Posted on 12/02/2002 10:10:36 AM PST by tracer
Reported five minutes ago -- no ther details yet found..
No,if I remember correctly,he checked out.
Any info?
Not a bit. I'm GUESSING that the 10 year sentence will be commuted to "time served" within a year or so. He's already been held for a couple of years,and that counts towards his sentence. ALL of this is just speculation on my part,though.
Although this article does not state that Maher signed any confessions under duress, it surely doesn't pose a pretty picture for "poor" Lily and raises considerable doubt about the charges against Maher. If I was this same "mourning widow," I guess I should no suspicions should be cast my way, either [/ sarcasm]:
11/24/02: Independentco.uk
Focus: Richer than the Queen (and considerably better connected)
She's the world's wealthiest widow (£700m and counting), London's flashiest socialite and Monaco's star murder trial witness. But just who is 'Gilded' Lily Safra? Sonia Purnell finds out.
They call her the Gilded Lily. She is said to be the world's wealthiest widow, with a fortune estimated at £700m. In comparison to 65-year-old Lily Safra, even the Queen looks hard up, and rather less well connected. Driven round London in an enormous armoured BMW, Mrs Safra is protected 24 hours a day by a posse of bodyguards and by sophisticated security systems at her six-storey, £23m home in Eaton Square.
Four years ago, she was barely known in Britain. Today, she is among the most powerful people in London's social and philanthropic circuits. She has become friends with the Prince of Wales, lavishing money on his charity, The Prince's Trust, and rubs shoulders with Camilla Parker Bowles, Lord Rothschild and Sir Elton John.
Mrs Safra's influence is more significant than a few mentions in the diary columns. She is changing the tone of London. Under her influence, it is becoming more like New York, where social position is defined not by what you have, but by how much you can afford to give away to worthy causes. For instance, she donated £8m to Somerset House for the computer-controlled fountains in its magnificent courtyard, and managed to arrange, against fierce opposition, for it to be named after her late husband Edmond, a banker.
But such a rapid social conquest, proof, if it were needed, that money buys access to the highest levels of London life, is threatened by the trial being held in Monaco of the American male nurse who is accused of killing her husband in 1999. This week, Mrs Safra takes the witness stand, and high society across Europe is salivating at the prospect of any number of possible revelations about the Safras' rarefied world of private banking billions. Throw in mysterious clients, bumbling police, a socially ambitious widow, and the highly charged atmosphere of Monte Carlo and you could hardly hope for a more enticing mix.
Ted Maher, 44, who had been hired to help care for Mr Safra, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, has admitted he lit a fire in a waste-paper bin in his employer's Monte Carlo penthouse. He hoped to win Mr Safra's favour by pretending they were being attacked, then "save" him. But the fire raged out of control.
Mr Safra who believed assassins might be behind the fire, died with another nurse after refusing to leave his locked bathroom. His wife, who pleaded with him to leave, escaped unharmed. There have already been wild allegations that Mr Maher's wife was kidnapped by the Monaco police, and unfavourable comments that two out of Lily's four husbands have died in mysterious and tragic circumstances. She has also been sued by Mr Safra's three sisters over £14m they believed was owed to them from his will – although that is now resolved – and has fallen out with his brother.
There have even been murmurings about whether Mr Safra's great friend Prince Rainier intervened behind the scenes in a cover-up because he wanted to protect his principality's tax-haven reputation.
Questions have been asked about why Mr Safra's usual round-the-clock bodyguards were told to take that night off. And where are the security videotapes that should have recorded what happened?
So concerned is Mrs Safra at any possible further damage to her standing that she has hired the services of Prince Charles's spinmeister Mark Bolland (on the recommendation of Camilla and Lord Rothschild) to handle her image. He is already paid £120,000 a year by the prince for part-time PR consultancy, but he is expected to make much more from her.
It is all a far cry from her early days as Lily Watkins, the daughter of a Russian Jewish émigré, she tells friends, who made a modest fortune exporting British railway carriages to Brazil. Conflicting reports about her childhood suggest she was born in Mitcham, Surrey, or in Uruguay.
What is known is that she speaks five languages – English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese, and is working on Russian – and that she acquired her wealth from her four husbands. She speaks English with an indefinable foreign accent. She "charms charmingly" say even her critics, and one friend describes her as "a serious, clever, quite devout but tough person, not silly or giggly, who has dressed in sombre clothes since her husband died".
Another acquaintance said her determination to retain her youthful looks had left her face "with wide-open eyes and a slightly strange look that makes it difficult to tell exactly what age she really is. She has also taken to wearing a lot of black eye make-up recently".
Still X-ray thin – and fond of sporting a quantity of costly diamond and platinum jewellery – she started married life with Mario Cohen at 19, and they had three children. Then she became Mrs Freddy Monteverde, wife of a Brazilian hosiery magnate, who, says Brazilian police, committed suicide because he was depressed. He left her with £160m, but there were also unhelpful stories that Mr Monteverde had mysteriously shot himself twice in the heart and police had not arrived on the scene for almost seven hours.
A quick third marriage followed, but Mrs Safra had already turned to Edmond for financial advice. They married in 1976 and lived in a sumptuous six-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York, with a guest suite at the Pierre Hotel for friends. Mr Safra, a Lebanese-born Sephardic Jewish financier whose private bank attracted a mix of clients from royalty to film stars, had always led a quiet, workaholic life but his fashionable new wife soon became a leading player in the socially competitive charity circuit in Manhattan. Society began commenting on their "meteoric rise to social power".
Status was important; the Safras wanted the social cachet enjoyed by the Rothschilds. After all, the couple – worth an estimated £3bn – had all the required material trappings of the mega-rich, including their lavish hilltop mansion La Leopolda, which is claimed to have the best sea views in the south of France. It was built by King Leopold of the Belgians in the style of a Roman villa.
Since the death of her husband, Mrs Safra has continued to entertain on a lavish scale at any of her homes across the globe. Fortunately, Mr Safra reportedly changed his will shortly before he died, leaving a large part of his fortune to her, as well as to his charitable foundation. As long as she can get this lurid and exotic trial safely behind her, there will be no stopping her remorseless scaling of the social heights.
How many billions of Russian Aid money was laundered through Safra's bank?
Safra was apparently discussing that with authorities around the time of his demise.
"Challenging him"???Well, Dave S, you feel you have to challenge someone to get him to make his post more understandable. I don't really challenge someone for a cause so trivial as this. I just ask them. Betcha, I will get the information quicker than you. I also heard the news on the radio. I would have known what he was talking about,if I had been the first post.
Billionaires' Benidorm [Ted Maher case, Monaco]
The Spectator (UK) ^ | 11/30/2002 | Philip Delves Broughton
Posted on 12/02/2002 5:02 PM EST by dighton
Philip Delves Broughton, in Monaco for the trial of Ted Maher, finds that the principality is a rotten little retirement home for fat cats
It was bucketing down in Monte Carlo and the casino was empty. Croupiers sat forlornly at the tables in the gilded Salle d'Europe and in the large private rooms at the back, overlooking a sheer drop to the Mediterranean. Several of them were horsing around with the sticks they use to gather in chips. The restaurant tablecloths were starched and laid with silver, but the waiters had no one to serve. A few old birds in dodgy leather jackets pulled away at the one-armed bandits.
In the bar at the Hôtel de Paris, I ordered a drink and listened to the pianist play "Strangers in the Night". The only others there were a Japanese couple, he in a dinner jacket, she in a sparkling gown, who sat edgily in their chairs like guests who had overdressed for a party. Earlier that evening, Dominick Dunne, Vanity Fair's aged society scribe, had sat in one corner drinking a Coke. He was in town for the trial of Edmond Safra's nurse, Ted Maher. In court, Dunne sat up with the defence lawyers, though his studiously superior image came undone when he wandered through the courtroom on the second day of the trial with his shirt poking out of his flies.
He, though, is the reason why the rest of us reporters were there. Dunne has written at length about the Safra case - Maher has been charged with arson resulting in his boss's death - ratcheting it up into the Riviera's answer to the O.J. trial. The ladies with whom he lunches on Madison Avenue want answers.
Safra was a Syrian-born private banker who made billions finding devious and discreet ways to handle Middle Eastern fortunes. Not long before he died, he tipped off the FBI to Russian money-laundering through Wall Street banks. He also sold his bank, the Republic Bank of New York, to HSBC for about £6 billion. After Prince Rainier, he was probably the most powerful man in Monaco.
He had a controversial wife, Lily, who had been married three times, to her considerable financial advantage, before she married Safra in 1976. From Dunne you get the sense that certain people are just desperate for her to be linked in some dark way with her husband's death. She is petite, with the kind of joyless eyes you see in people who go to too many benefit evenings.
But the real villain so far has turned out to be Monaco itself. It has come across as a rotten little retirement home, with all the glamour of hernia pants. You have never seen so many sad-looking billionaires. It is hard to foul up a series of rocky inlets along the Mediterranean, but Monaco has managed it, becoming a rich man's Benidorm, with tower blocks crowding down to the sea. Even at night, with the lights on, it's an eyesore. In Monaco surveillance cameras scan the streets and policemen are everywhere. When you check into your hotel, your passport is photocopied and filed; same at the casino.
Ted Maher got up on the second day of his trial and told the court that he had barely slept the night before. His guard, he said, had come by every 40 minutes to shine a torch in his face. His possessions had been rifled through the day before. One of his lawyers told me, "There are lots of people who want to see him shaky on the stand." Maher has already spent three years in prison waiting for Monaco's legal system, which must either be shambolic or corrupt, to get its act together.
Journalists, businessmen and lawyers working in Monaco have complained for years that their telephones are tapped. The government grants and rescinds Monaco's precious residency papers based on loyalty to its way of doing things. This has not stopped a new influx of Brits, who prefer Monaco to the rainy Channel Islands or the distant Caymans. Le Monde reported recently that the principality is encouraging British newcomers after its experience with men such as the Barclay brothers, who own the Ritz, the corporate raider Philip Green and the racehorse owner Michael Tabor.
Provided you can show a few hundred million in cash or equivalents, there are banks such as HSBC Republic to help you with the complicated citizenship procedures in Monaco. The British are now the third most numerous residents of Monaco, after the French and Italians. Monaco likes the British because, unlike the Russians, they seem clean and the principality wants to shed its image as the world's money laundry. It flipped out over recent French government reports that called its banking system corrupt. It wants to be more like Luxembourg and less like Macao.
During his 53-year rule, Prince Rainier, 79, has turned Monaco into a tremendous earner for his family, who are reputedly richer than the Windsors. There is a National Council, elected by Monaco's 30,000 citizens, but the Prince calls the shots. Worryingly for his subjects, he has been in hospital twice this year, and his son Albert looks woefully ill-equipped to succeed him.
Albert likes his Grand Prix, his tennis tournaments, supermodels and luxury-goods launch parties. At 44, he is yet to marry or provide an heir. Earlier this year, Rainier took out an insurance policy by changing the constitution to allow his daughters and their children to succeed Albert if he dies childless.
Rainier's eldest daughter, Caroline, is the most presentable member of the family. Her two teenage children are already French paparazzi favourites. Her weak point is her third husband, Prince Ernst August of Hanover, a belligerent German aristocrat who was caught peeing against the Turkish pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover, prompting apologies from the German government to the Turks.
Then there is Stephanie, who has let her looks go from sexy Euro wild child to overworked welfare mum. For the past two years, she has shared a caravan with a circus elephant-trainer. But she left him this spring, moved back into the palace and started an affair with yet another of her bodyguards.
The Grimaldis' family problems, however, are nothing compared with the damage to Monaco's reputation done by the Safra trial. The police and fire services had nearly two hours to rescue Safra as fire crept through his flat. They bundled away his personal secretary, who was the only man with the keys to the flat, because he was carrying a gun. By the time they got to Safra, he was dead from smoke inhalation.
Georges Kiejeman, Lily Safra's lawyer and formerly François Mitterrand's, has been harrumphing and arguing against the judge in Monaco as if he cannot believe the travesty of justice unfolding before him.
Everyone involved thinks that Monaco is suppressing the truth because Monaco knows that it is nothing if not a place where rich old men can live safely in their penthouse flats. Otherwise, it is not just, as Somerset Maugham said, "a sunny place for shady people", but an ugly, lifeless and dangerous one, too.
© 2002 The Spectator.co.uk
11/24/02: Independentco.uk
Many of those who want to fry him most, didn't even hear his name until today--that's very curious. They know he's guilty without knowing any facts. Even more curious. They've been disinterested in the Ted Maher thread, until today, when they've all suddenly become "expert sleuths." Rather than read the facts, and posts for the past year, they would rather believe the Monaco press reports and flame those here who question their validity. More curious, yet.
And thanks, the three of you, for your posts....I've got to sign off now, perhaps for the night....got some stuff to do here (like pay attention to my family....). Be talking to you all later and have a nice evening.
I agree. FR has been very effective in the past at using the internet and the media to effect change in the world, as you know. This possibly innocent man is facing 10 years in jail. We potentially have the power to free him, and yet BKauthor knows which powerful media personalities (people we could freep to speak out) believe that Maher is innocent, yet he won't say who they are. Doesn't that disgust you? What kind of person would have the power to potentially free Maher, yet refuses to provide the info?
I agree. FR has been very effective in the past at using the internet and the media to effect change in the world, as you know. This possibly innocent man is facing 10 years in jail. We potentially have the power to free him, and yet BKauthor knows which powerful media personalities (people we could freep to speak out) believe that Maher is innocent, yet he won't say who they are. Doesn't that disgust you? What kind of person would have the power to potentially free Maher, yet refuses to provide the info?
Yeah, who's that? Please back that up.
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