NZ
under Key is establishing itself as part of a worldwide web of
corruption and 'punching above its weight' in its contribution to the destruction of all life on this planet.
Unaoil
bribery scandal: New Zealand shell company linked
to Unaoil scandal
The Unaoil company at the centre of a global oil industry bribery network appears to be owned by a New Zealand shell company.
The
Ahsani clan (from left) Saman, Cyrus and Ata, who run the
Monaco-based oil company Unaoil at the centre of worldwide bribery
scandal.
A
Fairfax Media investigation of Unaoil obtained a
document which shows the "wiring diagram" for the
network of Unaoil entities through which giant multi-national
companies channelled bribes to corrupt officials in oil-producing
countries including Iran, Iraq and Libya.
After
a six-month investigation across two continents, Fairfax Media
(publisher of the Sydney
Morning Herald, The
Age and
Stuff) revealed on Thursday that billions of dollars of
government contracts were awarded as the direct result of bribes paid
on behalf of firms including British icon Rolls-Royce, US
giant Halliburton, Australia's Leighton Holdings and Korean
heavyweights Samsung and Hyundai.
The
investigation centres on a Monaco company called Unaoil,
run by the jet-setting Ahsani family.
The
leaked evidence of its own internal email
cache demonstrated that the multimillion-dollar fees Unaoil
takes from its clients were funnelled into an industrial scale
bribery operation which further entrenches corruption among the
powerful few.
The
wiring diagram appears to show Unaoil is owned by UNA Energy
Group Holding of Singapore, and that in turn is owned
by UnaEnergy Trustees based in Auckland.
But
the Auckland company is just a link in the chain, and it is owned in
turn by Fleetwood Trustees, based in the tax haven of St Kitts
and Nevis.
The
Auckland company has three directors, but two at least appear to
be trusts specialists who make a living providing professional
services to others.
They
are Monaco-based Lesley Ann Fogden from Rosemont Monaco SAM, which
calls itself a "multi-family office services company, which
manages trusts, corporations, foundations and other legal
structures and their underlying assets for multiple wealthy
families".
The
Auckland company's only New Zealand-based director is Richard Gordon
Wilson, who is a foreign trusts expert from Jackson
Russell Lawyers, a Shortland Street law firm.
Wilson
said: "UnaEnergy Trustees Limited is a trustee of a trust
established for UNA Energy, and holds the shares in a holding
company based in Singapore".
"We
just act on instructions from an outfit in Monaco which runs family
offices for wealthy clients," Wilson said.
That
organisation was Rosemont, for which Jackson Russell sets up New
Zealand trust arrangements.
"They
are a very reputable organisation of English professionals,"
Wilson said.
He
said his involvement was minimal, and he was not involved with the
day to day operations of UNA Energy.
"The
rest of the story is news to me," he said.
"I
am not at liberty to talk without clients' instructions."
New
Zealand has a substantial foreign trust industry. Trustee companies
based in New Zealand can be used to own companies and assets located
overseas. Income those assets earn is not taxable in New Zealand.
When
he was in Parliament, former Green Party co-leader Russel Norman
fought for a tightening up of regulations around the use by
foreigners of New Zealand trusts and companies, which were easy to
set up.
Now
as executive director of Greenpeace, Norman is an opponent of big
oil.
He
said the New Zealand Unaoil link would put the spotlight back on
the New Zealand trust industry.
"It
will certainly draw attention to all of the problems that have
been previously identified in the way New Zealand companies and
trusts system still works, and the very weak regulation around it,"
Norman said.
New
Zealanders were proud of the country's reputation as being corruption
free. "It's part of our identity," he said.
In the list of the
world's great companies, Unaoil is nowhere to be seen. But for the
best part of the past two decades, the family business from Monaco
has systematically corrupted the global oil industry, distributing
many millions of dollars worth of bribes on behalf of corporate
behemoths including Samsung, Rolls-Royce, Halliburton and Australia's
own Leighton Holdings.
Now a vast cache of
leaked emails and documents has confirmed what many suspected about
the oil industry, and has laid bare the activities of the world's
super-bagman as it has bought off officials and rigged contracts
around the world
These
are average temperatures for Wellington, New Zealand. I live in Lower
Hutt where summertime temperatures are a little higher
Let's
take the average maximum temperatures which are 20C in January and
February.
This
year the temperatures I measured every day were around 24C and never
below 22C throughout February and the first half of March.
Way
higher than 20C!
---SMR
Many thanks to Harold Hensel - via Facebook
The
melting Arctic
03
31 2016 Arctic Sea Ice disintigration advances inside the 80 degree
lattitude circle. 2nd image is a close up of fractured Arctic Sea ice
coming around the NE tip of Greenland and flowing into the Greenland
Sea. https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/
Arctic
Ice 03 30 2016 The pink represents thin ice. Notice the light has
come completely back to the Arctic Ocean. There is no black hole in
the center.
CO
2 406.56 ppm in Mauna Loa Hawaii 03 28 2016 Just
broke 405ppm by quite a bit. The line on the right is where we are
now with a baseline of 800,000
years. https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/
Extreme temperatures in Europe
Next
week, Amsterdam is forecast to get temperatures of 23C (and that is
even warm for July).
Next
week,parts of Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland etc, to
become 10C to 15C warmer then normal.
With
the U.S. dollar continuing to struggle, today the top trends
forecaster in the world issued a trend forecast for gold as the
global economy falters.
Gerald
Celente: For several days, gold prices fell on hawkish comments from
a number of regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents signaling
support for an interest-rate rise, pointing to a possible increase at
the upcoming Federal Open Market Committee meeting in late April.
They reasoned, as has President Obama and the establishment business
media, that anyone questioning the strength of the US economy was
“peddling fiction,” and that a Fed rate hike, the second since
2006, was in order…
Gerald
Celente continues: Subsequently, a strong dollar and higher interest
rates were bearish news for gold since the great criticism from the
financial world has long been that gold yields no interest. Thus,
with US interest rates expected to rise, it was more profitable to be
in dollars than gold.
Speaking
at the Economic Club of New York Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairwoman
Janet Yellen not only tamped down expectations for a rate rise in
April, but whether, in fact, there will be any interest-rate increase
for the rest of the year. Indeed, when the Fed ended the zero
interest-rate policy it had in place since 2008 when it raised rates
just 25 basis points in December 2015, it left The Street with the
impression that four more rate hikes would follow throughout the new
year.
However,
citing concerns of a slowing Chinese economy, emerging market
instability, turbulent equity markets and falling commodity prices,
the Fed chairwoman cautioned that a stronger dollar would worsen
conditions while further depressing US exports and damaging the
manufacturing sector.
The
longer Yellen spoke, the higher gold prices spiked and the lower the
odds for the long-awaited normalization of interest-rate policy to be
implemented. The Dow, down over 100 points in early trading, closed
up nearly 100 while the iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF jumped 1
percent on the relief of a strong dollar further battering their
already depressed currencies and economies.
Following
the facts, the fundamentals of the economy are not sound. Corporate
profits in the US for 2015 fell 5.1 percent, the largest drop since
2008. Worldwide, after falling $23.1 billion in the third quarter,
profits declined $6.5 billion in the last quarter of 2015. In the US,
where some two-thirds of GDP is consumer-driven, consumer spending in
February increased only 0.1 percent while January’s was revised
down from a 0.5 percent gain to 0.1 percent.
And
with existing home sales down 7.1 percent in February, Yellen’s
stated concern Tuesday that the housing sector needed to make a
larger contribution to US output was evidenced in the weak numbers. Gerald Celente on PRN
Trends This Week – Terrorism, lies and failed leaders…and why gold still glows – 03.30.16
The
question needs to be asked why John Key, prime minister that does not
have nuclear power nor uranium and has anti-nuclear legislation on
its books is attending a 'nuclear security conference' in Washington
that addresses neither nuclear bombs nor nuclear power.
Prime
Minister John Key said he would meet with the United States President
at an international summit in Washington.
Key
confirmed he would be heading to US capital during the Easter break.
"I'm
going over the weekend but for the nuclear security summit," Key
said on Paul Henry, spilling the beans on the trip before it had been
officially announced.
Compiled
data shows Govt has voted against anti-nuke stance
Compiled
data shows Govt has voted against anti-nuke stance
Data
compiled for the Green Party shows that the National Government voted
against, or abstained, on nuclear disarmament resolutions in the
General Assembly 25 percent of the time.
John
Key is currently in the US where he was invited to the Nuclear
Security Summit. He was initially invited in 2010 because of New
Zealand’s strong anti-nuclear stance, since then he has undermined
that.
“John
Key is supposed to be in the US promoting our anti-nuclear position
but in reality his Government has not voted in line with that
position each time it's had the chance to,” said Green Party
Co-leader Metiria Turei.
“We
have serious concerns that John Key is undermining New Zealand’s
strong anti-nuclear stance during his trip to the US to attend the
nuclear summit.
“For
example in 2014, the National Government voted against a resolution
that called on States “to take the measures necessary to prevent
the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects and to
promote nuclear disarmament”. This is fundamental to our policy,
there was no reason to vote against it.
“John
Key needs to do more to promote New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance
than use the Nuclear Security Summit as a photo-op.
“It's
crucial that New Zealand has an independent foreign policy. We need a
government prepared to stand up for what is right,” said Mrs Turei.
The
high-profile presidential primary revolt against decades of damaging
American trade policy finally has forced the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) into mainstream media coverage.
The
usual free-trade-agreement cheerleading squad of
chronic-job-offshoring corporations, Wall Street, agribusiness and
their coterie of think tanks and pundits are unnerved.
After
spending billions in campaign contributions, lobbying and PR since
the 1990s to enact our current trade policies, they want us to
believe there is no alternative. In recent weeks, they have ginned up
a PR campaign with two main themes: Critics of free trade agreements
in general and the TPP in specific are protectionists who want to
stop trade and/or are ignorant and misled.
The
recent Washington Post piece by Vice President Biden’s former chief
economist Jared Bernstein does a great job explaining why the real
choice is not between TPP and no trade. As he notes, we don’t need
more free trade agreements to expand trade.
Indeed,
U.S. export growth to countries that are not Free Trade Agreement
(FTA) partners has exceeded U.S. export growth to FTA partners by 29
percent over the past decade. By the end of 2015, the aggregate U.S.
trade deficit with FTA partners had increased by 418 percent since
the FTAs were implemented while that with all non-FTA countries had
decreased by 6 percent.
How
can that be? For the same reason polls repeatedly show that most
Americans are for trade and against our trade agreements: America’s
trade policy and trade agreements have been hijacked by special
interests.
Indeed,
the TPP’s strongest opponents are not against trade and do know
what is in such agreements. That is precisely why they oppose them.
This
Washington Post infographic shows how our secretive trade negotiating
process gives a privileged role to hundreds of official U.S. trade
advisors representing corporate interests. They have turned our
“trade” agreements into delivery mechanisms for an array of
retrograde policies, many unrelated to trade, that have hurt most
Americans.
Consider
that the agreements sold as expanding exports of Made-in-America
goods actually include provisions that make it easier for
corporations to export investment and American jobs to low wage
countries and import their goods back. The pro-free-trade Cato
Institute calls these foreign investor protections, found in pacts
since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a subsidy for
offshoring. The terms significantly reduce risks and costs for firms
that relocate.
Or
consider that our “free trade” agreements impose protectionist
intellectual property monopolies. Big PhRMA got terms that require
every signatory country to extend the periods during which
pharmaceutical firms can avoid generic competition and thus charge
obscene medicine prices. The pacts also include terms extending
copyright protections and limits on Internet freedom that undermine
access to knowledge and stifle innovation.
The
pacts also provide new tools for transnational investors to attack
the environmental and health policies on which we all rely to keep
our families safe. Major oil and gas firms have been among the most
frequent users of these infamous investor-state dispute settlement
provisions. They empower individual foreign corporations and
investors to drag the U.S. government in front of foreign arbitration
tribunals to demand compensation from taxpayers when the investor
believes that policies - applying equally to domestic and foreign
firms enacted by Congress and approved by our courts - violate their
new trade pact investor rights.
Agribusiness
interests got terms that require us to import food that does not meet
U.S. safety standards. The GEs, GMs and other manufacturing firms
that offshored production pushed rules that forbid us to apply “Buy
American” procurement policies. That lets them still benefit from
U.S. government procurement contracts after they move production to
sweatshops abroad. Yes, our trade pacts also offshore our tax dollars
rather than harnessing government purchasing power to create jobs and
spur innovation here.
Wall
Street got rules limiting financial regulation, even those applying
equally to domestic and foreign firms. This includes constraints on
policies that limit the size of financial institutions, ban
especially risky financial products or require firewalls to limit the
spread of risk across financial products.
Every
effort at common sense reform has been beaten back - both in the
agreements and in U.S. policy.
So
we have tax policies that reward job offshoring and provide impunity
for ‘American’ firms that invert their corporate structure to tax
havens but no rules to stop other countries from cheating on trade by
lowering the value of their currency. Currency devaluations subsidize
their exports to us - wiping out American jobs, firms and farmers -
and make our exports too expensive to sell in the
currency-manipulating countries.
There
are no limits on trade with countries complicit in horrific human
rights abuses. But it would violate the trade rules if we cut off
trade with a country after a coup against a democratic government.
In
sum, our trade policies reflect the goals of certain privileged
interests to the detriment of promoting the broad public interest.
Having
lived with the damaging results over the past decades, it should be
no surprise that many Americans are against these corrupt special
interest trade policies.
And
now we have presidential candidates from both parties revealing the
truth: There is nothing inevitable about the damage, but rather the
rules have been rigged against us.
Trade
agreement after trade agreement has not only failed to meet its
business sector and political backers’ glowing promises of job
creation but has done severe damage.
We
have suffered the net loss of nearly 5 million U.S. manufacturing
jobs and more than 57,000 factories, and seen millions of higher-wage
service sector jobs offshored.
Americans
face flat median wages despite significant productivity gains as
those losing jobs to bad trade polices join the glut of Americans
competing for non-offshorable service sector jobs. This has been a
major contributor to the worst U.S. income inequality in the last
century.
The
volume of U.S. food exports has stagnated while U.S. food imports
have more than doubled in the past 20 years of NAFTA-style deals. The
result: family farmers wiped out and all our families flooded with
unsafe imported food.
And
this is not just a NAFTA problem. The 2012-implemented Korea FTA
included the higher labor and environmental standards congressional
Democrats forced into George W. Bush’s last trade pacts. But still
the U.S. trade deficit with Korea grew over 90 percent in the first
three years it was in effect. That equates to the loss of 90,000
American jobs, counting imports and exports in the formula the
administration used to predict job gains from the pact.
We
can do better and we must.
Trade
agreements and policies are how we can write rules for the global
economy.
And
the United States is uniquely able to set trade policies that others
have to follow. That leverage is the only upside to having the
largest trade deficit in history.
China,
Vietnam, Mexico, Japan and other nations are deeply reliant on being
able to sell things here. That means these governments need to come
to agreement with us on terms of trade or risk economic disruptions
that could undermine their own political viability.
But
to date, this leverage has been squandered to obtain special
protections for Big PhRMA and U.S. firms seeking to invest abroad
rather than to secure terms that work for all of us.
We
desperately need a new American trade policy.
To
achieve that, first, we must do no further harm. As Paul Krugman put
it in a recent New York Times column, we need “a standstill on
further deals, or at least a presumption that proposed deals are
guilty unless proved innocent.”
We
must not enact any more-of-the-same, job-killing, race-to-the-bottom
agreements.
Polls
show majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans oppose the
TPP. Currently there is not a majority in the House of
Representatives to pass it. Supporters’ hope is to slime it through
Congress in a lame duck session post-election with the votes of
retired and fired representatives.
Imagine
the fury if the public knew that the Obama administration also is
close to a deal with China after years of closed-door negotiations.
That China Bilateral Investment Agreement would provide special
protections for U.S. corporations that offshore investment to China
and give Chinese firms new rights to buy up American manufacturing
companies, energy and communications firms, and land.
Second,
we must review and replace our existing trade policies and pacts. The
special interests that put our current system in place are jealously
intransigent about commonsense changes for which there is now growing
consensus.
This
includes enforceable disciplines against currency cheating; removing
offshoring incentives, bans on Buy American preferences, patent
extensions and the investor-state tribunal system in trade pacts;
conditioning access to the U.S. market on countries meeting
international labor, environmental and human rights standards;
eliminating existing U.S. tax credits, subsidies such as
Export-Import bank loans, and government contracts for firms that
ship jobs overseas; enacting domestic tax and procurement policies
that reward firms producing here; expanding Buy American procurement
preferences; eliminating the corporate benefits for companies that
relocate their corporate headquarters overseas to take advantage of a
tax loophole and so forth.
Third,
before we consider negotiating any new agreements, we must create a
new model that ensures any future pacts create jobs here and raise
wages.
The
TPP’s boosters cynically claim that the TPP is the new model. In
fact, the TPP includes word-for-word much of the old NAFTA-style
language. Worse, it actually expands on some of NAFTA’s most
damaging terms, such as the foreign investor privileges that promote
job offshoring.
The
TPP rolls back the initial reforms to trade-pact environmental and
medicine patent rules that congressional Democrats forced Bush to
include in his last trade deals. It would double U.S. liability under
the investor-state dispute settlement regime by empowering an
additional 9,200 Japanese and Australian firms to attack our laws in
foreign arbitration tribunals. (While billions have been paid to
foreign investors under this regime, so far we have dodged the bullet
because past U.S. pacts have been with developing nations with few
investors here.)
The
TPP includes notorious human rights violators like Brunei, which
recently implemented sharia-based laws for the stoning-to-death of
gays and unwed mothers, and Malaysia whose modern day slavery has
made it among the worst nations for human trafficking.
What
would a good trade agreement look like? In 2009, Congress’ leading
fair-trade champions worked with economists, trade experts,
businesses and environmental, labor, consumer, faith and family-farm
organizations to develop that alternative. They hoped it would shape
the approach taken by the new incoming Obama administration.
That
is not how history played out, and thus we have the TPP — NAFTA on
steroids.
But
the 2009 Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment
(TRADE) Act provides a good blueprint for trade pacts that could
benefit more Americans. The legislation set forth what must and must
not be included in future pacts - basically eliminating the special
interest non-trade riders that now comprise the majority of our
Trojan horse agreements and adding the rules to make actual trade
terms more fair.
It
also included criteria for what countries would be appropriate U.S.
trade agreement partners - those that offer American exporters
opportunities and where strong labor, environmental and human rights
standards exist in practice, not just on paper.
Unless
and until we enact a trade policy that can harvest the benefits of
expanding our exports to create well-paying American jobs and
prosperity for American farmers while growing jobs at home, raising
wages and promoting democracy, human rights and a healthy
environment, the trade fury we are now witnessing will only grow.
See
below for a summary of this program courtesy of The Nation.
.....
Nation
contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue
their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous
installments are at TheNation.com.)
By
regaining control of Palmyra, a major and ancient city, Cohen argues,
the Syrian army and its ground allies, backed by Russian air power,
have dealt ISIS its most important military defeat.
The
victory belies the US political-media establishment’s allegations
that Putin’s six-month military intervention was a sinister move
designed to thwart the West’s fight against terrorism.
Instead,
it has gravely wounded the Islamic State, whose agents were behind
the terrorist assaults on Paris and Brussels.
Not
surprisingly, these positive developments are being assailed by the
American-led war party, which has redoubled its vilification of
Russian President Putin, preposterously accusing him, for example, of
“weaponizing the migration crisis” in Europe, even though the
crisis began long before Russia’s intervention in Syria.
Putin
clearly backs Lavrov’s initiatives, even meeting with Kerry several
times. Obama’s stance, it seems to Cohen, remains unclear.
Neither
he nor the American commander of NATO congratulated or otherwise
applauded the Syrian-Russian victory in Palmyra, and Obama again went
out of his way to insult Putin (twice).
Instead,
Cohen explains, Washington is seeking to make the US-born Natalie
Jeresko prime minister of Ukraine, putting an American face on the
ongoing Western colonization of the Kiev government.
Jaresko
is also the candidate of the US-controlled IMF, on which Kiev is
financially dependent but whose demands for economic austerity
measures and “privatization” of state enterprises will almost
certainly further diminish the government’s sharply declining
popular support and further abet the rise of ultra-right-wing
Ukrainian forces and Kiev’s conflict with Russia.
Meanwhile,
in recent interviews, Donald Trump has emerged as the only US
presidential candidate to challenge Washington’s bipartisan foreign
policies that contributed greatly to the new Cold War.
As
Cohen predicted last week, the American national security
establishment has reacted to Trump as an “anti-Christ,” along
with the equivalent of the preceding Cold War’s redbaiting.
Thus,
Hillary Clinton charged that Trump’s less militarized proposals
would be like “Christmas in the Kremlin.”
The
mainstream media has taken the same approach to Trump, thereby
continuing to deprive America of the foreign policy debate it
urgently needs.
Posts
Paul Beckwith
