Peter Presland Wrote:I think Assange hits the nail on the head with his speculation about a message being sent to other Island 'Dependencies' - especially Bermuda. He is circumspect with his 'It remains to be seen.....', but for my money it is already obvious what is going on - so long as any current leadership regime remains totally compliant to UK/US foreign policy objectives, it can continue to live the High Life with a blind eye turned to its looting. Show the slightest hint of becoming a possible threat to those objectives and - Look what happened the the Turks and Caicos leadership. The message is crystal clear.

Most notably, as reported in this space and quoted extensively in overseas media, Brassington's "checkered past" included a stint as co-pilot on 39 weekly flights between Florida and Venezuela of the Lear jet (N351WB) which was owned by Huffman Aviation’s owner Wallace J. Hilliard, and was aboard the plane when it was finally busted by DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000 carrying 43 lbs. of heroin.

These unsavory associations did not prevent Kozeny from partnering in the Azeri scheme with a managing director of Hank Greenburg's American Insurance Group (AIG), recently bailed out by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $166 billion.

"The Pirate and the Barracuda"

Quote:The Maverick: The spectacular rise and fall of a hyperactive privatiser

By Luke Johnson
Published: 12:01AM BST 02 Apr 2006

There are those who believe ambitious entrepreneurs are similar to psychotics, because they never know when to stop.

Someone has even written a book on the subject, suggesting that a genetic tendency towards hypomania often leads to the sort of grandiose behaviour and manic risk taking that characterise many capitalists.

One figure who is definitely towards the more extreme end of the entrepreneurial scale is Viktor Kozeny, the so-called Pirate of Prague.

Kozeny is incarcerated in Fox Hill prison in the Bahamas, fighting extradition to New York. A Bahamian court refused to grant him bail, since he has six Irish passports and one each from Venezuela and the Czech Republic.

The Manhattan District Attorney wants to charge him with bribing Azerbaijani officials. Kozeny has spent the past 14 years making a lot of money in a hurry - and, according to his accusers, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from misguided investors.

Kozeny's rise and fall is a spectacular tale. He fled Communist Czechoslovakia at the age of 16, and after three years in Germany managed to wangle a place to study physics at a college in New Mexico.

He ran off with a professor's wife and later took a degree at Harvard in economics. In the meantime he married and divorced twice, and then moved to London in 1989 to work for six months as an investment banker at Robert Fleming, the blue chip firm.

His breakthrough came in 1991, when he moved back to Prague after Vaclav Havel had led the Velvet Revolution and introduced his homeland to capitalism.

Kozeny convinced the new government to let him help privatise Czech state assets. A system was conceived that permitted citizens to buy vouchers for $30 (£17) each, valuing the country's entire industrial base at just $200m.

In an audacious and ingenious move, Kozeny offered to manage ordinary people's vouchers in return for the promise of spectacular returns. He charged management fees and took dividends for his efforts. More than 1m voucher holders fell for the hard-sell advertising of his firm, Harvard Capital & Consulting, named after his alma mater.

Within a year, Harvard effectively controlled dozens of major Czech companies, including banks, steel mills and breweries. The value of the investments soared, peaking at over $5bn, providing a massive return for early investors.

By 1994 Kozeny had made so much money that he left Prague to settle in the Bahamas as a tax exile with his secretary, whom he married, having collected an Irish passport on the way.

But it still wasn't enough. Over the next couple of years Kozeny extracted more than $300m from Harvard. The Czech authorities in 2001 contended that much of this was stolen.

In 1997 Kozeny created a stir in London by buying Andrew Lloyd Webber's huge Eaton Square home for £15m and spending £13,000 on supper for three at Le Gavroche in Mayfair.

By then he had targeted his second privatisation bonanza: Azerbaijan, the former soviet republic with a reputation for corruption, where another voucher and sell-off scheme was under way. This time, it is alleged, Kozeny had to bribe Azeri officials to carry out his plans.

During 1998 he raised over $400m, mainly from US investors, for his investment vehicle, which carried the unlikely name of Oily Rock. They included sharp institutional players such as AIG and Columbia University. The target was Azerbaijan's principal state oil company, Socar.

Many tens of millions were spent on street corners in Baku buying vouchers. But the state never sold Socar and Kozeny's vouchers became worthless. Despite this, it is alleged that he managed to siphon off $90m from his partners in Oily Rock by marking up vouchers from 50 cents to $25.

When it dawned on various American investors that things had gone wrong, they sued Kozeny in the Bahamas and London. A British judge froze his assets and his wife filed for divorce. Kozeny's mansions in London, Ireland and Aspen were all seized, while he claims to have spent $100m defending himself from civil legal actions.

Meanwhile various associates have been arrested for alleged breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the US, and have made plea bargains with prosecutors in return for providing evidence against Kozeny.

So the rumpled, seemingly broke Kozeny sits in his dank prison cell, pondering his fate. Charm and chutzpah enabled him to achieve remarkable things, but his greed and inner demons saw him risk it all. His story demonstrates how political dislocation can create remarkable profit opportunities - and how deals in far off lands that look too good to be true normally are . . .

Luke Johnson is chairman of Channel 4 and Risk Capital Partners

Helen Reyes Wrote:thanks for detailing this. i saw the wikileaks docs but don't have any financial background so was left just wondering what was going on.

i have a few stupid questions.

Helen Reyes Wrote:1. Maybe Jan knows about this. Didn't UK do something like this with Trinidad and Tobago a few years back? They gave most of the West Indian colonies home rule but with a provision that the central banks were still controlled by Bank of England, didn't they?

Helen Reyes Wrote:3. Didn't it come out that MI5/6 had all parties in Northern Ireland peace talks thoroughly bugged, including Gerry Adam's automobile?

Helen Reyes Wrote:2. Wasn't Bohringer written up by a lone reporter in Florida who found out he was shipping coke with official CIA sanction, I think he called his fictitious airlines Olympic Airlines or something like that, and the airlines had its own section of the airport that DEA and customs never checked, by design. Or maybe it wasn't Bohringer, but Atta was involved, and the owner was a foreigner, Scandinavian I thought.