Turks and Caicos Islands and British Take Over.

[Magda Hassan]

Redacted copy of report:
http://wikileaks.org/leak/tci-inquiry-redacted-2009.pdf

Unredacted copy of report:
http://wikileaks.org/leak/tci-inquiry-fi...d-2009.pdf


Julian Assange (investigations editor, WikiLeaks)

WikiLeaks has released the full corruption report at the center of UK plans to take control of the Turks & Caicos Islands, a popular Caribbean tourist destination and tax haven.
A British warship on patrol in the Caribbean sea, the HMS Iron Duke, was reported earlier this month to be in a position to support the takeover, come the report's release.[1]
Last year, following corruption allegations made against the Islands' political elite, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) commissioned Sir Robin Auld to head up a Turks & Caicos Islands Commission of Inquiry.
On March this year, after the release of an interim report, the Commission found itself in court with the release of the full findings temporarily injuncted.
As a partial conclusion to that action, yesterday, the Commission released on its website what it called its Redacted Final Report[2]. According to the Commission's accompanying press release, the—
Governor's redaction results from the direction of the Hon Chief Justice Gordon Ward in the current litigation between Mario Hoffmann and Cem Kinay against the Governor and me (and an assurance given by the Hon Attorney General in proceedings brought by Jak Civre). Yet only hours later, the 266 page report was removed.
WikiLeaks has obtained the full report—and restored the redacted text.
Included in the redactions are the findings relating to former Premier Michael Misick, former Deputy Premier Floyd Hall and former Minister McAllister Hanchell.
Based on the report there does appear to be genuine grounds for the corruption allegations. Yet it is not clear that the corruption discovered in the Turks & Caicos Islands is of an exceptional character. Many British protectorates have leaders surrounded by corruption allegations. This means that the FCO can pick and choose its interventions at whim, something that corrupt but independent leaders in governances such as Bermuda must be noting with alarm.
Whether the leaders of such former colonies choose to stop looting their countries or, instead, choose to placate the U.K. through increased diplomatic submissiveness remains to be seen.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Big_Trouble_in...s_takeover

[Peter Lemkin]

The British do have a penchant for island take-overs. They are not even going to run a false-flag 'rescue' from godless communism, or some such..JUST damn take it! Hey, its a deja do of the bad old days all over again.

Glad to see that the sun never sets on British or [more so] American Imperialsm and misdeeds.....

[Peter Presland]

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.

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

In addition, there are rumours that Prime Minister Misick and his family/hangers on, were getting greedy and blabby - demanding too big a cut on threat of telling tales.

It's not quite Panama, but the taking out of Noriega (under the preposterously named Operation Nifty Package) and his incarceration in silent solitary was intended as a clear lesson to any developing country head of state who gets ideas above his caste status.

Misick is only in power as long as plays Their game. Which most definitely includes elite money laundering and, most probably, elite drug dealing too.

[Magda Hassan]

A bitter fight to redact portions of the explosive final report of an official British Inquiry into systemic corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands backfired last week when news of the redactions caused a firestorm of protest and the full report was leaked to freedom of information website WikiLeaks. Some of the most sensitive redactions (pdf) in the British Commission of Inquiry's Final Report concern much-traveled pilot Michael Francis Brassington, who first rose to the level of public scrutiny as co-pilot on a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to the owner of a flight school that at the time had been teaching Mohamed Atta to fly was seized by DEA Agents who found 43 lbs. of heroin onboard.
The controversy over the redacted report has ironically shed light on a previously-unknown connection between Brassington and a second pilot, Wolfgang Bohringer, whose name also surfaces regularly in the background to the intrigue in Florida swirling around Mohamed Atta during the run-up to the 9/11 attack.
Brassington and Bohringer were not previously known to have been connected.
The controversy over the unredacted report changed that, when the resulting publicity illuminated dark corners in the background of the man whose deep pockets were keeping secret the full extent of Michael Misick and Michael Francis Brassington’s crimes.
Michael Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer, an "associate" of Mohamed Atta's close enough for Atta to have frequently referred to him as “my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
The Tempest in a Turks & Caicos Teapoterupted when the British Commission of Inquiry into corruption in Prime Minister Michael Misick’s government backed down from releasing its full report in the face of an angry campaign threatening media outlets with lawsuits by lawyers for a shady Eastern European billionaire who stands accused in U.S. Senate documents of involvement in money laundering, as well as ties to international organized crime.
A weeks-long firestorm of negative publicity ensued, which ended when WikiLeaks published the full report. It was a rare victory for a free press and the democratic concept which Walter Cronkite famously called “the people’s right to know.”

Prime Minister Michael Misick: Gangsta' withfleet of Gulfstreams Jets

Brassington figured prominently in the British Commission’s report on Misick’s corruption, as not only the personal pilot but Misick’s partner-in-crime as well.
As we first reported earlier this year, the Gulfstream jet Misick and Brassington were jetting around the world on belonged to a former White House Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton named Jeffrey Watson, who was once called “Florida's insider at the White House” by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Watson is currently a Washington lobbyist.
The report shows the two men conspired to steal several million dollars from the coffers of the now-bankrupt Turks & Caicos government. Misick's crimes included a highly-publicized rape, intimidation and beating of rivals, as well as his wife, with whom he had several knockdown (literally) fights which required both to seek emergency hospital care.
In front of the British inquiry, Misick was portrayed in vivid testimony by his former wife (pdf), American TV-actress Lisa-Raye Misick-McCoy, as being a dripping-in-gold-jewelry gangsta in command a small fleet of Gulfstream luxury jets traveling all over the world.
Brassington is a key figure in several recent scandals, fingered in a military procurement scandal in his native Guyana recently.
He also goes on trial in Federal Court (pdf) in Newark New Jersey later this year, where he is charged with 23 felony counts accusing him of putting the lives of passengers in danger in the near-fatal crash of one of his charter company’s luxury jets at Teterboro Airport outside New York City in 2005.

Wally Hilliard's heroin pilot had get out of jail free card

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.
At the same time, pilot Wolfgang Bohringer, a close associate of Mohamed Atta's in Florida, was flying for notorious financier Viktor Kozeny, accused of involvement in the Russian Mob’s successful looting of hundreds of millions of dollars in Czechoslovakia during the privatization frenzy which took place in the 199o’s after the fall of Communism.
Kozeny is currently fighting extradition from the Bahamas to face charges of massive fraud in Federal Court in New York.
His former pilot Bohringer was himself the subject of a well-publicized manhunt in the South Pacific in 2006. The FBI issued a "terror alert" seeking his arrest.
Kozeny at one point in the mid-90's controlled one-third of the entire Czechoslovakian economy. With his ill-gotten gains, Kozeny tried to buy off top officials in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan to gain control of that country's state-owned oil company.
One man convicted in the scheme, Hans Bodmer, belonged to a network of Russian oligarchs that includes Pyotr Aven, accused by a Russian corruption task force of drug trafficking.

Russian oligarch "draws muscle from Slovak Intelligence"

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.
Greenberg was forced to step down amid Eliot Spitzer’s probe while New York Attorney General, which was rumored to involve major international money-laundering operations spanning several generations. His firm was founded by Cornelius V. Starr, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative in Southeast Asia during World War II whose nephew Kenneth Starr later became President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater antagonist.
Kozeny, who owns his own private island in the Bahamas, was traveling on an Irish passport before being arrested. His luxury jets were used during the Northern Ireland peace talks by the talk’s chairman, former Senator George Mitchell.
Although he today stands accused on two continents of defrauding thousands of people around the world, he has so far successfully—and inexplicably-- fought extradition to the U.S. to face felony charges of massive financial fraud.
The man funding efforts to keep Misick and Brassington’s crime secret, Mario Hoffman, is a full-fledged Russian Mob oligarch.

"The Pirate and the Barracuda"

In written evidence presented to the UK Parliament as well as to the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Hoffman's company Istrokapital was described as a conduit for “Russian money” and a front for money laundering,” described as having the “strongest ties to the underworld,” which reportedly “draws its muscle from former officers of the Slovak intelligence service.”
Hoffman was the first registered stockbroker in Czechoslovakia. He grew fabulously rich in Viktor Kozeny’s "privatization vouchers" scam.
Viktor Kozeny is known around the world as “The Pirate of Prague.”
Today Mario Hoffman’s sleek white yacht regularly patrols off the coast of the Turks & Caicos.
Hoffman's yacht is named “The Barracuda of Prague.”
Michael Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer, formerly a close enough associate of Mohamed Atta’s for Atta to refer to him frequently as “my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
http://www.madcowprod.com/08062009.htm

[David Guyatt]

Well, well, well and I'll be damned. What a skein of foul corruptness was behind 911.

Btw, I understand that the Joint Task Force on Terrorism had a high interest in Wolfgang Bohringer after he skipped the US following 911. He landed on the tiny speck of a South Seas island called Kiribati but was chased out of there by residents who had been following Daniel Hopsickers reports on 911 and Mohamed Atta. Current whereabouts unknown --- except to the authorities. I wonder if they still want him or are now content to leave him be so long as he keeps a low profile? After all, the danger of opening up smelly old wounds is that they need attention and since 911 has been officially identified as a terrorist event, it must remain one in perpetuity.

I wonder if we should show this to Sibel Edmonds?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Kozeny is also an intriguing character. Clearly a coalface player.

The question is: who owns Kozeny's ass?

Here's an entirely untrustworthy MSM article in what was then Krooked Conrad Black's Daily Torygraph. I copy it here simply to show the nature of the scams Kozeny was involved in. I assume all interpretation in the article to be disinformation until independently and factually substantiated.

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

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/29358...tiser.html

[Helen Reyes]

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.

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?

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.

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

Thanks for any help, I'm having trouble remembering all of this.

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

Not at all stupid. It's very hard keeping track of Their dark and byzantine games. One of the rationales for DPF is as a type of collective memory hole which can be used to inform contemporary events.

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?

Writ large.

The caribbean "colonies" are not just havens City of London/multinational/spooky money laundering, their legal system is still ultimately controlled by Britannia.

I haven't checked the actual status of each and every island, but the basic scam was that the ultimate court of appeal/supreme court was Her Majesty's House of Lords aka the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Co...vy_Council

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

More than that. MI5/6 allegedly had assets at very senior - the highest - levels in all the terror groups.

I'm sure David Guyatt and I have discussed the high level "Stakeknife" British Intelligence asset on DPF but I can't find the thread. Anyway, when Stakeknife's existence was about to break, Alfredo 'Scap' Scappaticci was fingered.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/may/12...rnireland1

Scappaticci may have been Stakeknife. However, many Republican insiders consider this to have been a limited hangout, burning Scappaticci to protect a much higher asset. Allegedly at McGuiness/Adams level.

These threads too may be of interest:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...stakeknife

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...=committee

[David Guyatt]

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.

See Dan Hopsicker's various articles on Bohringer at madcowprod.com. Daniel was the only reporter who covered Bohringer and who was relentless in pursuing the drugs angle of Atta and co.