Here's a little story dumped on slow news day, Friday. If you want to know what the Bush White House wants you least to know, check the online news for Friday and Saturday (usually later in the day). Surprise! Look for the "secret" CIA kicker at the end of this piece. Skip this if you plan to vote GOP this fall because, hell, you don't give a f#@% anyway.
Bank, Big Oil Tied to African Payments
...The venerable Riggs Bank in Washington, an old-line financial institution that has served diplomats and aristocrats for years...The report, which describes a pattern of lax regulation and abuse of federal regulations against money laundering, was triggered by a story in The Times last year that detailed how Equatorial Guinea had deposited hundreds of millions of dollars in Riggs Bank. The story also raised questions about whether Equatorial Guinea's growing oil wealth had been used to enrich the country's leaders to the detriment of its poor....
US bank helped Pinochet hide millions of dollars: US Senate report
Fri Jul 16,12:43 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - A respected American bank discretely helped former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to hide millions of dollars over an eight-year period, even after he was arrested in London in 1998 and a court froze his assets, a US Senate report said.
Executives of Washington-based Riggs Bank approached Pinochet in Chile in 1994 and invited him to open an account, said Senator Carl Levin, delivering the conclusions of the document in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Levin, calling the 88-year-old Pinochet a "notorious military leader accused of involvement with death squads, corruption, arms sales and drug trafficking," said the former general agreed to open the account.
"The bank opened an account for him personally, helped him establish two offshore shell corporations in the Bahamas called Ashburton and Althorp, and then opened more accounts in the name of those shell corporations both here and in the UK (Britain)," Levin said...
Riggs Bank's slogan for much of the past 20 years -- "The most important bank in the most important city in the world" -- was intended to distinguish Riggs from the common run of banking...
And here's the "secret" CIA kicker to the story:
The President and CEO of Riggs Bank is George W. Bush's uncle, Jonathan Bush!
Read John Kerry's book, "The New War" (written five years BEFORE 9/11 attacks), in which he explains how it's just this kind of banking corruption that allows terrorism to finance its operations across the globe. It's not enough to blow things up AFTER a terrorist attack, the president and the world need to attack the financing of terrorism via corrupt banking institutions such as Riggs.
Time for a new broom this November. The nation and the world cannot afford more of Bush's greed and tiny-minded vision.
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