“Almost 30 years have passed since our first foray into the workings of this toxic shadow network and the initial discoveries we made. We inadvertently discovered a niche. This world contains its fair share of ‘conventional’ crime bosses like Leonid Minin, but its most senior crime lords are often hiding in plain sight. They include heads of state and captains of industry – the very pillars of society. Very Bad People. Their rank and privilege allow them to act with impunity and obtain unimaginable power.”
A highly engrossing & exceedingly useful history from a founding member of anti-corruption NGO Global Witness on the government-corporate-mafia-banking-law international organised crime nexus, also acting as an ideal double for cross referencing & extrapolating to the super-swamp of malign actors & criminal coterie encrusting the Trump/Whore-E-Lago banana-peel republic regime & its Epstein Class intergrowth.
“We had stumbled upon a network. We called it ‘the shadow network’ because every time we investigated a case, there it was again, lurking in the dark corners. For us, this shadow network was a world within a world that commits or enables some of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated.”
These are mostly the warlords, diamond & illegal timber smugglers, arms traffickers, & the degenerate mercenary ex-intelligence rabble & corrupt “1st-3rd”-world actors & fixers that ply this abhorrent & highly ruinous menace. But as stated, these examples, & how they were countered, is extremely, extremely relevant to the modern midden, & can be studied carefully for the precedents they lay. The current effluvium & evil spiralling out of the U$, Israel, & the UK is very much subject to these terms & quarters (in fact, their offending is even greater, particularly where “Big Tech” & its apocalypse advocates are involved) & what can actually happen when the legal & regulatory infrastructure is actually allowed to function as positioned.
Author Patrick Alley is a veteran & founding member of Global Justice, an NGO started in the 90s by UK activists targetting – “Arms trafficking, offshore accounts and luxury property deals. Superyachts, private jets and supercar collections. Blood diamonds, suspect oil deals, deforestation and murder.” & the corrupt components that enable this “worldwide corruption” (now hysterical & engorged under the hellish & malignant festering of $ump & his $ecretions).
Patrick starts with Cambodia, back when the murderous Khmer Rogue “controlled the forests” & were illegally felling masses of trees & smuggling them onto the global market with a little laundering help from states (Cambodia & Thailand) & “friends in the West”….
“If we’d got this right, the enormity of the situation was starting to dawn on us. Could the Cambodian government actually be cooperating with their battlefield enemy in a trade that raised money so that both sides could fight each other?”
This reminds me of the infernal Palantir, so close with Ukrainian president Zelensky, yet with there dear delegate Elon Musk apparently speaking with Vladmir Putin almost every day. A profit, a game, a sick kick …. “expend and pretend”.
“Ukraine is turning into the best test grounds for products.” – Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK & Europe chief executive
“If our discovery was correct, then this trade was fuelling a war that was killing and maiming thousands of people. Undermining an embryonic peace process and destroying the rainforest. With both Cambodian sides plus theThai government and military complicit, the world was far, far madder than we had ever thought.”
“It seemed relations between the Thai army and the Khmer Rogue were totally relaxed. It was as if there was no border between them. They were simply players in the same business.”
SOOOO much of the text, terms, context & criteria reminds me of the Karp-$ump-Musk-Epstein-Thiel-Andreesen-Altman axis that they could be conjoined twins.
The book progresses onto the blood diamond trade that had ravaged parts of Africa & funded appalling wars & atrocities on the continent to titillate the neck-lines & fashion-senses of rich fucks elsewhere. Once again, the Palantir practice of insider market rigging/trading/looting/corruption of office/DOGE & overly lucrative self-awarding “no bid contracts” can be observed with the likes of De Beers Group (a gigantic British mining conglomerate) …
De Beers – “control the market and thus control the prices.” – “restricting the supply and thus controlling the price” … a “massive protection racket”
the “combination of misinformation and deliberately weak laws coupled with unfit for purpose international trading regulations” (the $ump Disintegration has bestowed a ten-year regulation freeze on any regulation AI for his of his donor plunderer buddies).
On a trip to Israel (Tel Aviv Diamond Exchange, the world’s largest diamond-trading centre.), they try & appeal directly to dealer to desist taking “blood diamonds” from the sickeningly violent conflict …
“listen, people have been killing people in Africa for centuries, so why is it our issue?” – Martin Rapaport, diamond trader (Rapaport Group), Tel Aviv, 1999
“I pay both sides”. – timber smuggler, Cambodia.
We also learn about Epstein/Mossad Ukrainian/Israeli “shadow network” ‘entrepreneur’ & reprobate slob gunrunner – Leonid Efimovich Minin – who was selling arms to Charles Taylor, arming the RUF militia in the Sierra Leone civil war.
Leonid was arrested after the police were called to a disturbance (a terrified call girl) at a hotel in Milan in 2000, where they found him –
“freebasing cocaine with four prostitutes and becoming increasingly violent”,
“We knew nothing about the man until the police took the call from the prostitute who was worried about an increasingly violent client, and suddenly I was pushed into a world I had no idea about. I had people from the American Embassy turning up at my office. There was the “retired” Mossad agent – she was a colonel based in Paris – who told me how useful Minin was to their intelligence services [Mossad].” –
the young prosecutor went on to describe Leonid –
“Minin was a grand corruptor. He visited Liberia many times, always accompanied by the same beautiful Ukrainian woman. Her job was to seduce senior Liberian leaders.”
blackmail & kompromat.
The eleven-year civil war that the guns & illegal trade in diamonds out to the west enabled was utterly horrendous, as Alley puts it “a civil war of almost unrivalled brutality.”
eventually, with pressure, lobbying & exposure from Global Witness, The UN Security Council unanimously enacted Resolution 1243 in 2001, which placed little Liberia under intensive sanctions.
“Until Taylor was denied access to arms and money, the war would carry on.”
why can they not find the spine with the supreme-crime-state-of-Dysfail?
Meanwhile, the Western diamond traders are happy to continue funding & profiting from the illegal trade, massacres & child soldiers ….
“The UN needs to tell us what to do. Until then, we trade.” – timber/diamond buyers from France & Denmark
Alley speaks frequently of the “shadow network”, the furtive & highly powerful para-apparatus that the likes of Epstein, Mandelson, Maxwell, Cohn, Thiel – & so frequently – the Mossad – flourish in.
“We had gleaned a painful insight into this shadow network – how the vested interests of companies and countries conspire to thwart the right outcome in the interests of their own power and profit. This is the way the world turns, but we also learned that a small group of people can stick very large spokes into the wheels.”
another “colourful character” in the line-up of vociferous criminal wrongdoers is the notorious Israeli billionaire, mining magnate & convicted felon Beny Steinmetz. As was so often the case with Israeli offenders & convicts from the past, very little media attention & column inches would be attributed to old Beny, but his herculean crimes in Africa & multiple convictions for heavily assorted corruption charges are richly documented in Very Bad People.
Frédéric Cilins [a Franco-Israeli fixer & broker working on behalf of Steinmetz in Africa]was arrested as he left the airport with US$20,000 cash on his person. He was charged with ‘tampering with a witness’, ‘destruction, alteration, and falsification of records in a federal investigation’ and ‘obstruction of a criminal investigation’. He was in big trouble: the first two charges each carried a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.”
sound like Peter Thiel on a good day.
“Many members of the shadow network companies that are prepared to take greater risks [Palantir] than their more mainstream counterparts, like doing corrupt deals in unstable dictatorships or war zones . These are apex predators. One step down the food chain are the companies that seem happy to service them and feast on the scraps. Companies like London-based lawyers Michon de Reya.”
excellent stuff & a worthy compendium & reference for these addled & assaulting times of abject abomination amok.
Patrick Alley, 2022, Octopus Books, 306 pages
