Follow the Money: Payment Trail Reveals Challenges of Ridding Liberia of Corruption
Last July, five months before she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf welcomed Chevron CEO John Watson into the executive mansion to herald one of the largest investments in her country since the end of its devastating civil war in 2003: Chevron’s purchase of the rights to explore for oil off the coast of the West African nation.
FAA Moves to Limit Blockout System Hiding Private Jet Flights
The (US) Federal Aviation Administration is proposing rules that would prevent private plane owners from keeping their flight records secret unless they can provide a valid security concern.
Ousted Tunisian leader Ben Ali’s 34 cars and 48 yachts are seized
Further evidence of the extent of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s wide-reaching financial empire has been revealed after police reportedly seized dozens of luxury items and company shares belonging to the ousted Tunisian leader.
Equatorial Guinea: France impounds African autocrats’ ‘ill-gotten gains’
At 42 Avenue Foch, the tree-lined boulevard that is one of Paris’s most expensive streets, looms a five-storey private mansion complete with disco, spa room, hair salon, gold- and jewel-encrusted taps, lift, pastel pink dining room and a breathtaking balcony-view of the Arc de Triomphe.
To Libya, Missouri Sends B2 Bombers… and Lawyers
As the Gaddafi regime teetered on the brink of collapse, against an uprising that saw bands of rebels backed by “Spirit of Pennsylvania” B2 Bomber air strikes from Whiteman Air-force Base, 70 miles east of Kansas City, lawyers based in Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, sought to secure a safe exit for Gaddafi and his family.
Six suspects on the run after US $62,000 heist in Lesotho
MASERU- Six gunmen waylaid a G4 Security van in Teba last Saturday morning, shooting dead one of the guards, before getting away with M496 000 belonging to retail giant, Shoprite.
Guide to U.S. Campaign Finance: ProPublica
Super-PACs and Dark Money: ProPublica’s Guide to the New World of Campaign Finance by Kim Barker and Marian Wang ProPublica, July 11, 2011, 1:38 p.m. The nation is gearing up for yet another “most expensive election in history,” the quadrennial exercise in which mind-numbing amounts of money pour into the political system. But this year [...]
Dirty Dictator Loot
Obama talks tough, but the U.S. remains a haven for the ill-gotten gains of bloodthirsty despots. In this week’s Newsweek, Philip Shenon looks at the uncomfortable, often overlooked fact that the U.S. remains as much a haven for the loot of bloodthirsty foreign despots as Switzerland, Dubai, the Cayman Islands, and the other international banking centers that usually take blame for stashing autocrats’ dirty money. THE DAILY BEAST
Gabon Parties Sue Transparency International
Five associations in Gabon on Monday filed a suit against Transparency International (TI), accusing the watchdog group of defamation against the late president Omar Bongo Ondimba, who died in 2009.
Dictators’ Pact: China-Mugabe Blood Diamonds
Mugabe’s darkest secret: An £800bn blood diamond mine he’s running with China’s Red Army. Across a remote tract of southern Africa, naturally fortified by mountains and patrolled by hundreds of soldiers with dogs trained to tear intruders apart, teams of mining experts are hard at work.
Kabila Bans Mining for Mobile Phone Minerals, Citing “Mafia” Activities
Congolese president Joseph Kabila has finally put his foot down on rampant irregularities in the country’s mining industry, which have led to the smuggling of minerals worth billions of dollars (mostly coltan and cassiterite used for making cellphones) out of the country over the past decade.
U.S. Money Laundering and the Global Drug Trade
Tom Burghardt: When investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker broke the story four years ago that a DC-9 (N900SA) “registered to a company which once used as its address the hangar of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, Florida Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in Campeche by the Mexican military … carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S.,” it elicited a collective yawn from corporate media.