Sunday, February 13, 2011

BANK of AMERICA, DICTATOR MUBARAK and kissing the asses of MUSLIM DICTATORS

WHEREVER THERE’S A DICTATOR OR RAPE AND PILLAGE, THERE WE FIND AN AMERICAN BANKER!


GLOBAL CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, BANK of AMERICA IS ONE OF THE WORST!

WHEREVER THERE’S A SAUDI, THERE’S AN AMERICAN POLITICIAN THAT SMELLS SAUDIS DIRTY MONEY.

IT WAS THE SAUDIS THAT INVADED US 9-11. IT WAS GEORGE BUSH AND BIG BUSH SAUDIS CARLYLE GROUP, ALONG WITH DICK CHENEY – HALLIBURTON, THAT STARTED NOT ONE, BUT WARS AGAINST SAUDIS NEMESES, SADDAM HUSSEIN!

DESPITE THE SAUDIS INVASION, AND THE FACT THAT THE SAUDIS DO NOT PERMIT CHRISTIAN OR JEWISH PLACES OF WORSHIP IN THEIR “KINGDOM” OF LARD BUCKETS, HILLARY-BILLARY HAVE ALSO TAKEN MILLIONS OF SAUDIS DIRTY MONEY FOR THE BILLARY LIBRARY!

YOU HAVE CRINGED AT THE SIGHT OF BARACK OBAMA, BENDING OVER AND KISSING THE HEM OF THE LARD BUCKET DICTATOR OF SAUDIS –WAHHABI TERROR LAND! THIS LARD BUCKET DICTATOR IS LISTED AS No. 5 BY PARADE OF THE TOP 10 DICTATORS.

AND WE ARE SUPPOSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE ABOVE CLOWNS, BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, AND OBAMA DID NOT KNOW THAT DICTATOR MUBARAK HAS ACCUMULATED $70 BILLION IN ASSETS, PRIMARILY BY SIPHONING OFF THE $1.6 BILLION OF AMERICAN AID FOR 30 YEARS….???

EVEN AS HILLARY AND OBAMA KISS UP TO THE DRUG ADDICT DICTATOR OF AFGHANISTAN WE PROTECT, ALONG WITH THE DICTATOR’S DRUG DEALER BROTHER. HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS HAS THIS DICTATOR HAULED AWAY OF AMERICAN LOOT??? GOOGLE IT!



Mr. Mubarak’s villa is in a compound developed by Hussein Salem, an Egyptian businessman and close friend of the former president. Mr. Salem pleaded guilty in 1983 to overcharging the Pentagon $8 million for shipping military equipment to Egypt. Despite the conviction, he prospered in Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt and heads a lucrative business that ships natural gas to Israel.





February 12, 2011

Mubarak Family Riches Attract New Focus

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR, DAVID ROHDE and ARAM ROSTON

After Hosni Mubarak’s younger son, Gamal, left his job as an executive with Bank of America in London in the mid-1990s, he joined forces with Egypt’s largest investment bank. Today he has a significant stake in a private equity company with interests throughout the Egyptian economy, from oil to agriculture to tourism, corporate records and interviews show.

During President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, he and his family were not flamboyant with their wealth, particularly by the standards of other leaders in the Middle East. While there is no indication that Gamal Mubarak or the bank were involved in illegal activity, his investments show how deeply the family is woven into Egypt’s economy.

Now with Hosni Mubarak out of power, there are growing calls for an accounting to begin.

Within hours of Mr. Mubarak’s resignation on Friday, Swiss officials ordered all banks in Switzerland to search for — and freeze — any assets of the former president, his family or close associates. In Egypt, opposition leaders vowed to press for a full investigation of Mr. Mubarak’s finances.

Tracing the money is likely to be difficult because business in Egypt was largely conducted in secret among a small group connected to Mr. Mubarak.

“Now we open all the files,” said George Ishak, head of the National Association for Change, an opposition umbrella group. “We will research everything, all of them: the families of the ministers, the family of the president, everyone.”

Estimates of the Mubaraks’ fortune vary wildly, including a widespread rumor that they are worth as much as $70 billion. United States officials say that figure is vastly exaggerated and put the family’s wealth at $2 billion to $3 billion.

Gamal Mubarak, who was being groomed to be the next president, and his older brother Ala’a, were considered major figures in the business elite.

Gamal Mubarak’s private equity business came through his ties to EFG-Hermes, the largest investment bank in Egypt. EFG-Hermes, which listed assets of $8 billion on its 2010 financial statement, was pivotal in Egypt’s privatization program, in which state companies were sold to politically connected businessmen.

The connection to EFG-Hermes reaches back to the mid-1990s. After Gamal Mubarak left Bank of America, he set up an investment firm called Medinvest Associates in London in 1996 with two partners. Medinvest, in turn, is owned by an international securities fund in Cyprus called Bullion Company Ltd. According to EFG-Hermes, Gamal Mubarak owns half of Bullion, and records in Cyprus show that his brother Ala’a is on the board.

Bullion owns 35 percent of the private equity operation, which has $919 million under management, according to the chief executive of EFG-Hermes, Hassan Heikal. The equity fund invests in oil and gas, steel, cement, food and cattle.

Mr. Heikal said that other than the private equity investment, Gamal Mubarak had no other ties “directly, indirectly, offshore or through family” to the bank. He said the fund constituted only 7 percent of the bank’s business. Questioned about the size of Gamal’s initial investment in the 1990s, Mr. Heikal declined to elaborate.

A spokeswoman for EFG-Hermes said in a statement that the bank “has received no special privileges or consideration from the Egyptian government and has always operated under legal and transparent best-practices.” Calls to Medinvest’s office in London and Bullion’s office in Cyprus last week were not returned. In the past, Gamal Mubarak has denied any wrongdoing and said he was involved in legitimate business activities.

For years, opposition groups have contended that since Egypt privatized its economy in the 1990s, the Mubaraks and a few dozen elite families have held stakes in the sale of state assets and in new business ventures. Later, some of these businessmen were appointed to government positions overseeing the very businesses they ran. Connections to the presidential palace brought benefits like the opportunity to develop government real estate and access to easy bank loans.

“The corruption of the Mubarak family was not stealing from the budget, it was transforming political capital into private capital,” said Samer Soliman, a professor of political economy at American University in Cairo.

Occasionally, members of the ruling elite who fell out of favor were suddenly convicted of financial corruption charges, but generally, the inner workings of the system have remained hidden.

One businessman who won government approval for various major development projects is Magdi Rasekh, Ala’a Mubarak’s father-in-law. Mr. Rasekh is chairman of the board of Sixth of October Development & Investment Company, which built one of a series of sprawling new developments in the desert outside Cairo. The government-backed development, Sixth of October City, is home to 500,000 people, an entirely new satellite city with an industrial park, a hospital, villas and middle-class apartments. Efforts to reach Mr. Rasekh were not successful.

As attention turns to tracking the Mubaraks’ purported wealth, rumors of vast real estate holdings by the family have swirled. But the only property outside of Egypt that has emerged is the London townhouse at 28 Wilton Place in Knightsbridge where Gamal Mubarak lived when he was an investment banker there.

But determining the precise ownership of the house shows why investigating the family’s wealth is complicated. A woman answering the front door of the house said the Mubaraks had sold it, but property agents said there was no record of a sale, and neighbors said they had seen Gamal Mubarak and his family entering it several times recently.

According to British records, the home is owned by a company called Ocral Enterprises of Panama. The registered agent for the company in Panama is a local law firm. A lawyer at the firm said that he could not reveal Ocral’s owner. The lawyer said his firm received its instructions regarding Ocral from a company in Muscat, Oman, which he declined to identify.

Though Swiss banks have begun the search for Mubarak family assets, experts said any money would be returned to Egypt only if its new government formally demanded them.

“Egypt has to run a criminal investigation,” said Daniel Thelesklaf, director of the International Center for Asset Recovery in Switzerland. “A lot will depend on the new Egyptian government.”

As the protest intensified last week, government prosecutors froze the assets of five government ministers and imposed a travel ban on them. The move appeared to be an effort by Mr. Mubarak to distance himself from the wealthy businessmen who had become the focus of public ire over corruption. It is unclear whether the military, which now runs the government and has vast business holdings itself, will allow a full inquiry into the Mubarak family’s wealth.

Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the level of corruption involving Hosni Mubarak himself. Former American diplomats said he appeared to live relatively simply, particularly by the standards of rulers in the region. His main residence outside Cairo was a villa in a private compound in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el Sheik, where he went after resigning the presidency on Friday. Diplomats said the villa was not particularly grand for the neighborhood, smaller than the nearby home of Bakr bin Laden, a member of the wealthy Saudi construction clan and a half-brother of Osama bin Laden.

Mr. Mubarak’s villa is in a compound developed by Hussein Salem, an Egyptian businessman and close friend of the former president. Mr. Salem pleaded guilty in 1983 to overcharging the Pentagon $8 million for shipping military equipment to Egypt. Despite the conviction, he prospered in Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt and heads a lucrative business that ships natural gas to Israel.

Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

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WHEREVER ON THE GLOBE THERE’S A DICTATORSHIP, THERE SITS A DICTATOR WITH HIS POCKETS FULL OF MONEY LOOTED FROM AMERICANS AS HIS PEOPLE GO WITH OUT FOOD!

IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ONLY KNEW HOW MUCH THE SAUDIS, - THE 9-11 INVADERS BUY OUR LEADERSHIP!





Mubarak family fortune could reach $70bn, say experts

Egyptian president has cash in British and Swiss banks plus UK and US property





Gamal and Hosni Mubarak are reported to have built up huge fortunes, including properties in London. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images

President Hosni Mubarak's family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.

After 30 years as president and many more as a senior military official, Mubarak has had access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits. Most of those gains have been taken offshore and deposited in secret bank accounts or invested in upmarket homes and hotels.

According to a report last year in the Arabic newspaper Al Khabar, Mubarak has properties in Manhattan and exclusive Beverly Hills addresses on Rodeo Drive.

His sons, Gamal and Alaa, are also billionaires. A protest outside Gamal's ostentatious home at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, central London, highlighted the family's appetite for western trophy assets.

Amaney Jamal, a political science professor at Princeton University, said the estimate of $40bn-70bn was comparable with the vast wealth of leaders in other Gulf countries.

"The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth," she told ABC news. "There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain.

"This is the pattern of other Middle Eastern dictators so their wealth will not be taken during a transition. These leaders plan on this."

Al Khabar said it understood the Mubaraks kept much of their wealth offshore in the Swiss bank UBS and the Bank of Scotland, part of Lloyds Banking Group, although this information could be at least 10 years old.

There are only sketchy details of exactly where the Mubaraks have generated their wealth and its final destination.

Christopher Davidson, professor of Middle East politics at Durham University, said Mubarak, his wife, Suzanne, and two sons were able to accumulate wealth through a number of business partnerships with foreign investors and companies, dating back to when he was in the military and in a position to benefit from corporate corruption.

He said most Gulf states required foreigners give a local business partner a 51% stake in start-up ventures. In Egypt, the figure is commonly nearer 20%, but still gives politicians and close allies in the military a source of huge profits with no initial outlay and little risk.

"Almost every project needs a sponsor and Mubarak was well-placed to take advantage of any deals on offer," he said.

"Much of his money is in Swiss bank accounts and London property. These are the favourites of Middle Eastern leaders and there is no reason to think Mubarak is any different. Gamal's Wilton Place home is likely to be the tip of the iceberg."

Al Khabar named a series of major western companies that, partnered with the Mubarak family, generated an estimated $15m a year in profits.

Aladdin Elaasar, author of The Last Pharaoh: Mubarak and the Uncertain Future of Egypt in the Obama Age, said the Mubaraks own several residences in Egypt, some inherited from previous presidents and the monarchy, and others the president has commissioned.

Hotels and land around the Sharm el-Sheikh tourist resort are also a source of Mubarak family wealth.

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OBAMA, LIKE BUSH AND SAUDIS STOOGES, HILLARY & BILLARY, KISS SAUDI ASS:

US Supreme Court declines to hear case of 9/11 families

By Joe Kishore

30 June 2009

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case brought by families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia, four members of the Saudi royal family, a Saudi bank and a charity. The action lets stand a lower court ruling that the Saudi members cannot be held liable in US courts.

The Obama administration supported the Saudi monarchs, who were accused of financially supporting several of the individuals involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The administration last month intervened to ask the high court to reject the appeal.

The family members claim that Saudi princes contributed to charities that funded Al Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers.

In August 2008, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a 2006 district court ruling that the Saudi officials and entities were protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The families argued that lower courts had made conflicting rulings on the scope of sovereign immunity, and that the Supreme Court should therefore intervene.

The Justice Department has sought furiously to prevent the release of documents assembled by lawyers for the families, which, according to a New York Times report, “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” The government has had copies of the documents destroyed and has sought to prevent judges from even looking at them.

The US government has worked systematically to conceal from the American people evidence of Saudi support for at least two of the hijackers, part of a broader cover-up of the many unanswered questions that still surround the 9/11 attacks.

The documents gathered by the 9/11 families—including a classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks—likely include material on Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two Saudi nationals who were aboard the planes that crashed on 9/11. They were known by US intelligence to be members of Al Qaeda at least since 1999.

Despite their previous association, the two men were allowed into the US, where they found accommodations with the help of a Saudi intelligence agent (Omar al-Bayoumi) and, later, an FBI asset (Abdussattar Shaikh). Al-Bayoumi received financing from Princess Haifa, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar.

The suit filed by the families focuses solely on the role of Saudi Arabia. However, the more fundamental question is the role of sections of the American state. The Saudi royal family has had long and intimate ties with American intelligence, and the broader exposure of Saudi links to the attacks threatens to unravel the entire official story of the September 11 attacks.

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Obama administration seeks to quash suit by 9/11 families

By Barry Grey

26 June 2009

The Obama administration has intervened to quash a civil suit filed against Saudi Arabia by survivors and family members of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The suit seeks to hold the Saudi royal family liable, charging that it provided financial and other support to Al Qaeda and was thereby complicit in the hijack bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC.

According to an article by Eric Lichtblau in the June 24 New York Times, documents assembled by lawyers for the 9/11 families “provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.” However, the article states, the documents may never find their way into court because of legal challenges by Saudi Arabia, which are being supported by the US Justice Department.

The administration is taking extraordinary measures to kill the suit and suppress the evidence of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Last month, the Justice Department sided in court with the Saudi monarchy in seeking to halt further legal action. Moreover, it had copies of American intelligence documents on Saudi finances that had been leaked to lawyers for the families destroyed, and is now seeking to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, rejecting the suit on the grounds that the plaintiffs cannot sue in the US against a sovereign nation and its leaders. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on whether to hear an appeal, but the families’ prospects have been weakened by the intervention of the Obama administration, which has called on the court not to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal.

The Times reports that it obtained the new documents from the families’ lawyers, adding that they are among “several hundred thousand pages of investigative material” assembled by the 9/11 families in their long-running suit against the Saudi royal family.

Lichtblau writes that the documents “provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of September 11, 2001.” However, there is a wealth of evidence in the public record strongly pointing to such a connection. And there is the 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 that deals with the Saudi role in the attacks. Lichtblau writes that “the secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”

Then-President George W. Bush ordered that section of the congressional report to be classified, and its contents were blacked out in the findings released to the public by Congress. The Obama administration is continuing this policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy.

Lichtblau reports that the material obtained by the Times from the families’ lawyers includes “thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents” that provide “an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.” He cites as one example “internal Treasury Department documents” that show that the International Islamic Relief Organization, a “Saudi charity,” heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, “provided ‘support for terrorist organizations’ at least through 2006.”

He gives other examples of evidence of Saudi support for Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the 1990s and witness statements and intelligence reports of money being given by Saudi princes to the Taliban and to “militants’ activities” in Pakistan and Bosnia during the same decade.

What are the motives behind the Obama administration’s efforts to cover up the connections between the Saudi monarchy and Al Qaeda?

The Justice Department, according to the Times, cites “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” should the 9/11 families’ suit be allowed to go to trial. This is undoubtedly a factor. The US has an immense political and economic interest in protecting the Saudi dictatorship, which is a major American ally in the Middle East, a supporter of Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world’s biggest producer of oil.

But there is a more immediate and compelling reason for suppressing any exposure of the Saudi connection to Al Qaeda and 9/11. The revelations would undoubtedly shatter the official explanations of the September 11 attacks and point to complicity on the part of US intelligence and security agencies.

Given its longstanding and intimate ties to the Saudi royal family and Saudi intelligence, it is not possible to believe that the CIA would have been unaware of Saudi support for Al Qaeda and at least some of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, as they were preparing to carry out the attacks on New York and Washington.

The ties between the Saudi and US intelligence establishments were strengthened during the US-backed war against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, beginning in 1979 and continuing through the 1980s. The US poured billions of dollars in arms and financing into this war, most of it funneled through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.

The Saudi regime also helped fund the anti-Soviet guerrillas, many of whom were brought to Afghanistan by Islamist forces in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden served as the Saudi regime’s personal emissary in this cause, helping to organize, train and equip Arab volunteers for the Afghan war. The movement now known as Al Qaeda was spawned through the interaction of these three intelligence agencies—the CIA, the ISI and the Saudis.

The bipartisan 9/11 commission, in its July 2004 report, echoed the Bush administration’s whitewash of Saudi ties to the terrorist attacks, declaring that it found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” Al Qaeda.

However, in a book published later that year, Intelligence Matters, then-Florida Senator Bob Graham charged the Bush administration with orchestrating a cover-up of Saudi involvement in the September 11 attacks. Graham was at the time the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which had carried out, along with its House counterpart, the joint congressional investigation into 9/11.

He wrote that “evidence of official Saudi supportî for at least some of the hijackers was ìincontrovertible.” Graham’s charges focused on the extraordinary cases of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were identified as hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

The two men, both Saudi nationals, are undoubtedly the “two hijackers” to whom Times reporter Lichtblau refers in connection with the secret section of the joint congressional report on 9/11.

Both were known to US intelligence as Al Qaeda operatives at least since 1999. Malaysian agents, acting in concert with the CIA, photographed and videotaped them and others during a 2000 meeting of Islamist terrorist groups in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Nevertheless, after the meeting, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were allowed to fly to the US using their own passports and visas issued by US consular authorities in Saudi Arabia. While the CIA knew of their presence in the US, it did not inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the FBI. (The CIA disputes this claim, insisting that it did alert the FBI). Nor did the CIA inform immigration authorities.

After landing in Los Angeles in January of 2000, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were met by Omar al-Bayoumi, an employee of the Saudi civil aviation authority. US investigators have concluded that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent.

Al-Bayoumi invited the pair to move to San Diego, where he found them an apartment, provided them with money and helped enroll them in flight school.

It has been reported that al-Bayoumi served as a conduit for thousands of dollars in funding for the future hijackers sent by Princess Haifa, the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a close confidante of the Bush family.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived openly in the US, one of them even having his name listed in the telephone directory.

Within months, al-Hazmi moved into the home of Abdussattar Shaikh, a retired professor at San Diego State University. Shaikh was on the FBI payroll, charged with monitoring the activities of Islamist groups in the San Diego region.

In his book, Graham wrote that the FBI concealed from the joint congressional committee the fact that its paid informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, had established a close personal relationship with the two hijackers.

When the committee staff discovered Shaikh’s role and the committee issued a subpoena to question him under oath, the FBI and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to serve the subpoena. Graham said that a senior FBI official wrote to him and the Republican co-chair of the joint committee declaring that the administration would neither allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on Shaikh nor allow the committee staff to interview him.

Graham wrote that this was the only time he had ever heard of the FBI refusing to serve a congressional subpoena. He commented, “We were seeing in writing what we had suspected for some time: the White House was directing a cover-up.”

Bush’s extraordinary intervention to block questioning of FBI informant Shaikh was consistent with his administration’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, when it allowed chartered planes to ferry some 140 prominent Saudis—including at least a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s relatives—to Boston for evacuation to Saudi Arabia. The pick-up flights were organized at a time when all non-military and non-emergency aviation had been grounded by government order. Bin Laden’s relatives were allowed to leave the country with little or no questioning by the FBI.

In his book, Graham himself posed the question of why the congressional committee was denied access to the San Diego FBI informant. After offering several possible answers, he suggested in deliberately obscure language a “far more damning possibility”—“perhaps the informant did know something about the plot that would be even more damaging were it revealed, and that this is what the FBI is trying to conceal.”

Graham did not spell out what “damning” information about the 9/11 conspiracy the informant might have revealed. But the role of the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration in the case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar suggests that it went beyond involvement by the Saudi government. It strongly suggests he was blocked from being questioned out of concern that he would reveal that elements within the US state apparatus knew of plans for an impending hijacking and allowed them to go forward.

Eight years after the attacks, no one has been held accountable for what on its face is the greatest failure of national security in US history. The question is: Was it a failure, or was a decision taken to permit a terrorist attack on US soil in order to provide the pretext for implementing plans for wars abroad and repressive policies at home that had been drawn up well in advance of September 11, 2001?

That a new administration is continuing the policy of shielding the Saudi monarchy and suppressing evidence of its complicity in 9/11 points strongly to the latter explanation.

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