co., with a successful track record and a sterling name, fit the bill. Bush is now an employee of Riggs and continues to run the company with his name on it.
But like many of the strategic objectives undertaken by Riggs in the last two decades, the J. Bush & Co. purchase, with much of Riggs's investment advisory business, hasn't lived up to its billing. This morning, as Riggs National Corp.'s investors gather for their annual meeting at the bank's ornate branch on Pennsylvania Avenue, company executives will present a bank moving decidedly away from the aristocratic leanings of its past. In Riggs's future, owning a company run by a Bush may not be as valuable an asset as it once was.....
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/bu...rint&position=
April 11, 2004
A Washington Bank, a Global Mess
By TIMOTHY O'BRIEN
ACH January, in honor of Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday, a group of Washington's movers and shakers gather to rub elbows at the Alfalfa Club dinner. Wizened, impressive and until recently entirely male, the Alfalfa roster includes presidents, politicians, diplomats and business impresarios, all bound together by being either formidably influential or fabulously rich.
Attendees have included luminaries like Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States; Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America; and others with surnames like Greenspan, Kissinger and Rehnquist. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made their first joint public appearance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Alfalfa gathering in 2002.
And each and every year, after dinner winds down, a dynamic Alfalfan from Mississippi, standing just over 5 feet tall, is host for a late-night cocktail party or a brunch the following day. These events are more than mere codas to an evening of networking. They are reminders that in a town long on political heavyweights and short on full-blown business tycoons, the 79-year-old host, Joe L. Allbritton, is a corporate titan.
Upon arriving in Washington in the mid-1970's, Mr. Allbritton cemented his ties to the city's high and mighty by assembling a gaggle of businesses: a newspaper, television stations and the faded banking jewel of Washington's financial establishment, the Riggs National Corporation. Along the way, he has given generously to charitable causes, helped to endow institutions as diverse as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and relished the international cachet that Riggs conveyed despite its middling fortunes.
Today, however, Mr. Allbritton and Riggs National Bank, which provides banking services to most of Washington's foreign embassies and to American consulates worldwide, are swept up in controversy. Federal law enforcement officials, Congressional investigators and banking regulators are scouring Riggs accounts in a wide-ranging investigation revolving around the netherworlds of terrorist financing, money laundering and the seamier geopolitics of Big Oil.
Neither Mr. Allbritton nor Riggs have been charged with any crime, although regulators say they are considering levying large fines against the bank for possible violations of statutes meant to thwart money laundering. One former Riggs executive, Simon P. Kareri, is the target of a grand jury investigation related to the inquiry.
The bank has been cooperating with an F.B.I. investigation of Saudi Arabian accounts at the bank, some controlled by Prince Bandar. The investigation began as federal officials tried to track funds used by the Sept. 11 hijackers; as the investigation wore on, banking regulators became increasingly alarmed by Riggs's practices. Last July, they publicly rebuked the bank for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering standards.
Although Riggs said it has made great progress in overhauling its practices, it has suffered yet another setback. In recent months, according to people with knowledge of the investigation, the bank's own examiners revealed to regulators that Mr. Kareri failed to adequately supervise accounts held by officials and the government of the oil-rich West African nation of Equatorial Guinea.
Until late February, Riggs managed $360 million worth of Equatorial Guinean accounts that federal investigators say were controlled by that country's dictator. The accounts were largely funded by proceeds from deals with Exxon Mobil, the oil company. Federal investigators say they are scrutinizing those accounts to see if they involve the proceeds of political graft or were used to bribe executives of any American companies, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the investigation. The problems with the Equatorial Guinean accounts also prompted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last month to warn Riggs that it plans to label it a "troubled" institution, meaning that the bank would have to cede significant managerial authority to the government.
RIGGS, meanwhile, decided to close all of its Saudi accounts in early March after huge cash transfers by Prince Bandar in and out of his personal accounts aroused fresh concerns at the bank about the nature of the transactions. A spokesman for the Saudi Arabian Embassy said that the F.B.I. recently assured the embassy that there were no concerns that any Saudi accounts at Riggs involved terrorist funds or money laundering. The Equatorial Guinean Embassy did not respond to repeated interview requests.
Amid this turmoil sits Mr. Allbritton, Riggs's controlling shareholder and until 2002 its chief executive. For more than two decades, he has held the reins of a bank that is a highly personal, extraordinarily quirky institution. Riggs is deeply rooted in the history of Washington: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis held accounts there. Today, despite anemic profits and an elfin footprint that would make it a backwater bank in other locales, Riggs has maintained its stature by catering to the glamorous, chauffeur-and-Champagne set that is Washington's elite political and diplomatic corps.
Although Mr. Allbritton and Prince Bandar share a fascination with expensive racehorses, frequent the same spots on the cocktail circuit, and have each courted the Bush family, they do not have a close personal relationship, according to Mr. Allbritton's friends. Even so, friends and banking analysts say that it would have been unusual for Mr. Allbritton and Prince Bandar not to have had regular business contacts, because the Saudis are among Riggs's biggest clients. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudi officials often rolled into a Riggs branch on a Friday and withdrew millions of dollars for, say, a weekend splurge in London, according to individuals familiar with the transactions. Even after the attacks, when Saudi institutions were criticized by federal officials for possibly financing terrorism, it took Riggs more than a year to begin tightening its oversight. A year ago, the bank says, it cautioned the Saudis, as well as embassies from other countries, that the no-questions-asked era was coming to an end.
Mr. Allbritton, who declined to be interviewed, is described by friends as whip-smart and honest. "In business, Joe is one of the most astute people I know," said Lloyd N. Hand, a Washington lawyer and a friend of Mr. Allbritton for 44 years. "He has excellent judgment and is a person of unquestionable integrity."
Over the years, various corporate suitors have had an interest in buying Riggs. But Mr. Allbritton maintained its independence because he coveted the bank's unique entree into foreign affairs and international finance, say banking analysts and others close to him.
As he courted embassies, however, banking analysts say he missed other opportunities to expand the bank's franchise. Riggs has invested in ill-starred ventures close to Mr. Allbritton's heart, such as the thoroughbred breeder Calumet Farms, and failed high-technology deals. Deepening its links to the Bushes, Riggs also bought a money management firm owned by Jonathan Bush, the former president's brother, in 1997.
Mr. Allbritton, now Riggs's vice chairman, retains a seat on the bank's board, which is stocked with company insiders and longtime Allbritton acquaintances like Mr. Valenti. The Allbritton family holds about 53 percent of Riggs's stock, a stake worth about $264 million, and Mr. Allbritton's son, Robert, 35, has been the bank's chairman and chief executive since 2002.
So is Riggs well managed? "Unequivocally, no," responded Henry J. Coffey Jr., a banking analyst at Ferris, Baker, Watts in Washington.
Other analysts agreed. "This is a bank that constantly has had regulatory problems, and it's had them for years," said Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Va. "This investigation is going to draw attention from the highest levels of the U.S. government because it raises questions about how all the embassies in the U.S. are doing banking business here and what kind of money laundering or corruption vulnerabilities exist."
Mr. Allbritton, who was born into humble circumstances in D'Lo, Miss., went on to become a debate champion at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., where he earned a law degree. He grew wealthy as a lawyer and as a bank, insurance, real estate and funeral home investor in Houston and Los Angeles before setting up shop in Washington in 1974.
He discovered Washington's attractions decades after a coterie of ambitious young Texans came to town on Lyndon B. Johnson's coattails - men like Robert Strauss, Leon Jaworski, Mr. Hand and Mr. Valenti, all of whom were or remain close to him.
"The only fair way to describe him politically is to say he has friends who are Republicans and friends who are Democrats, and many of them have ended up in very high places in government," said Gibson Gayle, a retired Houston lawyer who attended Baylor with Mr. Allbritton.
Politics, however, were Mr. Allbritton's secondary passion; business deals were his first. He made a splash when he bought The Washington Star in 1974, but he lost money on the newspaper before selling it to Time Inc. four years later, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the sale.
But Mr. Allbritton held on to three television stations in that deal, one of which, WJLA, is now the centerpiece of Allbritton Communications. Acquaintances say the communications company, privately held, is Mr. Allbritton's most valuable asset - meaning that his likely total net worth is far more than $500 million.
THE sale of The Star left Mr. Allbritton on the hunt for another prized local property, which he found in Riggs. He joined its board as an outside investor in 1980 and, wasting little time, took over the bank a year later. During his tenure, Riggs was always well funded, allowing it to weather a real estate lending bust in the early 1990's.
But Riggs's Washington location and its international reach sometimes landed it in the middle of messes that most midsize banks elsewhere would never dream of encountering. The investigation of the C.I.A. spy Aldrich Ames in 1994 turned up Riggs accounts flush with funds from Mr. Ames's Russian handlers. The bank also bought and later sold a stake in a Channel Islands company called Valmet that helped move funds for the jailed Russian oil billionaire Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, transactions that became fodder in the sprawling money-laundering investigation of the Bank of New York in the late 1990's.
None of these problems, however, are anything like the firestorm now engulfing Riggs. Besides the F.B.I., the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Governmental Affairs and two Treasury Department agencies are investigating Riggs's Saudi Arabian and Equatorial Guinean accounts for possible improprieties.
A Riggs spokesman said the bank has been cooperating with all of the investigations, has not "willfully" violated any laws and "has no indication that we are or ever were the target of an F.B.I. investigation."
The investigation was prompted by an examination of transactions of Riggs accounts controlled by Prince Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa, in 2002. At the time, F.B.I. officials were investigating whether money from the accounts of the princess helped finance the hijackers responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. The F.B.I. told The New York Times in late 2002 that it had found no evidence that the money went to the hijackers.
Nonetheless, Prince Bandar's banking habits soon became the focus of attention again, according to individuals with direct knowledge of the transactions. One of the prince's representatives deposited several million dollars in foreign currency drafts in the prince's personal Riggs accounts in December, then immediately withdrew half of the amount in cash and half in cashiers' checks, these individuals said. The next day, they said, the same person returned with $500,000 in cash, redeposited it into the prince's account and then wired the money to the prince's European bank accounts.
When Riggs officials asked Prince Bandar to disclose more information about the transactions, he declined, according to people with direct knowledge of the events. In early March, Riggs closed all of its Saudi accounts. Saudi officials declined to discuss the matter, other than to say it was their choice to end the relationship with Riggs.
Riggs, under regulatory supervision, began overhauling its monitoring systems a year ago. It hired new staff members and retained Eugene A. Ludwig, a well-regarded former comptroller of the currency, to help modernize its compliance systems.
"Riggs generally, especially in terms of its back office, has been like a good reliable Oldsmobile when in the post-9/11 world you need a Maserati," said Mr. Ludwig, who also observed that many others have struggled to keep up with stricter financial monitoring guidelines enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks.
While many of the suspect transactions besetting Riggs might have been small enough to escape easy notice, some were quite large and should have raised alarms, according to two people with direct knowledge of them. And many of those involved Equatorial Guinea, a poor country plagued by human-rights abuses and ruled by a dictator named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
Mr. Obiang assumed power in 1979 after his uncle was killed in a military coup. The United States ended diplomatic relations with his government in the mid-1990's but rekindled relations last year as the Bush administration moved to support efforts to tap new oil supplies outside the Middle East. Equatorial Guinean officials opened government and personal accounts at Riggs in 1995.
EXXON MOBIL entered into a profit-sharing arrangement with Mr. Obiang's government in order to secure drilling rights there. A company spokesman said that Exxon could not discuss "specific components" of the contract because it is confidential, but that it pays the regime income taxes, oil royalties and undisclosed "legal obligations" as part of the agreement. About $360 million derived from that contract was deposited into what Exxon Mobil and Riggs describe as a government treasury account at Riggs. The account requires multiple signatories, according to an individual with direct knowledge of it, but a federal investigator said that Mr. Obiang exercises authority over it.
Others also have concerns about the accounts. "Were these actually treasury accounts and, if so, why does the government have treasury accounts in a private bank abroad?" asked Sarah Wykes, a spokeswoman at Global Witness, a British environmental and human rights advocacy group that has written a critical study of Mr. Obiang's government and its relationship with Exxon Mobil.
Last fall, and again earlier this year, troubles within the Obiang government's Riggs accounts boiled over. In September, bank officials identified millions of dollars in questionable funds that flowed through a Riggs account opened under the name of a corporation called Otong starting in 1999, according to a report dated Jan. 30 that Riggs filed with federal regulators. Mr. Obiang controls Otong, according to a federal investigator briefed on the matter.
Mr. Kareri, the Riggs executive overseeing all of the Equatorial Guinea accounts at the time, told the bank's own investigators last September that money in the Otong account had come from overseas accounts that Mr. Obiang had closed - an explanation that Riggs and federal investigators have found unsatisfactory. Federal officials are looking into the possibility that Otong funds were used to bribe employees of American companies or involved the proceeds of political graft.
In January, matters became worse. Riggs investigators discovered that Mr. Kareri approached Mr. Obiang's son in Washington last year and solicited money to buy a car, according to three people with direct knowledge of the event. Mr. Obiang's son gave Mr. Kareri an undated, signed $40,000 check with no payee designated, these people said. Mr. Kareri, they said, then altered the check to change its value to $140,000, wrote a friend's name on the payee line, and then maneuvered to have the funds redirected to his wife.
Mr. Kareri was questioned about the transaction in January, suspended and then fired a few weeks later. A grand jury has been convened to weigh fraud evidence against him. He could not be reached for comment.
DURING the bank's investigation of Mr. Kareri, Riggs officials discovered that some funds from Equatorial Guinea's oil accounts at Riggs were transmitted to Luxembourg and the Canary Islands, suggesting that money was being diverted for questionable reasons. They contacted Mr. Obiang in Equatorial Guinea, and he traveled to Washington in February to meet with them. After being questioned further, he refused to discuss the matter, according to people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Riggs closed all of Equatorial Guinea's accounts at the bank shortly thereafter, but not soon enough for regulators disenchanted with the bank's vulnerabilities.
"Riggs told regulators that had Kareri not overseen the accounts this wouldn't have happened," said an individual involved in the investigations. "But that's like saying, 'Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?' "
The Obiang debacle led regulators to consider fines against the bank and to label it a "troubled institution," according to this same individual. Moreover, this person said, the Obiang problem erased whatever good will Riggs had earned by righting its monitoring woes over the last year.
Now Mr. Allbritton and his bank are left to face whatever results from the continuing investigations of Riggs accounts. "Riggs resembles a garden auger," said Gary Townsend, a banking analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey. "They dig themselves further underground with each turn of the screw."
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Quote:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/13/news/thatch.php
Mark Thatcher pleads guilty in plot
South African court suspends his sentence
By Michael WinesPublished: FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2005
JOHANNESBURG: Mark Thatcher, the son of a British political legend who became mired last year in a bizarre Equatorial Guinea coup plot, abandoned his claims of innocence on Thursday and pleaded guilty in a Cape Town Court to helping finance mercenaries who were behind the failed putsch.
But as part of a plea agreement that spared him a potential prison sentence, Thatcher maintained that his role was unwitting, and that he believed he was investing in a helicopter service for a mining venture until he began to doubt the project's true goals in early January 2004.
The coup attempt collapsed spectacularly that March, as Equatorial Guinea's security police rolled up a network of 20 suspected plotters and the Zimbabwe police arrested 70 more at the Harare airport as the mercenaries' jet landed to pick up a weapons shipment. Most are now in prison.
On Thursday Thatcher, 50, admitted to violating South Africa's Foreign Military Assistance Act, which bars civilians from involvement in military activities abroad without government permission. He was fined three million rand, or about $500,000, and given a four-year suspended prison sentence.
He was expected to leave immediately for the United States, where his American-born wife and their two children have lived since the South African police arrested Thatcher in August. His attorney, George van Niekerk, said in a written statement that Thatcher "will continue to cooperate, to the limited extent of his knowledge," with a South African inquiry into mercenary activity tied to the coup.
The plea agreement was nevertheless an ignominious admission for Thatcher, the son of Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who dominated British politics for much of the 1980s. Mark Thatcher's legal team had dismissed charges against him as "nonsense" after his August arrest, and accused the government's national police service, the Scorpions, of grandstanding by seeking to drag a public figure into a messy scandal.
In the plea agreement released Thursday, Thatcher admitted not only that he had suspected before he committed $275,000 to the purported mining venture that the money was bound for a West African mercenary operation, but that he had made the investment "despite his misgivings."
The agreement was also a symbolic victory for South Africa's government, which has long been accused of failing to enforce its laws regulating mercenaries. Decades of southern African conflict in the late 20th century made South Africa a training ground for soldiers of fortune. Executive Outcomes, a now-defunct South African mercenary company organized by the accused mastermind of the Equatorial Guinea coup, Simon Mann, was the template for many of the for-profit armies operating today in trouble spots like Iraq.
Now serving a seven-year term in Zimbabwe's notorious Chikurubi Prison, Mann was Thatcher's friend and Cape Town neighbor. On Thursday a Zimbabwean judge reduced Mann's prison sentence for illegal arms dealing from seven to four years.
In Thursday's plea agreement and in the attorney's public statement, Thatcher was cast as a sidelines player in a sprawling effort to unseat Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the unchallenged ruler of a nation which would go unnoticed except for the fact that offshore gushers have lately made it one of Africa's largest oil producers.
Obiang asserts that the plotters sought to bring a political exile, Severo Moto, to rule what is now regarded as Africa's most repressive dictatorship. Others believe that control of the country's oil, pumped mostly by American producers, was behind the coup attempt.....
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Quote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ma/6718831.stm
Princes, Planes and Pay-offs
By Jane Corbin
Panorama
For 21 years allegations of kickbacks have swirled round the biggest arms deal in history - Al Yamamah, the 'dove of peace'
Ever since Mrs Thatcher stepped off her plane resplendent in a Tory blue suit and veiled hat to greet the Saudi King and seal the Tornado warplane sale, the story has generated acres of speculation in newsprint and hours of broadcast time.
Rumours about her own son, Mark's role as a broker have featured large in the headlines.
But until Panorama broke the story of secret payments into accounts controlled by Prince Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, no journalists had got to the heart of the matter.
Politically sensitive
We have provided for the first time details of the mechanism involving BAE Systems with the approval of the British Ministry of Defence in the transfer of hundreds of millions of pounds into accounts controlled by Prince Bandar.
KEY DOCUMENTS
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It took the Panorama team, myself and colleagues James Oliver and Guy Smith several months of exhaustive research and filming to untangle the threads.
There were many long meetings with our well-placed sources who in this politically sensitive story did not want to appear in our film.
But as always in a tale involving allegations of fraud or corruption the maxim is 'follow the money'.
So that is what we did. It took us to Switzerland, France, Germany and America where we met an ex-secret service investigator - David Caruso.
Spotters all over the globe have monitored the movement of Prince Bandar's luxury Airbus over the years
Mr Caruso had never spoken before in detail before about the Saudi embassy accounts he was asked to look at in 2003 by Riggs Bank - bankers to Prince Bandar and his embassy in Washington.
Mr Caruso confirmed to us that the accounts we were interested in had been used as a personal piggy bank by the Prince.
The probe had started post 9/11 when most of the hijackers turned out to be Saudis and there were suspicions they might have been receiving funding via the Saudi embassy.
Suspicious payments
No links to terrorism were found but Mr Caruso did identify 'suspicious payments' he told us in some of the accounts.
Amongst them was the Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation account which our information indicated might well have been better described as a conduit to Prince Bandar.
An internal Riggs Bank document we obtained showed that the Prince had taken $17 million (£8.5 million) out of this account in the summer of 2003 for a construction project in Saudi Arabia.
Mr Caruso confirmed the investigators had been told it was for a home - or rather a palace for the Prince.
Riggs Bank was never able to get satisfactory answers to their questions about the accounts which contained hundreds of millions of pounds.
So Riggs closed them down and terminated its relationship with Prince Bandar and the embassy. The Prince later told us in a statement the account was for purposes approved by the Saudi Ministry and not for his personal use. The palace he said was an official residence.
Globe trotting
Some of the more light hearted moments in making the film occurred when we were introduced to the arcane world of plane spotting.
Spotters all over the globe have monitored the movement of Prince Bandar's luxury Airbus over the years and they were able to give us valuable information about dates and times which helped us put our story together....
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020903154.html
Saudi Prince's Assets Blocked
He and Riggs Bank Face Bribe Lawsuit
Associated Press
Sunday, February 10, 2008; A09
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the former Saudi ambassador to the United States from removing real estate sales proceeds from the United States, pending resolution of a class-action lawsuit.
The suit was filed last September by a tiny Michigan city's retirement system. It accuses current and former directors of BAE Systems, a giant British defense company, of breaching their fiduciary duties in connection with $2 billion or more in alleged illegal bribes paid to Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
Bandar also is named a defendant in the suit, along with the former Riggs Bank of Washington and its successor, PNC Financial Group.
BAE and Bandar have strongly denied that illegal payments were made to Bandar.
Without ruling on the merits of the case, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said in a temporary restraining order, signed Tuesday, that the suit by the City of Harper Woods Employees' Retirement System raises serious questions of law that warrant a temporary order keeping Bandar from taking the proceeds of real estate sales out of U.S.-based accounts.
The order notes that "it may, of course, be terminated or modified upon application to the Court by Prince Bandar." A hearing was set for this Thursday on whether to extend the temporary order.
The retirement system suit maintains that Bandar used funds illicitly obtained from BAE Systems to acquire U.S. real estate, including a Colorado ranch and mansion once placed on the market at $135 million and the former William Randolph Hearst mansion in California, offered for sale last summer at $165 million.
Harper Woods is a community of 14,200 people covering 2 2/3 square miles bordering the northeast corner of Detroit. It is the home of Eastland Center, one of the Detroit area's first enclosed shopping malls.
A message seeking comment on the case was left last night at the office of Harper Woods City Manager James Leidlein.
Bandar had denied previously through a London law firm that he received improper commissions through accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington.
"The accounts at Riggs Bank were in the name of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense and Aviation [MODA]. Any payments into those accounts made by BAE were pursuant to the Al-Yamamah contracts and as such would not in any way have been secret from the parties to those contracts," Bandar's statement said. Al-Yamamah was the name given to an agreement under which BAE supplied Tornado fighter jets and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia, which paid the British government with oil.
"Whilst Prince Bandar was an authorized signatory on the accounts any monies paid out of those accounts were exclusively for purposes approved by MODA," the statement said. "In addition, the accounts in question were audited on an annual basis by the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Finance on behalf of MODA."
In London, lawmakers disclosed last month that Britain's head of overseas intelligence had warned that Saudi Arabia probably would stop sharing vital information on terrorism if prosecutors pursued an investigation into alleged corruption involving the kingdom.
MI6, Britain's overseas intelligence service, believed Saudi Arabia would probably end information-sharing with Britain if investigators continued the inquiry, former attorney general Peter Goldsmith told the committee. MI6 raised objections to the prosecution before Britain's Serious Fraud Office decided to end the case, he said.
After the inquiry was dropped, Saudi Arabia signed a $8.7 billion agreement with Britain to buy 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets from BAE.
The company announced last June that the Justice Department has begun an investigation of the company's dealings with Saudi Arabia, looking into whether it complied with anti-corruption laws.
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http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?sortB...d=070702000587
WORLD NEWS: Al-Yamamah deal: the Saudi foreign policy connection
By Stephen Fidler in London, Financial Times
Published: Jul 02, 2007
Investigators from the US Department of Justice examining BAE Systems' compliance with anti-corruption laws in its arms dealings with Saudi Arabia will find themselves scrutinising a deal that was used, with the help of the British government, as a secret tool of Saudi foreign policy.
BAE said last week that the DoJ had launched a formal inquiry into the 20-year-old Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
The Al-Yamamah agreement, originally signed in 1985 by the Saudi and British governments to pay for the Saudi purchase of Tornado jets, was employed to distribute Saudi oil revenues outside the country's official budget. "It was a way of Saudis paying money to Saudis," said one person involved in the deal.
The mechanism has been used to pay for more than combat aircraft. According to one account, it bought arms from Egypt for the Mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan and paid for clandestine purchases of Russian arms to oust Libyan troops from Chad.
BAE serviced this contract and has always denied wrongdoing associated with it, arguing that its work was part of a government-to-government arrangement. If the payments were approved by the British and Saudi governments, how could it be doing anything illegal?
The arrangement, at least initially, involved a special account controlled by the Saudis, at the Bank of England. This would receive funds from the sale of Saudi oil lifted and sold by BP and Royal Dutch Shell, which took a commission. Press reports in 1996 suggested this exact arrangement changed - but over nearly two decades, tens of billions of dollars were directed through it.
The first oil lifting under the contract was on January 31 1986 of 1.8m to 1.9m barrels. The Saudis agreed to deliver 300,000 barrels per day [plus or minus 10 per cent] for the first three years of the contract. The amount of oil delivered varied with fluctuating oil prices up to a reported maximum of 600,000 bpd in 1993, when a new and expanded contract called Al-Yamamah 2 came into force, and fell to 400,000 in 1998 after the last Tornado was delivered. At times, the kingdom replenished the account with cash - and at other times there was a surplus that was available for distribution.
Some or all of the payments from the Bank of England account were routed through the UK's Defence Export Services Organisation, part of the Ministry of Defence. For this service, the MoD was paid a small commission.
UK media reports have alleged Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and now national security adviser to King Abdullah, received more than £1bn from BAE as part of these arrangements.
Prince Bandar has dismissed the allegations as "grotesque in their absurdity". He has said the payments came from a Saudi government account and were paid into another account belonging to the Saudi ministry of defence and aviation, to which he was a signatory. BAE was not a party to any of the accounts.
A 2006 biography of Prince Bandar, which enjoyed the prince's co-operation, describes the barter arrangement as one that "circumvented the bureaucracy". This included the US Congress, whose original objections to the proposed purchase of F-15 fighters led the Saudis to turn to the UK and bring Al-Yamamah into being.
The book, The Prince, by William Simpson, quotes "sources close to Bandar" as saying: "Al-Yamamah picks up the tab; Saudi Arabia will sign with the French or whoever, and Britain pays them on their behalf . . . If Saudi Arabia wants some services from the Americans, or some weapon systems that they have to buy now . . . and they can't get it from their current defence budget, then they simply tell Al-Yamamah, 'You divert that money'."
This and other descriptions paint a picture of British flexibility and discretion that suited the Saudis after their difficulties with the US Congress. BAE became the prime contractor for Saudi defence procurement - and even payments for the maintenance of US aircraft in the kingdom were made through this mechanism.
Prince Bandar said that the account to which Al-Yamamah funds had been allegedly directed at Riggs Bank in Washington had been audited by the Saudi ministry of finance. He pointed out that previous US investigations into the Riggs account had found no wrongdoing.
However, at least one investigator who has examined those accounts has said it was hard to distinguish between public and private use of Saudi funds.
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Last edited by host; 05-26-2008 at 02:37 AM..
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02-16-2008, 03:04 PM
