Robert Maxwell - PROMIS - KGB - Mogilevich - Lukanov - Janchev - Printable Version +- Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora) +-- Forum: Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-1.html) +--- Forum: Historical Events (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-8.html) +--- Thread: Robert Maxwell - PROMIS - KGB - Mogilevich - Lukanov - Janchev (/thread-816.html)

Robert Maxwell - PROMIS - KGB - Mogilevich - Lukanov - Janchev - Jeff Baker - 06-02-2009 http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/soc.culture.baltics/msg04564.html Re: Robert Maxwell - PROMIS - KGB - Mogilevich - Lukanov - Janchev ================================================ http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=28526 28Nov03 5 Sentenced to Lifetime Jail for Bulgarian Ex-PM Murder All five suspects in the murder case of former Bulgarian Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov were sentenced to life imprisonment. The defense could appeal the verdict in 15 days before the Court of Appeals. [ . . . ] One of the two Ukrainian suspects - Alexander Russov - was the one who carried out the shooting on October 2, 1996, court ruled. The other four were found guily on inciting Russov to committing the crime. [ . . . ] ================================================ http://www.bgnewsnet.com/story.asp?st=1933 BNN (10Nov03) ================================================= Radio Free Europe 25Jan96 WAS MAXWELL THE "KING OF BULGARIA Bulgarian newspapers on 24 January reported on an article in The Guardian the previous day entitled "King of Bulgaria," which deals with the connections between late media tycoon Robert Maxwell and former Bulgarian Communist leaders. The article, based on the Maxwell biography "Foreign Body" by Russell Davies, says Maxwell, former Bulgarian Communist Dictator Todor Zhivkov, former Prime Minister Andrey Lukanov, and former Communist Party Politburo member Ognyan Doynov had developed "perfect channels" to transfer some $2 billion in foreign currency out of Bulgaria. Maxwell reportedly helped the Communist leaders to launder money, mainly through joint ventures set up in the West with Bulgarian capital. -- Stefan Krause ===================================== Since RFE’s article about Robert Maxwell money laundering funds out of Bulgaria with the former prime minister Andrei Lukanov, a trial in Bulgaria had begun for the murder of prime minister Lukanov, killed in 1996. Three Bulgarians and two Ukrainians (Alexei Kichatov and Alexander Rusov) were the defendants for the murder of Lukanov. The Ukrainians were allegedly the guns hired by the Bulgarians. The court has found them guilty. One of the witnesses in the trial, Iliya Pavlov, a billionaire mafia oligarch and the president of the MG Corp, (MultiGroup), was shot dead one day after he testified at the trial. (Pavlov's wife was a financial contributor to Hillary Clinton's election campaign). Lukanov had business dealings with Maxwell and the Multigroup conglomerate as early as the 1980s. He was a high-level communist party and government official under the former dictator, Todor Zhivkov, and became Bulgaria’s first post-communist prime minister in 1989. He resigned in 1990 after anti-government protests, and was widely known as one of the “gray cardinals” of the Socialist Party, which won the 1994 elections. Andrei Lukanov was also a representative of the giant energy Gazprom in Bulgaria through TopEnergy. A billionaire named Iliya Pavlov testifying at the Lukanov murder trial, was shot dead on 7Mar03. Pavlov was the president of the largest Bulgarian industrial company, named MG Corporation. It was recently renamed from Multigroup [aka Multi Group] which was earlier linked to Robert Maxwell, Semion Mogilevich, the KGB and the Solntsevo mafia. Pavlov was ranked as the wealthiest person in Bulgaria and the eighth richest in Eastern Europe. Just like in other countries (e.g. Nordex in Austria), Multigroup was involved in the scheme to loot the country after the breakup of the USSR. The scheme involved the highest levels of the Communist Party and the KGB/mafia with help from Westerners. Robert Maxwell owned a money laundering bank in Bulgaria. The BBC (8Mar03) reported that: “Mr Lukanov, who masterminded the downfall of Bulgaria's long-serving communist leader Todor Zhivkov in 1989, was found shot in front of his Sofia home in October 1996. At the time, Bulgarian media said Mr Lukanov's death was a contract killing related to his business activities.” In 1995, Ilya Pavlov replaced Lukanov as head of TopEnergy (the joint venture with Gazprom). [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/from_our_own_correspondent/2832167.stm ] Pavlov’s wife, Toni Chergelanova, was the daughter of Chergelanov, the chief of the Bulgarian Intelligence Service, according to the Nova Makedonija (2Nov95), which also points out Multigroup’s links to the KGB and mafia, as well as expansion into Macedonia and Serbia. [ http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/mils/95-11-02.mils.html ] Lukanov was also deeply involved in the project codenamed “Neva” (created by the KGB, the Bulgarian State Security and involving Robert Maxwell). In his working paper titled, “The Political Economy of Corporate Governance Change in Bulgaria: Washington Consensus, Primitive Accumulation of Capital, and Catching-Up in the 1990”, Evgeni Peev writes that Multigroup was one of the special interest groups that captured control of Bulgaria. Other such groups included “Tron”, “G-13” and “Orion”. He writes that the government of Prime Minister Berov was known as “Multigroup’s government.” One infamous multi-million dollar scandal involved the Orion group and Mikhail Chernoy. [ http://cei.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/wp/wp2002-1.pdf ] Chernoy’s ties to Deripaska, Kuchma, Bezeq, and the Russian mafia, et. al. were pointed out earlier. [ http://www.infoukes.com/lists/politics/2001/06/0066.html ] Further information about the Multigroup, Tron and Orion groups is provided by Robert D. Kaplan in his article, “Hoods against Democrats”, in the Atlantic Monthly (Dec98; p.32) Robert Maxwell was born 65 miles south of Lviv in Solotvyna (aka Slatinske Doly, Szlatina, Solotvino, Aknazlaina) in 1923. By 1991, he was being called: “The crook of the century” by Newsweek (16Dec91). He became best known for the looting of employee pension funds belonging to some 20,000 employees at his Mirror Group companies in Britain. [ http://www.dti.gov.uk/cld/mirrorgroup/ ] Maxwell visited Bulgaria often and even had a school named after him in 1989, called the Robert Maxwell International Management School in Sofia, Bulgaria. The Jerusalem Post (“Maxwell Heads East Europe Fund”; 2Oct90) reported that Maxwell was the lead investor of a $250 million fund for investing in Eastern Europe and the USSR, including Bulgaria. The limited partnership was called the Maxwell Central and East European Partnership. Further to the Russell Davies book about Maxwell, published in 1995 and referred to by Stefan Krause above, another Maxwell book was released last year titled: “Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul” (2002; Carroll & Graf Publishers; ISBN: 0-78677-1078-0) written by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. Gordon Thomas is a best-selling author who has created television documentaries, written several screenplays and written 43 books selling more than 45 million copies. Martin Dillon is a foremost authority on global terrorism. While writing this book, the co-author received death threats at his New York home warning him to stop writing the book. Also a hacker accessed his computer in an attempt to destroy his research data. As a result, the FBI has launched an investigation. Robert Maxwell was the Labour Party’s Member of Parliament. He moved in upper social and political circles known to many that included many world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Francois Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Todor Zhivkov, et. al. He was on friendly enough terms that he used to call Thatcher and tell her what the main story in his morning Daily Mirror was going to be. Maxwell owned the global publishing house Mirror Group of newspapers from which he stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the employee pension fund, leaving them high and dry long before the Enron scandal broke. The authors claim that Robert Maxwell was also a superspy for Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad. He died under suspicious circumstances in 1991. Thomas and Dillon claim that Maxwell was assassinated by the Mossad. The Maxwell book has other themes. One is Robert Maxwell’s global marketing of the PROMIS software containing an Israeli-engineered backdoor with an undetectable electronic Trojan horse. The controversial PROMIS software was at the center of the “Inslaw Affair”. Maxwell sold the software to many government intelligence agencies and financial institutions allowing the Mossad secret and untraceable access into sensitive and very confidential files. For example, the authors write that Mossad official Rafi Eitan used PROMIS to uncover bank deposits made at Credit Suisse in Switzerland by Israeli millionaires illegally while circumventing Israeli financial controls. By threatening their exposure, the Mossad made the millionaires an unrefusable offer to make donations to Israel. No one apparently refused the Mossad’s offer. Another theme is the authors’ claim of the very little known business connections that Robert Maxwell had with the Russian Mafia (e.g. “Rising Sun” aka the Solntsevo crime syndicate) as part of the Communist Party/KGB’s master plan to loot assets out of the former USSR and Eastern Europe into the West. During the 1990s, while Harvard economists did the “talk” about “shock therapy”, and the IMF and World Bank did the “talk” about international investment into the former USSR, the rich and powerful insiders of the Soviet elites, along with their mafia oligarchs, were doing a different “walk” of looting the state and moving capital out of the country to offshore international banks around the world, including the islands in the Caribbean (eg. Mikhail Khodorkovsky's and Alexander Konanykhine's bank in Antigua called the European Union Bank, or Pavlo Lazarenko's and Peter Kirichenko's bank account at the European Federal Credit Bank in Antigua) and Pacific known as money laundering centers, and the main banking centres of London and New York. With only a few billion of dollars invested by foreigners into the former Soviet Union, and estimates of up to $500 billion exited out of the former Soviet Union, it is obvious which plan became dominant. The flight capital was absorbed by Western banks with a smile while U.S. policy not only turned a blind eye to the rise of organized crime but warmly welcomed oligarchs at White House fundraisers. The Cox Report (19Sep00), titled: “Russia’s Road To Corruption”, provides some details: [ http://policy.house.gov/russia/home.html ] ============================================ http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/soc.culture.baltics/msg04565.html [Cont'd from Part 1 ] But the stage for such massive flight capital was already set before the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. The Thomas and Dillon book describes the role played by Robert Maxwell in cahoots with KGB bosses and mafia kingpins in arranging such looting schemes originating in the Eastern Bloc before 1991, during the 1980s under Gorbachev’s perestroika and Yuri Andropov’s leadership. For example, the authors describe Maxwell’s deal with Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov in the Neva Project, created by Andrei Lukanov, a former member of Bulgaria’s Central Committee (and future Prime Minister). The deal was made between Maxwell and KGB boss Vladimir Kryuchkov. They brought Zhivkov on side with a bribe. Then Kryuchkov appointed Lukanov as the KGB’s point man for both the project and as Maxwell’s handler. To raise Lukanov’s authority to a higher level more appropriate for such an important project, Kryuchkov appointed Lukanov as an officer in the high ranking Investigation Unit of Soviet Intelligence. “Neva was designed to be the single largest programme for the mass-scale theft of US technology” operated by Darzhavna Sigurnost (Bulgarian intelligence service) and brought to Bulgaria under diplomatic cover where the technology would be re-engineered by Maxwell’s companies and then resold to Eastern Bloc countries including Russia and Ukraine. Profits would be split among Maxwell, Lukanov and Ognian Doinov (the vice-president of Bulgaria’s State Economic Council). The funds would be money laundered to the West through Maxwell’s Bulgarian Co-operative Bank. To implement Neva, Maxwell created a bunch of companies, such as Multiart (for producing stolen technology for the metal industry), Balkan Films (for providing stolen technology from Hollywood to the Bulgarian film industry), Stanke Dimitrov (for software to the pharmaceutical industry), Sophia Insurance (computers for the office management sector), and so on. The many companies provided cover for the Mossad operatives to infiltrate the Eastern Bloc. The companies eventually would be grouped under Maxwell’s Multi-Group (Multigroup) and embraced by the Russian and Bulgarian mafia. According to the authors, Maxwell had some 400 private businesses, such as Degem Computers (used as a cover by the Mossad), which sold software in the Eastern Bloc, Central and South America. Maxwell owned Tel Aviv-based Citex Corporation (whose Israeli head was the son of Yitzhak Shamir). He had 30 percent of the Ma’ariv newspaper in Israel and a piece of Moscow News in Russia. (Gorbachev sent Maxwell an icon as a gift when he found out that Maxwell had bought a stake in Moscow News). The Mossad used Maxwell’s publications such as the Daily Mirror to provide cover for both Mossad operatives posing as journalists and to publish some disinformation stories (e.g. about Mordecai Vanunu, who converted from the Jewish to the Christian faith, and blew the whistle as a technician at the Israeli Dimona nuclear centre on Israel’s secret nuclear program of weapons of mass destruction). The authors’ claim of Maxwell being an Israeli spy is not new. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour M. Hersh wrote the same a decade ago in “The Sampson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb” triggering a scandal in 1991 when two British members of parliament read excerpts in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege. Hersh was sued for linking Maxwell to the Mossad, but won his case (see Washington Post; "Hersh Wins Apology from British Papers"). The same claims about Maxwell being linked to Mossad were made by the two "rogue" Mossad agents: Victor Ostrovsky in “The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes The Mossad’s Secret Agenda” (1994; ISBN 0-06-017635-0), and Ari Ben-Menashe in his “Profits of War: The Sensational Story of the World- Wide Arms Conspiracy” (1992; ISBN 1-86373-379-5). The authors Thomas and Dillon interviewed both these former Mossad agents as sources for their book. The Maxwell book goes further than Hersh though and alleges that Maxwell was assassinated by the Mossad on board his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, for reasons described in the book. This is a controversial, minority view. (BTW, Maxwell bought the famous Lady Ghislaine yacht from the brother of Adnan Khashoggi, the well- known international arms dealer last reported by Sy Hersh as meeting with "The Prince of Darkness", Straussian neo-con Richard Perle). And the authors’ claim that Robert Maxwell was looting Bulgaria in cahoots with the Bulgarian secret service is not new either. Patrick Brogan reported in the Glasgow Herald (“Maxwell 'smuggled cash from Bulgaria’ ”; 20Jan92) on a New York Times article about Maxwell’s embezzlement and smuggling scheme in 1987 with the Bulgarian president, Todor Zhivkov, and Maxwell’s private company called “Bimex”. He writes: -------------------------------------------------- “ . . . that the Bulgarian secret service was heavily involved in schemes to plunder the treasury and launder money through foreign companies and banks. That is where Robert Maxwell was allegedly involved. The secret service was also engaged in illegal arms sales, drug trafficking, and terrorism. A presidential commission is investigating the allegations and a senior officer in the secret service who was about to be interrogated committed suicide last month. He was implicated in the murder in London in 1978 of leading Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was jabbed with a poisoned umbrella. [ . . . ] Mr Lilov claims that hundreds of foreign companies from Austria to Singapore were managed by the Bulgarian secret service.” --------------------------------------------------- Media reports praised Robert Maxwell for buying the New York Daily News. However, George Garneau reported in the Editor & Publisher (“Maxwell's money laundry”; 19Mar94) that in a court of law, the U.S. bankruptcy judge, Tina Brozman, found that Maxwell’s reason for the purchase was for money laundering purposes. Garneau quoted the judge’s ruling: ----------------- "The evidence here compels the conclusion that Maxwell's interest, both in purchasing and operating the Daily News, was to keep the newspaper alive so that Maxwell Newspapers could function as a money-laundering device," Brozman said in a scathing 23-page decision riddled with references to fraud, misappropriation of funds, deceit and self-interest. [ . . . ] In one instance, she said, Maxwell used the Daily News to secure a $78 million loan from Bankers Trust but gave the tabloid only $8.45 million. Another time, he negotiated to borrow $86 million from Bankers Trust for MGN and "sent the funds off on a great circular ride" through the Daily News and back to Bankers Trust to repay another loan, the decision said. -------------------- There are many other information sources for the book including interviews the authors had with the following: Maxwell’s widow Betty and daughter Isabel; John P. O’Neill (FBI’s executive agent-in-charge); Yitzhak Rabin (former Prime Minister of Israel); Ehud Barak (former head of Israeli Military Intelligence and former Prime Minister of Israel); William Casey and William Colby (former CIA directors); Rafi Eitan (former Mossad director of operations); David Kimche (former Mossad assistant deputy director-general); Uri Saguy (former head of Aman, Israeli military intelligence); and Richard Tomlinson (former MI6 officer). Vladimir Kryuchkov (former KGB chairman) was listed as one of the secondary sources. According to the authors, Maxwell’s Mossad handler was Rafi Eitan, the same Mossad official who recruited Jonathan Pollard to spy on the USA for Israel. The Pollard recruitment was carried out through Aviem Sella (the famous Israeli pilot who led the air attack destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor) and Yosef Yagur, the science attache at the Israeli consulate in New York. It was KGB boss Vladimir Kryuchkov who played a significant role in the looting plan hatched before the breakup of the USSR. He wanted to establish hundreds of business enterprises in the West that would provide cover for the KGB and Communist Party members to transfer their assets abroad with the assistance of organized crime, in a similar secret fashion to what Maxwell was providing to Mossad “katsas”. In the latter case, the authors say Maxwell met and colluded with Russian Mafia bosses such as Simeon Yukovich Mogilevich from the “Rising Sun” (aka Solntsevo) crime syndicate. Other Maxwell contacts included Andrei Lukanov and Ivo Janchev in Bulgaria where Maxwell bought the Bulgarian Cooperative Bank and which had allegedly laundered over $1 billion for the Solntsevo to Switzerland, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein. The KGB-led plan for looting the USSR and Eastern Europe has been corroborated by others beyond the Maxwell book, such as Richard L. Palmer, President of Cachet International, a former U.S. army intelligence officer, a former CIA operative specializing in money laundering, and a former CIA Station Chief in the former Soviet Union specializing in the investigation of Russian organized crime. Palmer described the plan in his testimony before the U.S. Congressional Committee on Banking and Financial Services dealing with the infiltration of the Western financial system by the Russian Mafia. Palmer is also recognized by the U.S. Federal Court as an expert witness on organized crime, official corruption and the banking system in Russia. Palmer described the earlier looting steps by the KGB and high Communist Party officials that were formulated and implemented (before the breakup of the USSR in 1991) in the second half of the1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika”. His testimony is available at the following URL: [ http://financialservices.house.gov/banking/92199pal.htm ] Robert Maxwell and Semion Mogilevich were but two players in such looting schemes. Other authors have described similar players such as Grigori “Lucky Loutchanno” Loutchansky and his Austrian-based company, Nordex, and commodity trader Marc Rich based in Switzerland. Author Paul Klebnikov wrote that oligarch Boris Berezovsky, “Godfather of the Kremlin”, learned from Marc Rich. Marc Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton for his crimes in USA, and like Maxwell, also had links to the Mossad. Many Israeli officials, some linked to the Mossad, sent letters to Clinton supporting Marc Rich’s pardon. The London Daily Telegraph reported that Robert Maxwell’s son, Kevin Maxwell, worked for Grigori Loutchansky’s Nordex as a consultant for several years, trading in finance and construction in Russia and its satellites. Grigori Loutchansky has been banned from Britain by successive Home Secretaries. In the article, “Russian Mafia Strikes Back in Bulgaria”, [ http://www.tol.cz/week.html#bul ] (Transitions Online; 11-17Sep00), Polia Tchakarova, points out how Loutchansky/Pordeks, was funding political parties in Bulgaria, and that Mikhail Chernoy was expelled from Bulgaria. And RFE Turkmen Service reported on the alleged bribe of $100 million made by Loutchansky to Akezhan Kazhegeldin, the prime minister of Kazakhstan. [ http://www.rferl.org/bd/tu/reports/2001/04/0-080401.html ] In his article about Loutchansky titled, “Sinned Against or Sinning” (Jerusalem Post; 28Dec95), Tom Sawicki reported that two Nordex employees were killed in mafia-style street shootings in Moscow and Kyiv (a third was wounded), and that the “Ukraine-based company, Ukraintechservice, with which Nordex works closely, is currently under investigation over several allegedly shady deals.” Sawicki also wrote about Loutchansky’s ties to the Russian Mafia, money laundering for the KGB, involvement in the illicit trade in nuclear materials and technology, and the Nordex plane that was stopped in Kyiv while refueling and loaded with Scud missile warheads en route from North Korea to Iraq. He also says: “By 1994, Nordex's turnover had reached some $3 billion and it had 40 subsidiaries and joint-venture firms in the West, and some 100 such affiliates in the former Soviet empire. It employs close to 8,000 people. Among the big names associated with Nordex are Robert Maxwell's sons Kevin and Ian in London, the daughter and son-in-law of President Nursultan Nasarbayev of Kazakhstan, and until recently former Israeli finance minister Yitzhak Moda'i.” ======================================== [Cont'd in Part 3 ] ======================================== http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/soc.culture.baltics/msg04566.html [Cont'd from Part 2] Marc Rich and Grigori Loutchansky have been linked to the Solntsevo (aka Solntsevskaya), as has Semion “Brainy Don” Mogilevich. Thomas and Dillon describe Mogilevich as the head of Solntsevo. Other authors have suggested Sergei “Mikhas” Mikhailov as the head. In the book, “The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy”, Professor Federico Varese has provided some insight into the organizational structure of Solntsevo which he describes as having roughly 9,000 members and being an umbrella organization for about twelve crews. Solntsevo also has a supreme governing council with twelve members who are leaders of the crews. In any case, Varese confirms that Mogilevich, Mikhailov, Viktor Averin, Vyacheslav Ivankov, Yurii Esin, Sergei Timofeev, and Sergei Kruglov are/were leading figures in Solntsevo. Timofeev and Kruglov have been killed. Mikhailov and Averin also have Israeli passports. In his book “Red Mafiya: How The Russian Mob Has Invaded America” (2000), author Robert I. Friedman devoted a full chapter to Mogilevich. The American Journalism Review has given Friedman the epithet, “The best investigative reporter you have never heard of.” Friedman exposed Mogilevich in a Village Voice article titled, “The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World” which earned him a Russian Mafia hit contract from Mogilevich of $100,000 on his head. [ http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9821/friedman.php ] Friedman also wrote the article, “The Money Plane”, published in the New York magazine (22Jan96) describing how the Republic National Bank based in New York provided billions of U.S. dollars to the Russian Mafia- controlled banks in Moscow. The money supply was denominated in uncirculated new $100 bills wrapped in their Federal Reserve wrappers, and flown weekly aboard the “money plane”, a nonstop Delta Flight 30 leaving Gate 14 at John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. Republic National Bank was founded and owned by Edmond Safra (ranked among the 200 world’s wealthiest people in 1999) who was killed in his Monaco penthouse by a male nurse and former U.S. Green Beret, Ted Maher, convicted in Dec 2002. Safra’s widow, Lily, is ranked as Britain's eighth richest woman. The authors Thomas and Dillon claim Safra managed funds for the Russian Mafia and that Safra had links to Robert Maxwell. The Solntsevo crime syndicate is perhaps the most powerful in the world today. It has formed alliances with the Sicilian mafia in Europe, the Cosa Nostra families in New York, including Brighton Beach, the drug cartels in South America, the Triads in Hong Kong, and the Yakuza in Japan. Media reports claim it had significant influence in the inner political circles of presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine. For example, Vadim Rabinovich was Kuchma’s adviser and a Nordex representative in Ukraine (where Mogilevich was born). In Russia, Solntsevo has been linked to oligarchs and the “familia” members of Boris Yeltsin. For example, TIME magazine linked Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to Nordex also. [ http://www.afpc.org/rrm/rrm160.htm ] There have been many widely-publicized examples of Western-based mob operations for money laundering the loot from the former USSR: Canadians might be interested to know that Semion Mogilevich was one of the founders of YBM Magnex, a huge money laundering front for the Solntsevo mafia listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. After going bankrupt and bilking investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, YBM Magnex was the subject of investigative hearings by the Ontario Securities Commission involving such high profile YBM board directors as the former Liberal premier of Ontario, David Peterson. Peterson was found not guilty but YBM Magnex executives such as Igor Fisherman were found guilty. The FBI now has Mogilevich and Fisherman on their “Most Wanted” list. [ http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/alert/mogilevich.htm ] [ http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/alert/fisherman.htm ] Americans might be interested to know that Mogilevich was a key player in the multi-billion dollar money laundering scandal at the Bank of New York (BoNY), still under criminal investigation. The BoNY scheme was linked to Russian banks such as Bank Menatep and Inkombank, whose billionaire owners are now some of the richest so-called oligarchs in Russia. Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been ranked as the richest person in Russia. A role was played by the Geneva bank, Bank of New York-Inter Maritime, controlled by Bruce (Baruch) Rappaport, believed to be connected to American and Israeli intelligence. Rappaport has been the subject of congressional hearings and was earlier involved in the BCCI banking scandal (Wall Street Journal, 28Feb01; The Economist, 28Aug99). Rappaport got his diplomatic immunity as the ambassador from Antigua to Russia. In the 1980s, Rappaport was the largest shareholder of Bank of New York. He was also linked to Charles Keating (the infamous Savings & Loan bandit and part of the "Keating Five" scandal). [http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/02_27_01psi_min_rpt_case.pdf ] A key role in the BoNY money laundering was played by a small company, linked to Mogilevich, called Benex, described in the congressional testimony by the former Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of State, Jonathan M. Winer: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.house.gov/financialservices/3900win.htm [ . . . ] In response to my questions, I learned that the Benex account at the Bank of New York had moved more than $4.2 billion, with over 8,000 transactions a month for an average of one wire transfer every five minutes, night and day, 24 hours a day, for 18 months. I learned that Benex with its couple of employees and personal computers was operated by Peter Berlin, a Russian who had married a U.S. citizen named Lucy Edwards, herself Russian-born, who had divorced her first, American husband after acquiring U.S. citizenship. I learned that Ms. Edwards worked at the Bank of New York, where Benex maintained its account and through which Benex undertook its money laundering activity. I learned that Ms. Edwards’ job at the Bank of New York was to head the East European Trade Finance Department at the Bank of New York’s London offices, and that she remained in daily contact with her husband Peter Berlin, who was still in New York, running Benex. Mr. Chairman, my jaw literally dropped open when I was provided this information. In the past I had investigated the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, and a lot of other big international money laundering cases, but this case had stunning implications. It suggested as a serious possibility that Benex was a multibillion dollar money laundering business operated by a couple of Russians, including one insider at a major United States money center bank, and that Benex was among other things laundering funds in New York City for the some of the worst elements of the Russian mob. In various capacities, I had prosecuted, investigated, analyzed, or undertaken oversight of many major money laundering cases over the previous 20 years. I had never heard of any money laundering case of this magnitude. [ . . . ] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- And Europeans might be interested in Solntsevo’s multi-billion dollar money laundering scheme in several European countries recently uncovered by the police investigation code-named “Operation Spiderweb” and also linked to the BoNY scheme. The Maxwell book may very well spur more research about the ties between Robert Maxwell and Semion Mogilevich and the Solntsevo. It will be interesting to see if the Maxwell book will elicit a backlash from the Mossad. In the past, the Mossad tried to financially cripple Victor Ostrovsky for his Mossad expose, while in the Ari Ben-Menashe case, the Mossad initially claimed that he never even worked for them. Thomas and Dillion used both as sources. In the meantime, below are some excerpts from the book. Stefan Lemieszewski P.S. BTW, Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, was the accountant for both Multigroup and Maxwell’s receivership. ========================================== Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul” (2002; Carroll & Graf Publishers; ISBN 0-78677-1078-0) by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. Chapter 1 Days of Kidon (p.37) [ . . . ] There were also other names, dangerously embarrassing names, that had links to Maxwell and Israel. They did not officially appear on any of the Maxwell company documents. These people held their shares through nominee attorneys or accountants. Those names had invested in Maxwell because they believed it would make it easier for them to conduct their activities: whole-scale drug running, money laundering, trafficking in humans and gun running. By 1991, investors included the heads of the Russian Mafia, who had positioned themselves for the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. One was Semion Yukovich Mogilevich. He was a specialist in every major crime. Maxwell had arranged for Mogilevich to enter the Western financial world in 1988. It was a time when the Bank of New York had begun aggressively to prepare to step into the post- Communist financial world. Maxwell had introduced the bank to a Swiss banker who ran an investment brokerage in Geneva with branch offices in the Middle East, west Africa and the Cayman Islands. For Mogilevich it was an ideal window through which to launder his money - into hard currency. But to keep check on what was happening, he needed a passport. Robert Maxwell had recommended he should be given one from the State of Israel. The passports had been issued to Mogilevich and 23 of his gang members. There were others on the list who did not need such a document. One was Edmund Safra, a US-based billionaire banker who had made tens of millions of dollars managing the funds of other members of the Russian Mafia. Safra had links to Maxwell: they had dined on board the Lady Ghislaine when the yacht berthed opposite Safra’s home in Monte Carlo. (p.41) [ . . . ] For his part, Maxwell had learned enough about the methods of British intelligence to discover that truth is an acquired taste. Years later, after he had finally been recruited by Mossad, he had been told by Rafi Eitan, ‘our work is to create history and then hide it. On the whole we are honourable, respect constitutional government, free speech and human rights. But in the end we also understand that nothing must stand in the way of what we do.’ [ . . . ] ========================================= [ Cont'd in Part 4 ] ====================================== http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/soc.culture.baltics/msg04567.html [ Cont'd from Part 3 ] Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul” (2002; Carroll & Graf Publishers; ISBN 0-78677-1078-0) by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. (p.57) [ . . . ] A substantial portion of the MI6 file - according to one of its former officers, Richard Tomlinson - was devoted to Maxwell's connections with the KGB and its satellite services in the Soviet Bloc. Tomlinson was to recall that there was also 'a lot of interesting stuff about Maxwell's dealings with some very dodgy characters, heads of the Russian criminal families. Some of the stuff on file were transcripts of meetings with them in hotels in Moscow. There was also material on his ties to Israel.' MI5's file was focused on Maxwell's financial activities in the City of London: his borrowings, his relationships with dozen of banks both in London and New York, and details about his interlinked companies. (p.74) [ . . . ] By using his scientific contacts, offering to publish their work on computer technology in his magazines, he was able to provide hard evidence that the Eastern Bloc was well behind the West in technology and innovation. It gave Israel an opening to sell secretly a number of Eastern Bloc countries computers produced by Degem, Maxwell's own company. In turn that allowed Mossad to send its own electronic specialists to the Soviet Union, posing as technicians, to cast their eyes over the state of the domestic computer industry. Step by step, while Israel had no meaningful diplomatic presence in the Soviet Union, Maxwell's intelligence gathering opened up the reality of what was happening in the Communist empire. (p.84) [ . . . ] Robert Maxwell's interest in Bulgaria had started before he was recruited by Mossad. In one of those earlier meetings with Vladimir Kryuchkov in Moscow, Maxwell raised the possibility that Bulgaria might be a country where he could invest his money away from prying eyes in the City of London and Wall Street. The KGB chief had been surprised. He had assumed 'somebody like Maxwell had taken care of such matters'. But Maxwell had persisted. He would like to use Bulgaria to store substantial sums of money in hard currency. It would, of course, have to be available to him for withdrawal on demand. In the meantime, a Bulgarian bank would become his own personal vault, even more inaccessible than those in Switzerland. Kryuchkov had asked for time to see if this was feasible. No other entrepreneur from outside the Soviet Union, let alone someone of the status of Robert Maxwell, had been given such financial shelter. Kryuchkov had correctly assumed that the money Maxwell wanted to bury in Bulgaria would raise serious questions in the bastions of the West's financial centres. But there could be an advantage for Russia. Moscow effectively controlled Bulgaria's banking system. Allowing Maxwell to keep money there would enable the KGB to have an inside view of how he operated. There would also be the not insignificant fact that he would be expected to pay a 'handling fee' for such a service. That would come into the KGB's own bank in Moscow. Kryuchkov consulted with the then single most important leader in the Soviet Union, his own predecessor at the KGB and at that time General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee: Yuri Andropov. The bespectacled party chief had listened carefully to Kryuchkov in his Kremlin office. Andropov knew Maxwell better than anyone in the Soviet Union. They shared a background of poverty and each had risen to eminence by a combination of hard work, ruthlessness and duplicity. They also shared another link. Both were Jews. But unlike Maxwell, Andropov had carefully hidden his ethnic roots. To be a Jew in the Soviet hierarchy was as dangerous as being one in Hitler's Third Reich. Maxwell had learned about Andropov's background from Rafi Eitan. Just like Eitan, he had also filed that titbit away in one of those compartments in his mind. Without telling Kryuchkov, he had called Andropov on the Jewish Day of Atonement. During the conversation he said how much he would like to help develop Bulgaria because as a Jew he had always wished to see an impoverished country begin to prosper; the pitiful state of Bulgaria's economy reminded him of what life had been like in those days when he had grown up in Slatinske Doly. While the precise words of their conversation went unrecorded, it was left to Kryuchkov to say, 'No one can agree like two Jews united in common purpose.' More certain is that Robert Maxwell also recognised that when Andropov finally succumbed to the kidney disease that was in an advanced stage, Kryuchkov would still be an influential figure in the Soviet archipelago - and a source of important information for Mossad. He began to send couriered gifts to Kryuchkov's office in the Lubyanka: a cashmere coat, sets of solid golf cufflinks, the latest hi-fi set and a box of the finest opera recordings. Every week without fail the British Airways flight from London to Moscow had stowed in its hold a crate of vintage Scotch whisky or Krug champagne. Inevitably, the gifts came to the attention of MI6. It deepened its concern that Maxwell might in the later words of one serving officer 'be doing a Blunt or Philby'. Both men had been close to the core of British intelligence and had betrayed its secrets to Moscow. But David Spedding, the MI6 chief, decided that Maxwell was purely driven by an insatiable need to promote himself so as to become a major deal maker in the Soviet Union. By then Vladimir Kryuchkov had agreed to provide Maxwell with his financial bunker in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. In one of those piquant twists that the KGB liked, the Bank of Bulgaria, where Maxwell's money would be safe, was one the KGB used to finance international terrorist groups and the global traffic in drugs. To watch over Maxwell, Kryuchkov decided he needed his most trusted operative in Bulgaria. He was Andrei Lukanov. Still not fifty years of age, he had been a member of Bulgaria's Central Committee for over a decade. Soft-spoken, he bore a broad Slav face, its most noticeable feature being his expressive eyes. Like Maxwell, Lukanov had long buried his peasant background. He dressed, walked and spoke in an aristocratic manner. Those he favoured, he greeted with a hug for the men, a hand-kiss for the women. Others he no longer favoured often disappeared from one day to the next. No one would ever know how many persons he had got rid of with a few whispered words or a nod. He was cast in the mould of a Mafia godfather. Before Maxwell had been given his special coded account in the Bank of Bulgaria, Kryuchkov had sent for Lukanov. (p.163) [ . . . ] But not even Robert Maxwell, in those halcyon months after that dinner at the Sofia Sheraton, could have imagined that the empire he was single-handedly creating - Lukanov and Doinov were soon no more than underlings at his beck and call - would grow into one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world, embracing the Russian Mafia, the crime families of Bulgaria and, far away across the Atlantic, those in New York and, on the other side of the world, the crime families of Japan and Hong Kong. By then all the companies that Maxwell had formed would come under one name: Multi-Group. It would control a significant percentage of the global profits from gas, telecommunications, oil, gambling and money laundering. If Maxwell had seen it reach that stage, he might well have tried to insist that due tribute be paid to his achievement. Who can doubt as the founder godfather he would have liked his name in the title. Maxwell Multi Group would surely have had a ring which would have appealed to his overwhelming vanity. John P O'Neill, FBI executive agent-in-charge in New York, would later say that 'in many ways Maxwell was at the heart of the global criminal network. Beginning with his Bulgarian connection he showed how to structure a network that grew into financially powerful criminal corporations whose power would extend to the South American drug cartels, the Tongs and the Triads, the Russian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. They were all there before. But the way Robert Maxwell set up things up, they would all come together in Multi- Group in its early years. His last contribution was not that he just robbed his pension funds. It was that he was the man who set in motion a true coalition of global criminals.' Meanwhile, in those months of founding this great underbelly of criminality to support his very public face in London and New York, Maxwell had continued to service the needs of Mossad. Just as Degem Computers provided cover for katsas to move through South America, so those in the Eastern Bloc served the same purpose. Mossad, like all intelligence services, had until then found it very difficult to operate in Russia and its satellites. While the CIA and British intelligence still found it hard to do so, Robert Maxwell ensured that Mossad could penetrate far into the economic structure of Eastern Europe and make informed judgments never before possible by working under cover of the Neva companies. (p.164) [ . . . ] The morning after the Sheraton dinner, Maxwell sent for Doinov. They strolled through the ground of the government villa where Maxwell usually stayed. He said he had been serious about resolving Bulgaria's foreign debt. All he would require was a commission of 15 per cent. Doinov agreed that was reasonable, yet it could just have been a figure that Maxwell pulled out of the air to show how powerful he was. Crunching over the snow, Maxwell then began to outline how it would be possible. The first steps would be to restructure a joint venture company, BIMEX, which Maxwell had set up with Lukanov some time ago. This would now be registered in London with two addresses, Headington Hill Hall and Maxwell House. The shareholders would be those in another of Maxwell's companies, Orbit House Enterprises. The initial capital would be $1 million for 500,000 shares, equally divided between the Orbit stockholders and those in BIMEX, Bulgaria. Its board would be reinforced by a director of a Bulgarian bank registered in Beirut. It was called LITEX and was a cover for the Middle East station of the Bulgarian secret service. This interlocking arrangement would pave the way for Maxwell to obtain a controlling interest in the Bulgarian Cooperative Bank. For years the bank had unwittingly been a conduit for money laundering by one of the major criminal families in Moscow, the Rising Sun [aka Solntsevo], whose head was Simeon Mogilevich. But, on that January day in 1987, Robert Maxwell confined himself to explaining to Doinov the finer points of international financial manipulation. Once he had his hands on the Cooperative Bank, Maxwell would quietly forget about his offer to service Bulgaria's foreign debt. The bank would provide him with a means, according to a later Bulgarian government report, to: “launder over $1 billion through Switzerland, some of it passing through Gibraltar to Liechtenstein as a consequence of joint ventures like BIMEX and others in which Maxwell was involved. As a result of Decision 53 of the Council of Ministers, $200 million of the country's monetary reserve was invested in shares and bonds via Maxwell's Bishopsgate International Investment Management PLC in England.” Vassily Koralov, director of the Bulgarian Foreign Trade Bank, was unable to explain how Maxwell had taken $500 million out of the country with simply a bank withdrawal slip. 'I cannot imagine how it was possible to do this without the signature of the head accountant. I have no desire to comment on whether the money had been money that came in from abroad,' Koralov said. The money came from profits Neva had made in sales of computer technology to all the Eastern Bloc countries. Maxwell had set up a web of financial companies across the world that ensured those profits would never be traced. The funereal-like Dr R had seen to that. The one certainty is that they far exceeded the $1 billion that the Bulgarian government subsequently reported it was able to identify. Credit Suisse in Switzerland, banks in Gibraltar - which serve the same purpose as do those in the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein - were mere staging points on the electronic trail the ingenious Dr R had opened, and along which his client, Robert Maxwell, was the only man allowed to travel. It would remain so well disguised that investigators from the US Internal Revenue Service, from Britain's Inland Revenue and from all the regulatory bodies who may have suspected it existed, would never - ever - be able to follow it. ========================================= [Cont'd in Part 5] ========================================= http://www.usenet.com/newsgroups/soc.culture.baltics/msg04568.html [Cont'd from Part 4] Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul” (2002; Carroll & Graf Publishers; ISBN 0-78677-1078-0) by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. (p.172) [ . . . ] On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, Admoni had gathered his staff in the Mossad canteen and said: 'I wish us all a year without mistakes. We need to all keep our eye on the ball.' It was an injunction in the case of Robert Maxwell that Nahum Admoni should himself have heeded. The criminals Maxwell was becoming involved with would not only lead him into dangerous and uncharted waters, but would eventually pose a threat to Israel and seal Admoni's own fate. He would become the Mossad director who did not hear the alarm bells ringing. The danger surfaced in Moscow over another of those dinners Kryuchkov gave Maxwell in the Lubyanka late in 1988. Even more fearful at the pace at which perestroika was accelerating, Kruychkov said that for the KGB to remain a potent force he wanted to establish 'over six hundred commercial enterprises'. They would all have links to the West. Just as Maxwell's companies provided cover for Mossad's katsas, Kryuchkov envisaged his companies would provide similar protection for KGB operatives. The Russian companies would operate on sound business principles, just like any other corporation in the West. The profits from the Russian concerns would go to the KGB and help fund its foreign intelligence operations. Maxwell was assured none of these would be against the State of Israel. Kryuchkov had explained that behind his immediate plan was a long-term one. The six hundred companies would each employ a quota of senior party members to provide them with an income during the difficult days ahead in the transition from Communism to capitalism. Through genuine trading links, the companies would obtain access to the very heart of capitalism: Wall Street and the City of London and the Bourses of Western Europe. Its staffs would then learn the innermost secrets of the West's banking system, the wellspring of all capitalism. Eventually it might even be possible to destabilise Western economies - and pave the way for the return of Communism. It was madcap scheming that Stalin would have been proud of. But there was more. Before that meeting Maxwell met a man in the plan Kryuchkov had created. His name was Simeon Mogilevich. He was a Ukrainian-born Jew and head of the Rising Sun [aka Solntsevo], one of Moscow's major criminal families. And soon, thanks to Maxwell, he would be able to travel on an Israeli passport. Money laundering, weapons, contract hits and drug trafficking were the staples of Mogilevich's work. At their first meeting, again in Moscow, Mogilevich told Maxwell he would be able to get Jews out of the Soviet Union and had done so on many occasions. The truth was that Mogilevich had repeatedly robbed Soviet Jews of their last valuables in return for his promise to smuggle them to Israel. By the time he met Maxwell, Mogilevich had established some fifty legitimate companies in Israel, Britain, the United States, Austria and Germany. Through them he laundered his criminal profits. These would grow to some $40 billion a year after he met Maxwell. A phone call to Tel Aviv, and Mogilevich had his passport. Now he could go anywhere - and he did: to Liechtenstein to set up a new money-laundering operation; to Gibraltar, to Cyprus, the Channel Islands and the Cayman Islands. In all these places money and a no-questions policy were opposite sides of the same coin, and Simeon Mogilevich, thanks to Robert Maxwell, availed himself of new opportunities. The second man to cross Maxwell's path, this time through an introduction by his old friend Andrei Lukanov, was Ivo Janchev. An officer in the Bulgarian secret service, he had ambitions to be rich whatever it took. Using his contacts in Moscow and Budapest, he would be the link to organised crime figures like Mogilevich. He would also be the front man to make contact with several Russians with businesses in the West. Within a few months of meeting Mogilevich and Janchev, Robert Maxwell had gone into partnership with them. He had now become a serious player in the world of organised crime. Even by Maxwell's standards of being willing to enter into any arrangement that would ultimately profit him, his decision to partner these two men was extraordinary. Maxwell was a corporate raider, a man who would breeze into a boardroom and say he had come to buy the company. His new partners' usual technique was to storm into a company with their private armies of former Soviet Spetznaz (special forces), and threaten to take apart the building unless the offer they made was accepted. While Maxwell had a bevy of fawning secretaries to slip him his deodorant or mop his brow, his partners did not bother with such feminine niceties. They depended on their armed bodyguards to make sure no one passed comment on their body odour. At play they could be rough, publicly manhandling their women, stomping their way into a night spot and terrorising the other clients. Their business was prostitution, drug running, traffic in humans. When MI5 discovered how Mogilevich earned his money, they informed the Home Office which expelled him from Britain and publicly branded him as 'one of the most dangerous criminals in the world'. It is hard to believe that Robert Maxwell did not know that. Yet he continued to be drawn ever deeper into the dark and evil empire Mogilevich operated. A number of people who had crossed his path had been disposed of into the Moscow River or in one of the city's back streets. He had his own team of killers never further away than a phone call. These two were the men Maxwell had chosen as his partners. The question that would be asked was: why? Why did a tycoon still listed among the top ten publishers in the world, among men like Murdoch, not only rub shoulders with, but treat as equals, Lukanov, Janchev and Mogilevich? Maxwell's enjoyment came from being seen in public with kings and queens, with Prince Charles and Princess Diana, with Hollywood stars. Through them he could continue to fill not only the pages of his own newspapers, but those of his rivals. But with his three new partners he dared not even be photographed by a hostess in a Sofia nightclub. He could meet his partners only in the shadows, in one of their fortified palaces where even he had to undergo a body scan before gaining access. He could never invite them, even in the dead of night, to visit him. He could never take them for a cruise on the Lady Ghislaine. He could do almost nothing that he normally liked to do to show his power. He was just their business partner. No more. No less. He knew their business was corruption and pornography of every kind: fortunes were made from prostitution and drug trafficking, from trading in men, women and children for the sex industry, from the mass marketing of obscene films, from contract killings, blackmail, extortion. What was Robert Maxwell doing in their world? The answer would come within a few months of their alliance. Maxwell, who was not averse to hiding behind other respectable figures - the Rothschilds, the Lehman Brothers and that epitome of respectability, the governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton - would now find himself fronting for three of the world's most powerful godfathers. There is only one reason why he would do so, feel he must do so: the attraction of making still more money to satisfy his insatiable desire to be the richest man in the world. The obsession may have gone all the way back to that time when he walked barefoot in the summer, shared his shoes with his siblings in the winter, when he slept under a quilt smelling of sour straw and when his mother had told him that to be an Englishman was to be different. He had become an Englishman of sorts. He was certainly different - if that meant being wealthy. But he had not yet enough money. Lukanov, Mogilevich and Janchev had offered him a means to come that much closer to getting what he wanted. Through his own connections to international finance, where his very name could still open doors to the bankers at Goldman Sachs and the House of Morgan, he had paved the way for the godfathers to enter with him. Israel's superspy had now become an associate of criminals. Fraud by now was nothing new to Maxwell. But to be a partner with criminals on every watch list of police and intelligence services was something new. It marked his fall, rise and fall again: he had fallen after the damning report by the British government's inspectors that he was not fit to be a director of any company; he had risen again to own the Daily Mirror. But now he had embarked on a journey that could only lead to another fall. Nevertheless, he must have believed he could still count on the protection of Mossad. He could only have believed that because he knew so much of their own dark secrets that, if his own criminal connections had surfaced, he could depend on Mossad to help him. In New York, the FBI chief, John P O'Neill, later identified the global threat posed by organised crime and its links to Maxwell: 'Some of Maxwell's associates were involved in narcotics, illegal weapons and contract killings, of which there may be as many as five hundred a year. They were also into smuggling precious metals and counterfeiting. They had links with the Russian military. Any Russian banker that didn't do their bidding knew what to expect. He got a grenade tossed into his car. A hit like that could be arranged for as little as two hundred bucks. People who tried to cross them had nowhere to run. They could hunt you down anywhere. 'These people had sophisticated operations for washing money in London and New York. It came from drugs, financial fraud -just one step beyond what Maxwell was doing - prostitution and extortion. 'Their operations looked something like this. In Britain it was money laundering. Same in Switzerland. Italy was drugs and traffic in people -mostly women for prostitution. In Belgium and Germany, it was stolen cars and more laundering of profits. Albania and Poland was fraud, arms and drugs. Maxwell showed how an intricate, complex web of shell companies under a group umbrella could move money around the globe. When New York became a target for Eastern Bloc criminal syndicates and we looked at how it operated, the Maxwell model was there for all to see.' (p.180) [ . . . ] At a meeting with Lukanov, Maxwell said he wanted a new stake in BZK and for his Bishopsgate Investment Trust to handle a substantial portion of Bulgaria's current $10 billion foreign debt. He also wanted something else: the pick of Todor Zhivkov's palaces and villas, now all about to come on the market. They were being offered at bargain- basement prices. Maxwell would buy the choicest for himself and acquire the others either for resale or high rentals to the foreign investors he would bring into Bulgaria. Accompanied by Nick Davies and his photographer, he travelled to Perla on the Black Sea. It was famous for two reasons. It produced the best rikea drink in all Bulgaria and was the site of the former president's most luxurious holiday palace. It had its own harbour and a cinema. When Maxwell returned to Sofia, Doinov was anxiously waiting. 'I told him I had decided I was at risk - that I knew too much. Mr Maxwell told me to leave Bulgaria right away without telling anyone and promised to install me in Vienna as his consultant,' said Doinov. Maxwell also promised Doinov a large salary and an ongoing secret role in laundering money from Bulgaria. Lukanov, when he later faced scrutiny for his links to Maxwell, turned the tables on Doinov with a letter he published, within which he cited Doinov. A Bulgarian federal prosecutor would later threaten, 'I will personally go to Vienna and bring Doinov back to Sofia in a bag if I have to.' With no extradition treaty, that had proved impossible. Another man who crossed Maxwell's path was Michael Chorney [Mikhail Chorny], a Russian Jew with an Israeli passport. Young and flashy, he impressed Maxwell as someone who would go a long way. Chorney had his own eye on setting up banks, hi-tech businesses and buying a football team in Bulgaria. In time he would learn a lot from Maxwell's flamboyant style and hard-nosed strategy. He would also subsequently become a controversial figure. With Doinov in Vienna and Andrei Lukanov running the country, Maxwell had achieved his goal of making Bulgaria his own. But events at home, in Russia and in Israel were about to threaten all that. [ . . . ] =========================================== Robert Maxwell - PROMIS - KGB - Mogilevich - Lukanov - Janchev - Magda Hassan - 06-02-2009 Welcome to the forum Jeff. What a fascinating post. I was wondering how long it would take for PROMIS to get an airing here. There is certainly a lot of very interesting information here. I look forward to more :fisheye: