Bill Browder and the Magnitsky Act. Humanitarian Act or Big Scam?
Sometimes Moose and Squirrel get too close to truth. Money needed to get Useful Idiots to post things that change the scent. Moose and Squirrel will never know how smart we are!
A great big, new bookstore called "Indigo" just opened at the Mall at Short Hills. It's a Canadian chain making a foray into the United States. The store looks just like what one would expect a Mall at Short Hills bookstore to look like.
The founder and CEO is Heather Reisman. One of the features is a section of books called "Heather's Picks". As she writes on their website: "I am happy to share that indeed any book with a Heather’s Pick sticker or Heather’s Kids Pick sticker is really and truly a book that I have read and loved."
Anyway, we dropped in there yesterday, and I noticed this on the "Heather's Picks" table.
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
nan said:
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
Okay, have fun. I was just amused to think that I was one of the few people who would have seen that on the table and thought "Uh-Oh, this store should have a trigger warning."
Is Nan trying to have the book removed as a Heather's Pick?
"it ain't censorship when we do it"
nan said:
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
Maybe you can just leave her alone.
dave23 said:
nan said:Maybe you can just leave her alone.
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
Reminds me of the time I wrote to Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library and told him the 2015 Barraco Rock Rose Red he recommended has ties to Generalissimo Franco and I refuse to shop there until he stops selling it.
nohero said:
nan said:Okay, have fun. I was just amused to think that I was one of the few people who would have seen that on the table and thought "Uh-Oh, this store should have a trigger warning."
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
See how much you learn on MOL!
Anyway, I have not received anymore communications and re-reading the email I was sent last night, this might be as far as it goes:
Thank you for choosing Indigo. Sincerely, |
sbenois said:
Is Nan trying to have the book removed as a Heather's Pick?
"it ain't censorship when we do it"
No, you are the one into censorship. I was just letting her know that the "real story" she loved was actually fiction. I gave her links to the movie, book and Lucy Komisar's website.
nan said:Anyway, I have not received anymore communications and re-reading the email I was sent last night, this might be as far as it goes:
Lets hope so.
ridski said:
dave23 said:Reminds me of the time I wrote to Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library and told him the 2015 Barraco Rock Rose Red he recommended has ties to Generalissimo Franco and I refuse to shop there until he stops selling it.
nan said:Maybe you can just leave her alone.
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
Did he write back? I have rarely complained about products or service, but once in college I got a stale candy bar from a machine in my dorm and I wrote to Nestle to complain. They sent me a box of the freshest candy bars I have ever eaten and a letter testifying to the cleanliness of their factories. I guess that was the form letter they sent to everyone or maybe I should have looked closer at that candy bar.
Oh, and once I wrote to protest Diane Ratvich getting the John Dewey Award since she had written a book criticizing John Dewey and that just seemed wrong. The head of the John Dewey Society wrote back and said he could see my point and indicated I was not the only one to complain--like there might have been one other person. Ratvich later joined the anti-school privatization movement and redeemed herself so maybe she softened her view on Dewey too. Who knows.
ridski said:
Reminds me of the time I wrote to Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library and told him the 2015 Barraco Rock Rose Red he recommended has ties to Generalissimo Franco and I refuse to shop there until he stops selling it.
Reds don't go with fascism. Everyone knows that.
DaveSchmidt said:
ridski said:Reds don't go with fascism. Everyone knows that.
Reminds me of the time I wrote to Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library and told him the 2015 Barraco Rock Rose Red he recommended has ties to Generalissimo Franco and I refuse to shop there until he stops selling it.
Listen, Dave, Noam Chomsky himself told me in 1972 that Garnacha is literally the most fascistic of all the varietals.
nan said:
ridski said:Did he write back? I have rarely complained about products or service, but once in college I got a stale candy bar from a machine in my dorm and I wrote to Nestle to complain. They sent me a box of the freshest candy bars I have ever eaten and a letter testifying to the cleanliness of their factories. I guess that was the form letter they sent to everyone or maybe I should have looked closer at that candy bar.
dave23 said:Reminds me of the time I wrote to Gary Vaynerchuk at Wine Library and told him the 2015 Barraco Rock Rose Red he recommended has ties to Generalissimo Franco and I refuse to shop there until he stops selling it.
nan said:Maybe you can just leave her alone.
Thanks for the notice on that. Next time I visit the SHM (not a common occurrence), I will speak with Heather about her choice. Or maybe I can drop her an email, since she is probably not there. I'll let you know what she says.
Edited to add: I sent an email to customer service. They said they would get back with me in 24 hours.
Edited again: OK, they sent me another email saying they sent my inquiry to the Support team.
Nestle, you say?
I think it was Nestle--might have been a different company. Nestle is evil, but back in the 70's I was not thinking in those terms much (do remember the baby formula in 3rd world countries scandal).
Under the Magnitsky Act, Senators are calling for an investigation of Khashoggi's disappearance. Whether anything will come of it, we'll see.
dave23 said:
Under the Magnitsky Act, Senators are calling for an investigation of Khashoggi's disappearance. Whether anything will come of it, we'll see.
Yes, it will be interesting to watch what happens or does not happen with that one.
This is long and the sound quality not great, but if you have been following this story you might find this interesting. It is a two+ hour interview with Russian Attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was a lawyer in the Prevezon case and the "mysterious" women at the famous Trump Tower meeting. She discusses that meeting and Browder. I am still listening to it in pieces so I will have more to say when I finish. Lots more detail than you get in the mainstream news.
In the meantime - Lucy Komisar has raised a whopping $80 of her $5,000 goal in the last 2 weeks. You would think there would be a lot more anti-Browder supporters out there contributing based on nan's rants. At least the Sputnik crew may not but as influential as I thought. 
jamie said:
In the meantime - Lucy Komisar has raised a whopping $80 of her $5,000 goal in the last 2 weeks. You would think there would be a lot more anti-Browder supporters out there contributing based on nan's rants. At least the Sputnik crew may not but as influential as I thought.
She's a powerless, unsung hero and gets scant attention. Have some respect. Really, picking on a 70+ year old independent journalist who has tirelessly investigated corporate crimes for decades. Is this really who you want to be? Whose side are you on? Not the side that cares about your own well-being. Meanwhile CNN/MSNBC, etc. continue to manufacture consent for war and corporate profit, while hardly mentioning climate change, and you are willing brainwashed.
New interview with Lucy Komisar on how Mikhail Khodorkovsky and William Browder scammed Russian energy sector companies. . .This is the investigation that Mueller would pursue if were interested in how the West scammed Russia. Not on his agenda.
Is Stealing Energy Assets Behind the REAL #RussiaGate
https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2018/11/stealing-russias-energy-assets-is-the-real-russiagate/
NOTES:
* MBK (Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky) getting control of Yukos oil through rigged auctions in the corrupt Yeltsin regime and then using transfer-pricing to cheat minority shareholders and Russian taxpayers and
* Browder buying shares in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom through cutout companies to evade rules that banned purchases of its stock in Russia by foreigners.
Here are the links:
The Yukos story
The Russian government owned the company until 1995, when “oligarch” Mikhail Khodorkovsky obtained 78-percent of it for $350 million in a rigged “loans for shares” auction run by his own Menatep Bank, agent for the State Property Committee of corrupt former President Boris Yeltsin. The company was supposed to be security for “loans” that the Yeltsin government conveniently never paid back. When the shares went on the market a few years later, Yukos’ value was put at $9 billion. Massive theft.
The smoking gun that points to where some of the Yukos money went is a confidential memo that shows how the company moved its profits through offshore accounts to cheat minority shareholders and the Russian government. There are charts indicating the connection between Yukos and offshore trading companies that were allegedly independent.
The secret document details a meeting that occurred in June 1, 1999 at 94 Park Lane, in London. Among five participants were Stephen Curtis, managing director of Group Menatep, the holding company that owned Yukos; Peter Bond, who ran Valmet, a shell company incorporator on the Isle of Man, a tax haven; marketing director Branson Bean; and two others listed as “Peter Clucas” and “JJ.”
Bond would later acknowledge in a US federal court that his business involved setting up shell companies for clients to hide and move illicit money. That case involved his client Robert Brennan, an American stock swindler who in 2001 was convicted in New Jersey for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering. The Justice Department promised he would not be asked about his Russian clients.
Curtis briefed the others about Yukos marketing. He explained that Yukos oil flowed through what they called the “Jurby Lake Structure,” an offshore network they’d named after a lake in England. The structure was based on trading companies — Behles, South Petroleum and Baltic Petroleum — which Jurby controlled. Behles and Menatep shared an office at 46 rue du Rhône in Geneva. South was registered in Geneva and then Gibraltar, Baltic in Ireland.
The network was used for “transfer-pricing,” ie over and under-invoicing. Yukos would sell oil to Behles at below market prices, and Behles would resell it to South at market prices. The difference ($3-$4 million a month) was transferred via bank accounts at UBS in Switzerland to secret accounts on the Isle of Man.
So, the real profits from the oil sales would not appear on Yukos balance sheets, and they could be hidden from tax authorities and minority shareholders.
About Gazprom
Russian authorities claim that Browder and the Ziffs illegally bought 200 million shares of Gazprom between 1997 and 2005, at a time a presidential decree banned foreigners from buying such shares. They used networks of Russian shell companies to make buys on the St. Petersburg and Moscow trading floors.
Browder and his partners, the Russian Interior Ministry alleges, used the Kalmykia shell, Kameya, to buy 200 million shares at St. Petersburg and Moscow brokerage trading floors. Kameya’s general director was listed as Ivan Sergeevich Cherkasov, Browder’s partner acting as a nominee.
The Russian investigators say Gazprom shares in 2006 were transferred to the Cypriot Giggs Enterprises Ltd and the profits were then shifted to companies managed by the Ziff Brothers Fund. The Interior Ministry said the shares were consolidated in Kameya, which sold some of them and sent about 70 million as dividends to Speedwagon Investors I and II.
Russian Interior Ministry investigators described the Speedwagon I and II, Cyprus and Kalmykia shell company network whose owners were Browder and the Ziffs.
The remaining shares moved to Browder’s Kalmykia companies, Saturn Investments, Dalnaya Steppe, and Ryland. Then they were transferred to Browder’s Cyprus shells. Including Glendora. They ended up in the HSBC fund, ie Hermitage. The ministry says that by these transactions, Russia was cheated of more than 1 billion rubles. (A ruble at the time was less than 3 U.S. cents, so nearly $30 million.)
The ministry says the Ziffs may have violated U.S. law since Ziff Brothers Investments, a tax resident of the United States, was not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment company and thus could not participate legally in those transactions.
The General Prosecutor’s Office conducting an investigating into the illegal acquisition of the Gazprom shares the Russian asked for U.S. Justice Department help in their investigation. They wanted data that would allow them to take the case to Russian court, though they expected that Browder would not return for trial. They thought American authorities might want to determine if the transactions adhere to U.S. financial and tax law.
They didn’t get that help.
Cyprus
Instead, when the Russian sought help from Cypriot authorities to trace how Cyprus shell companies may have been used to move Gazprom shares out of the country, Browder took legal action to challenge their cooperation. And got members of the European Parliament to back him, to threaten Cyprus with sanctions if did the normal international judicial cooperation. At first Cypriot authorities agreed to cooperate, then suspended cooperation.
Of course, the question is what is Browder hiding? Why should he oppose looking into how he used Cyprus shell companies to move shares, especially Gazprom shares, out of Russia? Seems like the action of someone with something to cover up.
Cyprus’s final decision is awaited. We will see if Browder and his political allies can continue to finesse the international rule of law.
more meaningless word salad rants from komisar- at least she has Sputnik news.
I'm embarrassed to admit I have a subscription to Vanity Fair, especially when they publish this fiction as fact, although it is fairly clear that the writer is not taken in by Browder's story. Seems there is no glory or career advancement in outing Browder, but the mainstream articles are coming closer to doing that all the time, baby-step by baby-step.
“I SEE HIM AS A MODERN-DAY PABLO ESCOBAR”: INSIDE BILL BROWDER’S WAR AGAINST PUTIN
In a series of revealing new interviews, Putin’s public enemy No. 1 offers scintillating details about his investigation into Russian financial malfeasance, running for his life, and the Helsinki fallout.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/bill-browder-war-against-putin
Lawmakers in Washington are trying to compel the Trump administration to take strong measures against Chinese officials for their mass repression of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China.
Legislators introduced companion bills on Wednesday in the House and Senate following months of discussions on how to punish China for its treatment of the Uighurs, including sanctioning specific officials and limiting sales of products from American companies to certain Chinese state agencies. The push comes as China’s treatment of the Uighurs has come under increasing scrutiny by Western news organizations and international agencies.
The bills would put more pressure on the Trump administration to take action on what international officials and scholars say is China’s worst collective human rights abuse in decades.
The legislation introduced Wednesday calls for the secretary of state to consider invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials, including Chen Quanguo, the party chief in Xinjiang, engaged in the abuse. Officials in the White House and departments of State and Treasury have already been discussing this punishment.
nohero said:
Lawmakers in Washington are trying to compel the Trump administration to take strong measures against Chinese officials for their mass repression of ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China.Link
Legislators introduced companion bills on Wednesday in the House and Senate following months of discussions on how to punish China for its treatment of the Uighurs, including sanctioning specific officials and limiting sales of products from American companies to certain Chinese state agencies. The push comes as China’s treatment of the Uighurs has come under increasing scrutiny by Western news organizations and international agencies.
The bills would put more pressure on the Trump administration to take action on what international officials and scholars say is China’s worst collective human rights abuse in decades.
The legislation introduced Wednesday calls for the secretary of state to consider invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to impose economic sanctions on Chinese officials, including Chen Quanguo, the party chief in Xinjiang, engaged in the abuse. Officials in the White House and departments of State and Treasury have already been discussing this punishment.
I don't know the details on this so I can't say if it is a real human rights abuse, or just some politically motivated move. What I can say is, that even if these sanctions are justified, it does not make Bill Browder's story true and Sergei Magnitsky an innocent lawyer who was murdered by Putin. That is still fake news, no matter what fawning NPR reporters have to say.
nan said:I don't know the details on this so I can't say if it is a real human rights abuse, or just some politically motivated move.
There's a link to the news coverage. I'd like to hear how it couldn't be considered a real human rights abuse.
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It's not a scam It's to support her reporting. She's an independent journalist. It's not different than people supporting YouTube speakers through Patreon. She is an amazing reporter; she gets to the bottom of stories ignored on CNN/MSNBC where they sometimes make $30K a day to lie or ignore. If you don't like her than don't contribute. She's not trying to brainwash anyone--it's very straightforward.