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Ukraine's Made-in-USA Finance Minister |
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Monday, 08 December 2014 14:50 |
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Parry writes: “An ex-U.S. diplomat and newly minted Ukrainian citizen, was involved in insider dealings while managing a $150 million U.S. AID-backed investment fund.”
New Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko stands before deputies Tuesday during a session of parliament. (photo: Reuters)
Ukraine's Made-in-USA Finance Minister
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
08 December 14
 kraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. State Department officer who was granted Ukrainian citizenship only this week, headed a U.S. government-funded investment project for Ukraine that involved substantial insider dealings, including $1 million-plus fees to a management company that she also controlled.
Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was cofounder and managing partner of Horizon Capital which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 to 2.5 percent of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.
The growth of that insider dealing at the U.S.-taxpayer-funded WNISEF is further underscored by the number of paragraphs committed to listing the “related party transactions,” i.e., potential conflicts of interest, between an early annual report from 2003 and the one a decade later.
In the 2003 report, the “related party transactions” were summed up in two paragraphs, with the major item a $189,700 payment to a struggling computer management company where WNISEF had an investment.
In the 2012 report, the section on “related party transactions” covered some two pages and included not only the management fees to Jaresko’s Horizon Capital ($1,037,603 in 2011 and $1,023,689 in 2012) but also WNISEF’s co-investments in projects with the Emerging Europe Growth Fund [EEGF], where Jaresko was founding partner and chief executive officer. Jaresko’s Horizon Capital also managed EEGF.
From 2007 to 2011, WNISEF co-invested $4.25 million with EEGF in Kerameya LLC, a Ukrainian brick manufacturer, and WNISEF sold EEGF 15.63 percent of Moldova’s Fincombank for $5 million, the report said. It also listed extensive exchanges of personnel and equipment between WNISEF and Horizon Capital.
Though it’s difficult for an outsider to ascertain the relative merits of these insider deals, they could reflect negatively on Jaresko’s role as Ukraine’s new finance minister given the country’s reputation for corruption and cronyism, a principal argument for the U.S.-backed “regime change” that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.
Declining Investments
Based on the data from WNISEF’s 2012 annual report, it also appeared that the U.S. taxpayers had lost about one-third of their investment in WNISEF, with the fund’s balance at $98,074,030, compared to the initial U.S. government grant of $150 million.
Given the collapsing Ukrainian economy since the Feb. 22 coup, the value of the fund is likely to have slipped even further. (Efforts to get more recent data from WNISEF’s and Horizon Capital’s Web sites were impossible Friday because the sites were down.)
Beyond the long list of “related party transactions” in the annual report, there also have been vague allegations of improprieties involving Jaresko from one company insider, her ex-husband, Ihor Figlus. But his whistle-blowing was shut down by a court order issued at Jaresko’s insistence.
John Helmer, a longtime foreign correspondent in Russia, disclosed the outlines of this dispute in an article examining Jaresko’s history as a recipient of U.S. AID’s largesse and how it enabled her to become an investment banker via WNISEF, Horizon Capital and Emerging Europe Growth Fund.
Helmer wrote: “Exactly what happened when Jaresko left the State Department to go into her government-paid business in Ukraine has been spelled out by her ex-husband in papers filed in the Chancery Court of Delaware in 2012 and 2013. …
“Without Figlus and without the US Government, Jaresko would not have had an investment business in Ukraine. The money to finance the business, and their partnership stakes, turns out to have been loaned to Figlus and Jaresko from Washington.”
According to Helmer’s article, Figlus had reviewed company records in 2011 and concluded that some loans were “improper,” but he lacked the money to investigate so he turned to Mark Rachkevych, a reporter for the Kyiv Post, and gave him information to investigate the propriety of the loans.
“When Jaresko realized the beans were spilling, she sent Figlus a reminder that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement” and secured a temporary injunction in Delaware on behalf of Horizon Capital and EEGF to prevent Figlus from further revealing company secrets, Helmer wrote.
“It hasn’t been rare for American spouses to go into the asset management business in the former Soviet Union, and make profits underwritten by the US Government with information supplied from their US Government positions or contacts,” Helmer continued. “It is exceptional for them to fall out over the loot.”
Jaresko, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Kiev after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has said that Western NIS Enterprise Fund was “funded by the U.S. government to invest in small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine and Moldova – in essence, to ‘kick-start’ the private equity industry in the region.”
While the ultimate success of that U.S.-funded endeavor may still be unknown, it is clear that the U.S. AID money did “kick-start” Jaresko’s career in equity investments and put her on the path that has now taken her to the job of Ukraine’s new finance minister. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cited her experience in these investment fields to explain his unusual decision to bring in an American to run Ukraine’s finances and grant her citizenship.
A Big Investment
The substantial U.S. government sum invested in Jaresko’s WNISEF-based equity fund also sheds new light on how it was possible for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to tally up U.S. spending on Ukraine since it became independent in 1991 and reach the astounding figure of “more than $5 billion,” which she announced to a meeting of U.S.-Ukrainian business leaders last December as she was pushing for “regime change” in Kiev.
The figure was so high that it surprised some of Nuland’s State Department colleagues. Several months later – after a U.S.-backed coup had overthrown Yanukovych and pitched Ukraine into a nasty civil war – Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs Richard Stengel cited the $5 billion figure as “ludicrous” Russian disinformation after hearing the number on Russia’s RT network.
Stengel, a former Time magazine editor, didn’t seem to know that the figure had come from a fellow senior State Department official.
Nuland’s “more than $5 billion” figure did seem high, even if one counted the many millions of dollars spent over the past couple of decades by U.S. AID (which puts its contributions to Ukraine at $1.8 billion) and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has financed hundreds of projects for supporting Ukrainian political activists, media operatives and non-governmental organizations.
But if one looks at the $150 million largesse bestowed on Natalie Jaresko, you can begin to understand the old adage that a hundred million dollars here and a hundred million dollars there soon adds up to real money.
Those payments over more than two decades to various people and entities in Ukraine also constitute a major investment in Ukrainian operatives who are now inclined to do the U.S. government’s bidding.
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Nature Does Not Negotiate: Climate Catastrophe Is With Us Now |
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Monday, 08 December 2014 14:28 |
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Naidoo writes: “Tragically, we are not taking urgent action. Nature does not negotiate, it responds to our intransigence. For the people of the Philippines, and in many other parts of the world, climate change is already a catastrophe.”
Philippines residents (photo: Alanah Torraiba/Greenpeace)
ALSO SEE: The Laundering Machine: How US Corporations Threaten Peru's
Forests Through Illegal Logging
ALSO SEE: Widows of Peru's Murdered Indigenous Rainforst Defenders Demand
Justice at UN Climate Summit
Nature Does Not Negotiate: Climate Catastrophe Is With Us Now
By Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace
08 December 14
 s Typhoon Hagupit hits the Philippines, one of the biggest peacetime evacuations in history has been launched to prevent a repeat of the massive loss of life which devastated communities when Super Typhoon Haiyan hit the same area just over a year ago.
"One of the biggest evacuations in peacetime" strikes a sickening chord. Is this peacetime or are we at war with nature?
I was about to head to Lima, when I got a call to come to the Philippines to support our office and its work around Typhoon Hagupit (which means lash). In Lima another round of the UN climate talks are underway to negotiate a global treaty to prevent catastrophic climate change. A truce of sorts with nature.
But these negotiations have been going on far too long, with insufficient urgency and too much behind the scenes, and not so much behind the scenes, interference from the fossil fuel lobby.
This year, like last year and the year before these negotiations take place against a devastating backdrop of a so-called 'extreme weather event', something that climate scientists have been warning us about if we don't take urgent action.
Tragically, we are not taking urgent action. Nature does not negotiate, it responds to our intransigence. For the people of the Philippines, and in many other parts of the world, climate change is already a catastrophe.
Only one year ago, Super Typhoon Haiyan killed thousands, destroyed communities and caused billions of dollars in damage. Many survivors who are still displaced have this week had to evacuate the tents they have been living in as Typhoon Hagupit carves a path across the country as I write.
It's too early to assess the impact so far - we are all hoping early indications will spare the Philippines of the same pain that was experienced after Haiyan.
Here in Manila, we prepare to travel to the impacted areas in the wake of Typhoon Hagupit, or Ruby, as it has been named. We will offer what minor assistance we can.
We will stand in solidarity with the Filipino people and we will call out those who are responsible for climate change, those who are responsible for the devastation and who should be helping pay for the clean up and for adaptation to a world in which our weather is an increasing source of mass destruction.
With heavy hearts we prepare to bear witness. We challenge those in Lima to turn their attention from the lethargy and process of the negotiations and pay attention to what is happening in the real world.
We call on them to understand that climate change is not a future threat to be negotiated but a clear and present danger that requires urgent action now!
Each year, the people of the Philippines learn the hard way what inaction on emissions mean. They might be slightly better prepared and more resilient, but they are also rightly more aghast that each year - at the same time - the climate meetings seem to continue in a vacuum, not prepared to take meaningful action, not able to respond to the urgency of our time and not holding accountable the Big Polluters that are causing the climate to change with ferocious pace.
Before leaving for Manila I also received a message from Yeb Saño, climate commissioner for the Philippines: "I hope you can join us as we bear witness to the impact of this new super typhoon. Your help would be very valuable in delivering a message to Lima loud and clear."
Yeb was the Filipino chief negotiator for three years at the UN climate talks and recently visited the Arctic on a Greenpeace ship to witness the Arctic sea ice minimum. Two years ago in Doha, as Typhoon Pablo took the lives of many he broke through the normally reserved language of dispassionate diplomacy that dominates UN climate treaty talks:
"Please ... let 2012 be remembered as the year the world found the courage to ... take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?"
I am joining Greenpeace Philippines and Yeb to visit the worst hit areas, document the devastation and send a clear message from climate change ground zero to Lima and the rest of the world that the ones that are responsible for the majority of emissions will be held accountable by the communities that are suffering the impacts of extreme weather events linked to climate change.
We will call on the heads of the fossil fuel companies who are culpable for the unfolding tragedy to examine their consciences and accept their historic responsibility. They say the truth is the first casualty of war, in this war against nature, the truth of climate science is unquestionable.
Please join us. Please add your voice by signing our petition calling on Big Polluters to be held legally and morally accountable for climate damages. After signing the petition you will be redirected to a site where you can make a donation to the relief efforts of partner organisations.
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FOCUS | Putin Spells Out His Politics |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 08 December 2014 12:21 |
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Weissman writes: "Welcome to the new Cold War. Both sides talk past one another. Neither hears what the other says. And their dialogue of the deaf could easily lead to nuclear annihilation. So, let’s try to understand."
Vladimir Putin. (photo: Ria Novosti/Reuters)
Putin Spells Out His Politics
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
08 December 14
  he support for separatism in Russia from across the pond, including information, political and financial support and support provided by the special services,” said Vladimir Putin, “left no doubt that they would gladly let Russia follow the Yugoslav scenario of disintegration and dismemberment.”
With these wooden words in his annual State of the Nation address last week, Putin stepped up his accusations against Washington and its NATO allies, and not without reason. He spoke of the West’s “coup in Ukraine,” “the historical reunification of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia,” and the “so-called sanctions and foreign restrictions.” He also referred to covert support for Chechnya’s Islamic separatists, who only hours before had killed several police officers in a bloody terrorist attack in Grozny, the regional capital.
“The policy of containment was not invented yesterday,” said Putin. “It has been carried out against our country for many years, always, for decades, if not centuries. In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools are quickly put to use.”
At a US State Department press briefing in Washington, a reporter named Said asked if Putin was wrong in saying “that the West has always sort of plotted and planned … to destabilize Russia?”
“Well, I would clearly not agree with that statement,” replied Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf. “This isn’t about the West. This is about the people of Ukraine, including Crimea, getting to pick their future, not having Russia pick it for them.”
Welcome to the new Cold War. Both sides talk past one another. Neither hears what the other says. And their dialogue of the deaf could easily lead to nuclear annihilation. So, let’s try to understand.
Putin is expressing here Russia’s deeply felt sense of grievance. He honestly sees himself responding to decades of American and European provocation, and the evidence shows why. Here is a small taste:
From the end of World War II, US and British intelligence used Ukrainian neo-Nazis against the Soviet Union. Toward the end of the Cold War, President George H.W. Bush and German chancellor Helmut Kohl hoodwinked a severely weakened Mikhail Gorbachev and set out to expand NATO to the Russian borders. In the former Yugoslavia, Washington and its allies destabilized Serbia, historically Russia’s “little brother,” and then organized color revolutions to destabilize Ukraine, Georgia, and other countries newly independent from the former Soviet Union. In a second “Orange Revolution,” Washington and its NATO allies put together the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s corrupt, but legally elected government (Part I and Part II) In making their coup, American strategists consciously saw Ukraine as a stepping stone to control the Eurasian heartland with its rich store of oil and gas.
This cursory list, culled from my previous columns, supports many of the charges Putin is making. But Western provocations form only part of the picture. In his speech, Putin’s sense of grievance goes far beyond the evidence to reveal the new nationalist ideology he has developed in recent years. He presents Russia as a victim nation going back centuries and cloaks his response in evidence of a very different kind.
“Crimea is where our people live, and the peninsula is of strategic importance for Russia as the spiritual source of the development of a multifaceted but solid Russian nation and a centralized Russian state,” he explains. “It was in Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus or Korsun, as ancient Russian chroniclers called it, that Grand Prince Vladimir was baptized before bringing Christianity to Rus.”
“Christianity was a powerful spiritual unifying force that helped involve various tribes and tribal unions of the vast Eastern Slavic World in the creation of a Russian nation and Russian state,” he goes on.” “It was thanks to this spiritual unity that our forefathers for the first time and forevermore saw themselves as a united nation.”
Which is why, he says, Crimea and Sevastopol “have invaluable civilizational and even sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.”
Dismiss this, if you will, as Godly cover for old-fashioned power politics. But, whatever his personal convictions, Putin is appealing to his fellow Russians with an overtly religious nationalism, and they seem to buy it in large numbers. They could well lose their faith as Western sanctions and plummeting oil prices erode the value of the ruble, the living standards of average citizens, and the wealth of oligarchic supporters. Or they could become even more irrational, as is happening on the Temple Mount and among Christian Nationalists in the United States.
In his speech, Putin couples a celebration of Russia’s religious past with a call to “the traditional values which we inherited from our forefathers,” which he uses as a catchall to justify his opposition to abortion, gay rights, and homosexual marriage. He also defends private property, freedom of enterprise, national pride, patriotism, and sovereignty, all of which he proclaims as “fundamental conservative values.”
Add to this Putin’s willingness to openly mass his troops and covertly use his little green men to defend fellow countrymen who happen to live across international borders in Ukraine and other “brotherly Republics of the former Soviet Union.” Add as well his recently revealed bankrolling of the Moslem-bashing Marine Le Pen and her Front National in France.
How should we understand all this? Like most American progressives, the former KGB colonel and the daughter of the old-school Fascist jointly oppose Washington’s foreign policy, at least as it applies to Europe. But, despite their drastically different histories, they also join together to promote ultra-nationalist politics and extremely right-wing Christian values, as expressed by Putin in this and other speeches, by Le Pen over the last three or four years, and perhaps most cogently by her pro-Putin foreign policy advisor, the extremely scary Aymeric Chauprade.
The apparent contradictions that emerge are hardly new, as any student of Twentieth Century European history will quickly grasp. Yet many who see themselves on the left seem intent on taking sides between an imperial Washington and this dangerously retrogressive force that proposes to remake Europe in such nasty ways. Why the rush? Why the knee-jerk? Why be useful idiots for one side or the other? Clearly, decent people should fight against both, and now is the time to begin.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Monday, 08 December 2014 11:05 |
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Greenwald writes: "The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today."
Bush's picture replaced by Obama's at Guantánamo, 2009. (photo: Brennan Linsley/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: US Sends 6 Prisoners from Guantanamo to Uruguay
Release of Six Detainees After Twelve Years Highlights the Historic Evil of Guantánamo
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
08 December 14
he U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today.
Among the released detainees is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Lebanese-born Syrian national and father of four who was seized by the Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. in 2002 for what was reportedly a large bounty. He was cleared for release in 2009 – five years ago – and has repeatedly gone on hunger strikes inside the camp to protest his treatment. At the age of 43, he has become physically debilitated. As the human rights group Reprieve detailed:
As a result of the conditions inside the prison and the callous treatment he has received, Mr Dhiab’s health has now deteriorated to such an extent that he is confined to a wheelchair. Recent revelations revealed that Mr. Dhiab is being denied access to his wheelchair, meaning he is brutally dragged from his cell and force-fed against his will every day.
As the great Miami Herald Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg notes, there are – six years after Obama was elected on a pledge to close the camp – still 136 detainees there, with 67 of them cleared for release (Democrats’ claims that Obama is largely blameless are false and misleading in the extreme, as are claims that no country will accept detainees). In a just-posted article, Rosenberg notes that the release of these six men, all in their 30s and 40s, was underway for a full year, but it “sat on [Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's] desk for months, awaiting his signature, while intelligence analysts evaluated it.”
For all the years of propagandistic assertions that the detainees are dangerous “terrorists,” almost none has been charged with any crime by a government that has repeatedly (and with disgraceful ease) convicted people on terrorism allegations. They have just been kept in cages, indefinitely, in the middle of an ocean, thousands of miles from their homes. Nine detainees have died at the camp: several allegedly by suicide, others from illness. One of the detainees kept at the camp (released in 2008) was an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami Al-Haj, who was encaged for six years with no charges or trial and with almost no U.S. media notice (even as the U.S. media endlessly denounces the detention of U.S. journalists by other governments).
One significant reason these six detainees were released today is because Uruguay’s President, Jose Mujica, publicly shamed the U.S. into doing so. He wrote an open letter to Obama last week, posted on his presidential website, urging their release on humanitarian grounds, writing: “We have offered our hospitality for human beings who suffered an atrocious kidnapping in Guantánamo.” Mujica himself is a “former 14-year political prisoner who spent much of his captivity in solitary confinement for his guerrilla activities with the Tupamaro revolutionary movement.”
Just as the Obama administration suppressed photos showing U.S. torture and is now attempting to delay if not outright prevent release of the U.S. Senate’s torture report, Obama officials have repeatedly sought to suppress the videos showing the horrors of force-feeding at Guantanámo. It was the family of Dhiab, the Lebanese-Syrian detainee released today, which relentlessly pursued a legal and public campaign to obtain those videos to show the brutality of this treatment. As Reprieve described:
After mounting a prominent legal challenge against his treatment, lawyers from Reprieve were able to view the video tapes of Mr. Dhiab being force fed. Whilst their content is currently classified “Secret” and therefore cannot be disclosed to the public, Cori Crider, Strategic Director for Reprieve and counsel for Mr. Dhiab, said that she had ‘trouble sleeping’ after viewing the harrowing tapes. In June 2014, 16 news organisations, including Reuters and the New York Times, intervened in Dhiab v Obama to seek access to the videos on First Amendment grounds [DISCLOSURE: First Look Media, which publishes The Intercept, was one of the organizations bringing that suit].
In October, a federal judge ordered the videos released, but just last week, the Justice Department announced it was appealing the ruling. The rationale from The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ for suppressing evidence of U.S. government crimes, brutality and savagery is always the same: transparency will “adversely affect[] security conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq” by enraging people around the world. Not engaging in such behavior is never an option. The only priority is preventing its disclosure.
In a gut-wrenching July essay at The Huffington Post, Dhiab’s wife, Umm Wa’el, recounted the suffering she and her family have endured as a result of her husband’s 12-year, due-process-free imprisonment in the middle of the Caribbean Sea:
More than a decade has passed since Abu Wa’el was taken from us in the night. I had just given birth to our fourth child; our other children were just toddlers. My husband is a kind man and a superb cook. I miss the dishes he learned to prepare in his father’s restaurant. He is guilty of no crime, has never been charged, and was told by President Obama five years ago that he would be released from Guantanamo. . . .
In the past, I wouldn’t have expected this kind of secrecy of America. But over the past few months, I’ve seen it repeatedly. First, the government fought to prevent our lawyers from seeing the force-feeding videos. Now they forbid our lawyers from even discussing their content with other security-cleared lawyers in secret. Then they opposed the request from 16 of their country’s most reputed media groups for access to the material. They are doing their best to make sure that what has happened — is happening — to my husband never sees the light of day. . . .
America was shocked by the images from Abu Ghraib. These films from Guantanamo threaten to do the same. The American people should be given the chance to see them, and to decide whether they accept what is being done daily to my husband. I am certain that if they are given the chance, they will see the reality: the simple desperation of an innocent man, held without charge or trial, using the only means at his disposal to get back to his wife and children.
That is a scenario that has repeated itself over and over for the last 13 years – not just at Guantanámo but other American due-process-free hellholes at Bagram (which the Obama DOJ vehemently defended) and Abu Ghraib, as well as aboard floating lawless ships and CIA black sites. None of this has remotely deterred the U.S. and its uber-national media commentators from continuing to lecture the world on the necessity of due process and fair judicial proceedings (just as Tony Blair’s lucrative subservience to dictators doesn’t prevent him from lecturing the world on the need for democracy).
But all of this has increasingly caused the world to stop taking seriously anything American officials have to say on such matters (to the extent anyone took it seriously before). As well they should. The historic evils and shameful actions of the U.S. government during the Endless War on Terror are manifold. Keeping people in cages for more than a decade and counting in the middle of the sea, far from their families, without a shred of due process or hope for release, is near the top of that list.
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aybe this is obvious, but expanding our agricultural footprint to feed the growing population — cutting down forests, plowing prairies — is a really bad idea.
