Prepared Mr. Stuart Eizenstat
Partner
Covington and Burling
10:00 a.m., Wednesday, September 26, 2001 - Dirksen 538
The unhappy experience of the Bank of New York highlights the vulnerability of our financial institutions. The Bank was involved in an alleged money laundering scheme in which more than $7 billion was transmitted from Russia into the Bank through various offshore secrecy jurisdictions. At least one relatively senior official of the Bank was suborned, and she suborned others. We do not know to this day how much of the money came from the accounts of the Russian "Mafiya," how much represented assets stolen in the course of the privatization of state industries — undermining the hopes of Russian reformers — and how much was money hidden to escape legitimate taxation, destroying the fiscal projections on which the reformers depended to lower taxes for ordinary citizens. We do know that the money came out of Russia through accounts in shell banks chartered in places such as the South Pacific island of Nauru. The Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank has estimated that, in 1998 alone, $70 billion was transferred from Russian banks to accounts in banks chartered in Nauru; not all of that money went to Bank of New York, of course, but none of it was ever intended to stay in Nauru.
Eizenstat laments the "unhappy experience" of BONY.
Seven billion here, seven billion there--seventy billion in 1998 alone.
Safra cooperated with the FBI; the chief inspector of Monaco Olivier Jude attended the ten-week FBI National Academy in spring of 1999; December 3 of that year Safra was dead with a plausible patsy to take the heat.
The FBI now finds some chicken feed leading to political figures to shut them the hell up.
While the big sleek rats (Clintons, Rubin, Summers, Harvard, et Russoformers) are never mentioned.
Remarks by Treasury Deputy Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat before the Anti-Corruption Summit 2000
Washington
September 21, 2000
Second, we will push for a stronger role for the IMF, the World Bank and regional development banks in fighting financial abuse. Tomorrow, Secretary Summers will be leaving for Prague where he will urge the IMF, the World Bank, and the regional development banks to intensify their work in combating financial abuses of the global financial system. This new effort would not represent an expansion of the mandate of these Bretton Woods institutions; on the contrary we believe that the fight against international money laundering is consistent with and integral to the responsibilities of the IMF and the MDBs to protect the credibility and integrity of the international financial system. The IMF and the World Bank already engage in helping countries develop and reform their financial systems, to adopt good governance and to fight corruption. We are not asking the Fund or Bank to be policeman. But we believe both can play a greater role in fighting abuse and preserving the integrity of the international financial system in areas that are within the scope of their mandates.
We will be asking the Fund and Bank to institutionalize the fight against financial abuse through various avenues, including technical assistance, surveillance, financial sector assessments, and lending conditionality, where relevant and appropriate. The Bank and the Fund are uniquely well placed to perform analytic and diagnostic work on financial abuse issues. We also believe country programs and loan operations should incorporate appropriate conditions designed to help countries make real and measurable progress in combating money laundering. In Prague, Secretary Summers will also call on both the Fund and Bank to prepare a joint paper on their respective roles in combating financial abuse, for final consideration next Spring.
Safra was said to have aided the Russians by laundering $4.8 billion through his Republic Bank. Which he sold to HSBC, finalized the day of his death.
Eizenstat--during the Clinton Administration under Summers--is here assuring the assembly that, the horses having been stolen and unaccounted for, the barn will now be locked.
And now Eizenstat skips off to serve that impeccable institution Menatep.
May 12, 1999
Stuart Eizenstat, a senior State Department official who was a top adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was nominated by Clinton to replace Summers as deputy secretary.