Category: Politics

Mitch Wade lawyer nominated for US Atty

President Obama has nominated Ronald C. Machen Jr. to be U.S. Attorney in Washington DC.

Machen, 40, was part of the team at WilmerHale that defended defense contractor Mitchell Wade, briber of Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

Thanks to WilmerHale’s efforts, Wade is serving a 30-month sentence. That’s not bad, considering that Cunningham is serving more than eight years and Wade’s former boss and Cunningham briber, Brent Wilkes, is appealing his 12 year sentence.

Machen also represented another corrupt former congressman, Democrat William Jefferson and Christopher Ward, former National Republican Campaign Committee treasurer accused of stealing funds.

The U.S. Attorney is DC’s top law enforcement official, overseeing  the largest federal prosecutors office in the country.

Machen served as an Assistant US Attorney in the Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, US Department of Justice, from 1997 to 2001.

Pakistani President Ali Zadari on Money Laundering

The International News in Pakistan reports today that President Asif Ali Zardari says he was cleared in a 10-year-old money laundering investigation by the US Congress.

The Presidency has officially claimed that the US Congressional Subcommittee on Money Laundering had cleared Asif Ali Zardari, as it had found no evidence that Citibank or any other private bank knowingly helped Mr Salinas (of Mexico), or any other criminals launder dirty money.

This official statement has been released by the spokesman of the president Farhatullah Babar in response to questions sent to him about the details provided by the Citibank’s top administration to the US Subcommittee on Money Laundering in November 1999.

This comes as a Pakistani anti-corruption agency found that Zardari had accumulated assets of $1.5 billion through illegal means. Zardari, who was known as “Mr. 10 percent,” is the notoriously corrupt widow of the late former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

An investigation in 1999 by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into private banking and money laundering examined that Zardari had three accounts at Citibank Switzerland private bank. Some of the accounts allegedly were used to disguise $10 million in kickbacks for a gold importing contract to Pakistan.

Another of Citibank Switzerland’s high profile clients was Raul Salinas, the infamous brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas.

Swiss authorities froze more than  $100 million – allegedly linked to drug trafficking — in Salinas’ accounts. That included  about $27 million Citibank Switzerland private bank.

The Senate subcommittee notes a striking coincidence between the two men: “The Zardari accounts in Switzerland were opened one day before Raul Salinas was arrested.”

Zardari’s accounts were opened February 27, 1995. Salinas was arrested and imprisoned in Mexico on suspicion of murder the following day.

According to the Senate subcommittee report:

On the day following the arrest, a number of telephone conversations took place between private bank personnel in New York, London and Switzerland. The telephone conversations to London were recorded on an automatic taping system. The tape transcripts indicate that the private bank’s initial reaction to the arrest was not to assist law enforcement, but to determine whether the Salinas accounts should be moved to Switzerland to make discovery of the assets and bank records more difficult. This suggestion was made by the head of the private bank at the time, Hubertus Rukavina, and discussed by several employees. It was not acted upon, apparently because it was agreed that London bank records would disclose the funds transfer to Switzerland. Private bank employees also tried to determine whether to require immediate repayment of an outstanding $3 million loan that had been made to Trocca (a Salinas family trust), so that if the funds in the Trocca accounts were frozen by authorities, Citibank funds would not be at risk.

Rukavina also played a role in the Zardari accounts. Specifically, he was involved in the decision to allow a Swiss lawyer to open three accounts on behalf of Zardari.

Rukavina told the Senate subcommittee staff that he did not make the decision to open the accounts but referred the matter to the head of private bank operations in Pakistan, Deepak Sharma.  According to Mr. Rukavina, he never heard whether the accounts were ultimately opened.

A Swiss judge found in 2003 that Zardari was guilty of money laundering, and a Swiss prosecutor closed the investigation last year, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to bring Zardari to trial.

Who was Anton Surikov? (Updated)

Several publications are reporting the passing of a former Russian intelligence officer named Anton Surikov, who died at the age of 48.

Axisglobe identifies Surikov as a shareholder of Far West LLC — reportedly a shadowy intelligence/military consulting group. Kavkaz Center, a Chechen website, reports that he was poisoned. Numerous reports link him to the CIA.

Surikov, born 1961 in Moscow, was the son of  Victor Surikov, a designer of Soviet ICBMs. Anton Surikov was a man who at one time was apparently trusted by both sides in Russia’s bitter conflict with separatist rebels in Cechnya.

In the early 1990s, Surikov and Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev met when they both fought on behalf of separatists battling the Georgian government. Surikov commanded a detatchment of special forces for Russian military intelligence (GRU).

From 1990-1996, Surikov worked at the Institute of USA and Canada Academy of Sciences of the USSR (ISKRAN), a Russian think tank, according to an archived (Russian) copy of his bio.

In 1994, he was seconded to Department of Defense Studies at King’s College, London University, which published two of his books on various aspects of Russia’s domestic and defense policies. One of Surikov’s books, Crime in Russia: International Implications is based on documents collected by Russia’s Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK). 

While at the institute, Surikov become an advisor in 1995 for the Institute of Defense Studies.

In September 1996, Yuri Maslyukov, president of the Duma’s Committee on Economic Policy, hired Surikov as his assistant. When Maslyukov became first deputy prime minister two years later, Surikov went to work in the Kremlin. 

In 1999, Surikov used his contacts with Basayev to arrange a meeting between the Chechen rebel leader and a top Russian official, Alexander Voloshin.

Surikov and the two men met in the south of France at the villa of Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi, a wealthy Saudi arms merchant.

The meeting was secretly recorded by French intelligence and later leaked to the press and been the subject of much speculation ever since. (See this 2004 paper (.pdf) from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.)

When Putin took over as president, Surikov briefly worked into Russia’s Aircraft Corporation, MiG and then became chief of staff to the Duma committee on industry, construction and high technology.

In 2001, Surikov accused Russian military officials of colluding with Afghan drug lords:

In an interview published last week (dated 29 May) in the “Moscow News” (“Moskovskie Novosti”) weekly, former Russian military intelligence officer Anton Surikov charged that a substantial portion of the drugs produced in Afghanistan had been directly shipped from the Tajik capital Dushanbe on board Russian military planes, helicopters, and trains.

Surikov said: “You can come to an arrangement [with custom officials] so that the search of military transport planes remains purely formal. The same goes for train convoys carrying military cargo [to Russia from Tajikistan].”

According to his account, Afghan opium producers usually sold drugs to Tajik citizens who smuggled them into Tajikistan with the active complicity of Russian border guards. The drugs were then put on board military planes or trains en route to Russia, where they were sold to local criminal gangs.

Surikov retired from government service in 2002, according to his bio. He was affiliated with the Institute for Globalisation Studies, a think tank headed by a leftist professor.

He also served on the board of the Swiss firm Far West Ltd., which was closely affiliated with the Internet news site, Pravda-info. Far West said it “specializes in consulting work on questions of security in conducting business in regions of the world with unstable environments and hiring personnel for foreign private military companies.” The company said it had offices in Dubai, Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo, Georgia, and Russia.

Most recently, Surikov was providing informed speculation to the Financial Times on the mystery the Arctic Sea, a cargo ship that vanished off the coast of Portugal:

But Anton Surikov, a Russian security expert and former military intelligence officer, advances the theory that smugglers, with the backing of elements in Russia’s security services, may have loaded ammunition and anti-tank missiles bound for Hizbollah in Lebanon, and four Kh-55 cruise missiles to be fitted to Sukhoi-24 bombers for Iran, on to the ship as it underwent repairs in Kaliningrad.

Mr Surikov says he believes that when the the ship was boarded in the dead of night on July 24 off Sweden, the attackers found the weapons cache, photographed it as evidence and left.

His scenario fits with initial reports conveyed by police in Sweden that the crew reported being attacked by about 10 men posing as Swedish policemen who searched the ship and departed in an inflatable dinghy.

The photos were then shown, thinks Mr Surikov, to the UK and US security services – which arranged a second incursion as the Arctic Sea disappeared on August 1. “A behind-the-scenes trade between state powers then began,” he says.

The Most Expensive Road in the World?

The scale of corruption in Russia is so mindboggling that it’s difficult to comprehend.

You can get an idea by looking at the watches that Russian officials wear.

Another way is to look at the cost of one kilometer of road in Moscow.

The Fourth Ring Road is under construction in Moscow at a cost of 7.4 billion rubles per ($250 million) per kilometer, according to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who’s quoted in Radio Free Europe’s series on corruption in Russia:

“If you compare the cost of Moscow’s roads to the Large Hadron particle collider in Switzerland,” he says, “the collider is cheaper, as is the Channel Tunnel [between Britain and France], another grandiose construction project.”

It’s far, far cheaper to build a road in Afghanistan. The Big Dig in Boston, the most expensive highway project in the United States that rerouted a major highway into a tunnel under the city, cost $188 million per mile, according to this report. (.pdf)

According to an AP story, City Hall put the costs at an exorbitant $209 million per kilometer and blamed demolition of residential housing in areas adjacent to the new ring road.

Nemstov blames the problem on Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his inner circle.  Luzkhov’s wife is on Forbes magazine’s list of the richest people on Earth.

The “corruption market,” officials tell RFE/RL, is estimated at $300 billion a year. Russia’s GDP was about $1.6 trillion last year, the World Bank says.

Even the government’s own figures show that the average bribe has tripled over the past year to $32,000.