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Thursday, March 31, 2016

New Zealand foreign trusts and the Unaoil scandal more chickens coming home to roost and they are big

Fairfax reporter Nick McKenzie explains in detail how source contacted him and why:
In that story, we alleged Unaoil had been used by the Australian firm as a middle man and was somehow connected to powerful officials and politicians in charge of large, tax-payer funded oil field projects.
Upon publication, this allegation was immediately dismissed, denied and denigrated as a work of fiction by Unaoil. In 2014, Unaoil’s patriarch, the urbane Iranian-born multi-millionaire Ata Ahsani, even swore on oath in the UK High Court that it was sheer nonsense to suggest Unaoil was some sort of a bribe-paying fixer for multinationals.
My mystery letter-writer, though, said they had been impressed by our 2013 story. They also hinted that we had not dug nearly deep enough.. .




  • The advertisment in French newspaper Le Figaro placed by an Australian journalist, using the words Monte Christo to alert a secret informant


 Australia emerges as the "dumping ground" for dirty money from Asia

#The Bribe Factory Day Two ( 2 )
##[See also Unaoil The Bribe Factory Day One (1)]


*NZG may well be wishing they’d not just ignored early warnings of the scandal to come, back in 2012. The chickens, in the form of 11,000 NZ foreign trusts, are simply going to keep coming home to roost now.  There is going to be a large and noisy mess.
Naked Capitalism, March 18, 2016

 Well, the next instalment of the large and noisy mess didn’t take very long to turn up. New Zealand Foreign Trusts, implicated last month in sleazy-looking machinations by Maltese Ministers, have now hit the big time as vehicles for corrupt international money flows.
This Wednesday, Fairfax Media and Huffington Post jointly broke the story of Unaoil. “The Company That Bribed the World”. From Fairfax outlet The Age:
A massive leak of confidential documents has for the first time exposed the true extent of corruption within the oil industry, implicating dozens of leading companies, bureaucrats and politicians in a sophisticated global web of bribery and graft.

 …on the MEthod of Operation:
The Unaoil emails don’t show corrupt third-world kleptocracies shaking down helpless Western corporations. They show the opposite: Unaoil, working for Western companies, is seen slowly corrupting foreign officials, starting off with small gifts and shopping sprees and eventually hooking them on major graft...
 How do New Zealand Foreign Trusts fit into this picture? Stuff.co.nz, another Fairfax Media outlet, has the dope:
A Fairfax Media investigation of Unaoil obtained a document which shows the “wiring diagram” for the network of Unaoil entities through which giant multi-national companies channelled bribes to corrupt officials in oil-producing countries including Iran, Iraq and Libya.
…
The wiring diagram appears to show Unaoil is owned by UNA Energy Group Holding of Singapore, and that in turn is owned by UnaEnergy Trustees based in Auckland.
But the Auckland company is just a link in the chain, and it is owned in turn by Fleetwood Trustees, based in the tax haven of St Kitts and Nevis.
The Auckland company has three directors, but two at least appear to be trusts specialists who make a living providing professional services to others.
…
The Auckland company’s only New Zealand-based director is Richard Gordon Wilson, who is an foreign trusts expert from Jackson Russell Lawyers, a Shortland Street law firm.
Wilson said: “UnaEnergy Trustees Limited is a trustee of a trust established for UNA Energy, and holds the shares in a holding company based in Singapore”.
“We just act on instructions from an outfit in Monaco which runs family offices for wealthy clients,” Wilson said.
That organisation was Rosemont, for which Jackson Russell sets up New Zealand trust arrangements.
“They are a very reputable organisation of English professionals,” Wilson said.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has been given new powers to scrutinise foreign investments for their impact on Australia’s national interest. It seems that the ATO will focus on Chinese state-owned enterprises. The chairman of China’s State Grid Corporation, Liu Zhenya, said at a press conference in Beijing on 30 March 2016 that his company expected to be treated the same way as other bidders for the New South Wales electricity network, Ausgrid. ATO to test national interest

Malawi: Farmers World 'secretly auctioned' to a tax haven  

CODA:
During the year 1866 only Crime and Punishment was being read, only it was being spoken about by fans of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left which caused people with strong nerves to risk illness and forced those with weak nerves to give up reading it altogether.
A great novel is 150 years old this year, and readers are talking about it. Prufrock News has collected several links, and the curator, Micah Mattix writes about it for the WSJ. If you don’t have access to the WSJ, here’s a post he wrote on why every Christian should consider reading Dostoevsky’s classic

Speaking of punishment, Welcome to Iceland, Where Bad Bankers Go to Prison Bloomberg 

March 2016: Public records show Grigory Baevsky, a 47-year-old business associate of an old friend of Putin, sold or transferred the properties to three of the women Putin in London
March 1986: Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia, by Karen Dawisha courtesy of Taxjustice.net as they know which tax havens the money is buried in ...  
*Wendi Deng dating Vladimir Putin, Us Weekly claims?



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