CHICAGO - An indicted businessman who poured thousands of dollars into the campaigns of Barack Obama and other politicians was jailed Monday after prosecutors disclosed he received $3.5 million from an Iraqi billionaire [UK-based Nadhmi Auchi] while claiming to be broke. Real estate developer and fast-food entrepreneur Antoin “Tony” Rezko was arrested Monday at his home in Wilmette and held after his attorneys failed to dissuade Judge Amy J. St. Eve from revoking his $2 million bond. “This defendant has played a shell game and I think misled the court about what his assets are,” federal prosecutor Reid J. Schar said.-----http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080129/ap_on_re_us/fundraiser_indictedAn Iraqi billionaire wanted in a corruption case involving the former French oil giant Elf gave himself up yesterday. Nadhmi Auchi, 65, appeared at the law courts in Paris just before the case was due to restart. Mr Auchi is one of 37 defendants in the biggest corporate graft trial in French history. ---- "People: Iraqi billionaire faces Paris fraud trial," Independent, The (London), May 6, 2003
The French court heard that in 1991 Elf paid 3.6 billion pesetas to the Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi for his help in purchasing the Spanish Ertoil refinery. The French oil giant was unable to buy the refinery outright because it was waiting for clearance from the European financial authorities. Auchi's job was to caretake the refinery for Elf and he later received a further commission after the US company Conaco made a bid for the refinery. But Auchi struggled to explain why he paid 1.4bn pesetas into an account at the Banque Continentale de Luxembourg belonging to an Irish haulage company called Travlane. When the French investigators looked into the accounts they found that its sole purpose was to act as the conduit for kickbacks paid to Sirven. -----"Mystery of Irish address at centre of fraud scandal," by Martin Bright, The Observer, Sunday May 11, 2003
Democrats...I hear the “It’s a small, small world” playing in the background.
Thanks for the update, piasa.
The above article gives historical and background information. Interesting read.
Fugitive French Oil Exec Alfred Sirven Arrested
February 2001
``I want to protect all those who helped me, I will say nothing,'' Sirven told Le Parisien in an interview conducted before he left the Philippines.Among other things, the above below reads like a list of who's who among international political criminals. An excerpt:``My work in this company was mixed with politics, and that is never good. I could hand over about a hundred names ... but it doesn't interest me,'' Sirven said. ``If I am forced to speak, it will be at the risk and peril of those who force me.''
``I am a tired man. I have blood pressure problems, I could have a heart attack at any moment -- please do not irritate me,'' he said. ``But I swear on my grandchildren that everything that has been said about me is not true.''
* * * Sirven also figures in allegations that former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl accepted bribes for his Christian Democratic party in the sale of the Leuna oil refinery in former communist East Germany to Elf in the 1990s.
At a French Trial, a Tale Unfolds of Graft on High
April 2003
But the real scandal, according to the prosecution, is the way a small team of executives bilked what at the time was the world's eighth largest oil company of at least $260 million while it was still government owned.Elf Verdicts Reveal State Corruption at Highest LevelsThe argument of the lawyers for Mr. Le Floch-Prigent, Mr. Sirven and Mr. Tarallo is that they are scapegoats, prosecuted for operating within a system that they did not devise and that ultimately benefited French politicians.
This month, Mr. Floch-Prigent, who was chairman of Elf from 1989 to 1993, described how French politicians regularly collected envelopes with money from the company to finance their campaigns. He said the money traditionally benefited the conservative Gaullist Rally for the Republic, as the party of President Jacques Chirac was formerly known. But he said François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, devised a system to benefit both sides.
* * * Mr. Le Floch-Prigent said the politicians were paid the equivalent of $5 million a year. But Mr. Sirven, asked to comment on that figure, replied, ''It seems to me to be particularly weak.'' He added that, ''in reality it was much, much, much higher,'' and took forms other than cash, including real estate and other gifts.Scrutiny of Elf's books disclosed immense unaccounted-for sums that led to the charges against Mr. Le Floch-Prigent, Mr. Sirven and Mr. Tarallo. Leaks to the French press and the jailing of prominent figures like Mr. Dumas helped bring out details of just how hundreds of millions of dollars flowed from Elf to politicians in France, Africa and perhaps elsewhere.
Some 10 people who "knew too much" have already died in dubious circumstances, of which four are considered extremely suspect by examining magistrates in France. One of these is Thierry Imbert, member of the secret service department, the DGSE, of which his father had been the director from 1985 to 1987. The story is that he fell from his Paris apartment window while fixing the shutter and died on October 10, 2000. However, his father has caused some embarrassment by insisting that his son had told him that he had the details of how the commissions were shared out not only in the case of the frigates, but also in the sale of Mirage 2000 planes. He asserted: "My son had told me that people in Taiwan and France, at the highest level in Thompson, had made colossal fortunes out of these contracts".First World Criminals, Third World Crimes - Part 2:
(3) Elf allegedly made still more payoffs in China and Taiwan in connection with a 1991 arms deal – including millions of dollars that were allegedly paid to Zhu Rongii, the former Mayor of Shanghai who served as China’s Premier from 1998 to 2003, and to Foreign Minister Dumas, to secure their tacit approval for the deal.Zhu Rongii and Clinton
These payments were reportedly made by Elf’s network in connection with the sale of six frigates to Taiwan by Thompson-CSF, another French company, in 1991. On this deal alone, the commissions reportedly totaled more than 30 percent of the $2.5 billion purchase price.
(4) Elf also allegedly made huge payoffs to Nadhmi Auchi, an obscure Iraqi-British billionaire who is reputedly Britain’s seventh wealthiest man, the largest shareholder in BNP Paribas, and – according to some – one of Saddam Hussein’s oldest cronies and private bankers. (They both took part in the attempted assassination of Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Qasim in October 1959.).
Nadhmi Auchi
The Elf payoffs to Auchi, which he reportedly passed on to Spanish politicians and partly kicked back to Elf officials, were made in connection with its 1991 purchase of Ertoil, a Kuwaiti-owned oil refinery in Spain. Auchi, one of the 37 people charged by the French court, was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million, after having been found guilty of accepting illegal commissions from Elf worth $84 million.
FINANCIAL CRIME NEWS
September 2004
Recent public hearings and investigations into transactions at Riggs Bank in Washington DC have called attention to the practices of oil companies of routing payments of cash and other benefits to the leaders of oil-producing countries directly as well as through banks, intermediaries, and front companies.(See News story "Riggs Bank sold after $25 million fine assessed by OCC," August 2, 2004). These practices were at the heart of a major political and financial scandal that dominated headlines in France for several years. It concerned the activities of Elf Aquitaine Internationale, a major international oil company which was the owned by the French government. Sine the scandal Elf was privatized and was taken over by Total, another French oil company.Alfred Sirven diedThe Elf Scandal, or "L'affaire Elf," as it became known, began with a 1993 investigation by the Commission des opérations de bourse (COB, the national agency which regulates stock market activity in France). The COB inquiry was directed, not originally at Elf, but at Maurice Bidermann, the head of a textile and clothing manufacturing company which had been involved in a heated lawsuit with a Bidermann associate in the United States. As information began to emerge that Bidermann had been getting clandestine infusions of financing from Elf Aquitaine, the COB realized that it had opened the lid on a potentially explosive case with possible criminal implications. The Bidermann case was passed to the French investigative authorities.
When Elf bought the Leuna oil refinery in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the local Christian Democrats were induced to agree with yet more cash. Some of that money, as well as direct contributions from Elf, ended up in the Federal CDU's coffers - a very good reason for the excellent ties between Mitterand and Helmut Kohl that was only exposed years later in the "Spendenaffäre" scandal that finished Kohl's career.
* * * Sirven's role had been crucial; he had signed off the money, helped to decide the targets and dispatched Andre Tarallo, Elf's director of corporate affairs, with actual bags of real raw cash to dish out the payoffs. When the story broke, he vanished with uncommon success. For several years, his location was a mystery. Later, journalists tracked him down to the Philippines, but the Filipino authorities were strangely unable to find him. The reason was no doubt financial. After President Estrada was deposed in a revolution, though, the Filipino police suddenly realised where he lived.
Thanks for your posts...as you likely noticed...I find them intriguing, to say the least.
holy ####...