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This website has published countless articles warning of these operations going back as far as 2014. This site has also warned of Russian hybrid warfare as noted by the Gerasimov Doctrine.
During the campaign season, the Obama White House knew more than they were telling or sharing. Furthermore, that same White House refused to take any real action with regard to Russian interference.
Huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.
Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy fix, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. More here.
Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over Black Lives Matter, Muslims
ChicagoTribune: The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.
The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.
These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.
The nature and detail of these ads has troubled investigators at Facebook, on Capitol Hill and at the U.S. Justice Department, say people familiar with the advertisements who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share matters still under investigation.
The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in coming weeks as they attempt to untangle the operation and other matters related to Russia’s bid to help elect Trump in 2016.
“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.
“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”
The ads which Facebook found raise troubling questions for a social networking and advertising platform that reaches two billion people each month and offer a rare window into how Russian operatives carried out their information operations during an especially tumultuous period in U.S. politics.
Investigators at Facebook discovered the Russian ads in recent weeks, the company has said, after months of trying in vain to trace disinformation efforts back to Russia. The company has said it had identified at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts. Facebook has said this spending represented a tiny fraction of the political advertising on the platform for the 2016 campaign.
The previously-undisclosed ads suggest that Russian operatives worked off of evolving lists of racial, religious, political and economic themes. They used these to create pages, write posts and craft ads that would appear in user’s news feeds — with the apparent goal of appealing to one audience and alienating another. In some cases, the pages even tried to organize events.
“The idea of using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism is an old tactic. It’s not unique to the United States and it’s a global phenomenon,” said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, California. and the executive director for the Center for Media Justice. Social media companies “have a mandate to standup and take deep responsibility for how their platforms are being abused.”
Facebook declined to comment on the contents of the ads being turned over to congressional investigators, and pointed to a Sept. 6 statement by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer, who noted that the vast majority of the ads run by the 470 pages and accounts did not specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or any particular candidate.
“Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the idealogical spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights,” Stamos said at the time.
Moscow’s interest in U.S. race relations date back decades.
In Soviet times, operatives didn’t have the option of using the Internet, so they spread their messages by taking out ads in newspapers, posting fliers and organizing meetings.
Much like the online ads discovered by Facebook, messages spread by Soviet-era operatives were meant to look as though they were written by bonafide political activists in the United States, thereby disguising the involvement of an adversarial foreign power.
Russian information operations didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After a lull in tensions, Russia’s spy agencies became more assertive under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, those services have updated their propaganda protocols to take advantage of new technologies and the proliferation of social media platforms.
“Is it a goal of the Kremlin to encourage discord in American society? The answer to that is yes,” said former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “More generally, Putin has an idea that our society is imperfect, that our democracy is not better than his, so to see us in conflict on big social issues is in the Kremlin’s interests.”
Clinton Watts, part of a research team that was among the first to warn publicly of the Russian propaganda campaign during the 2016 election, said that identifying and exploiting existing social and cultural divisions are common Russian disinformation tactics dating back to the Cold War.
“We have seen them operating on both sides” said Watts, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent.
When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, no one could have anticipated the company would become an advertising juggernaut worth almost half a trillion dollars — the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Roughly a third of the world’s population now log in monthly.
As Facebook’s user base rapidly expanded, it wrote the playbook for digital targeting in the smartphone era — and for the type of micro-targeting that has become critical to modern political campaigns.
The social network invested heavily in building highly-sophisticated automated advertising tools that could target specific groups of people who had expressed their preferences and interests on Facebook, from newlyweds who studied at Dartmouth College to hockey enthusiasts living in a particular zip code in Michigan.
The migration from traditional personal computers to smartphones and tablets also helped Facebook gain a major edge: The company pioneered techniques to help advertisers reach the same user on their desktop and mobile devices, leading Facebook to grow seven-fold in its value since it went public in 2012. Today, advertisers who want to target Facebook users by demographics or interests have tens of thousands of categories to choose from, and they are able to flood users with ads wherever they go on the Internet.
Unlike most websites, where ads appear alongside content, ads on Facebook have directly appeared in people’s newsfeeds since 2012. If users like a page, the administrators of that page can pay for ads and post content that will then appear in the cascade of information from publishers and friends that users see right away when they log onto Facebook.
Since the 2012 presidential election, Facebook has become an essential tool for political campaigns that wish to target potential voters. During the height of election season, political campaigns are among the largest advertisers on Facebook. Facebook has built a large sales staff of account executives, some of whom have backgrounds in politics, that are especially trained to assist campaigns in spreading their messages, increasing engagement, and getting immediate feedback on how they are performing.
The Trump campaign used these tools to great effect, while Clinton’s campaign preferred to rely on its own social media experts, according to people familiar with the campaigns.
Since taking office, Putin has on occasion sought to spotlight racial tensions in the United States as a means of shaping perceptions of American society.
Putin injected himself in 2014 into the race debate after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American, by a police officer who was white.
“Do you believe that everything is perfect now from the point of view of democracy in the United States?” Putin told CBS’ 60 Minutes. “If everything was perfect, there wouldn’t be the problem of Ferguson. There would be no abuse by the police. But our task is to see all these problems and respond properly.”
In addition to the ads described to The Post, Russian operatives used Facebook to promote anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages. Facebook has said that one-quarter of the ads bought by the Russian operatives identified so far were targeted to a particular geographic area.
While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”
Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.
Watts said such efforts were most likely to have been effective in mid-Western swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders had beaten Clinton. Watts said the disinformation pushed by the Russians includes messages designed to reinforce the idea that Sanders had been mistreated by the Democratic Party and that his supporters shouldn’t bother to vote during the general election in November.
“They were designed around hitting these fracture points, so they could see how they resonate and assess their effectiveness,” Watts said. “I call it reconnaissance by social media.”
Gotta wonder if Jane Fonda had her own entire file cabinet. Hollywood did have many names included on the blacklist. A pamphlet titled ‘red channels’ included the names. For how this blacklist worked due to the FBI and HUAC, go here.
Ralph David Abernathy, Donald Sutherland, Women’s Liberation, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War – Among Those on NSA’s Watch List
Gregory Peck Joanne Woodward
NSA Biographic Files Included 73,000 U.S. Citizens, Including Journalists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker and Actors Joanne Woodward and Gregory Peck
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2017 – The National Security Agency’s (NSA) own official history conflated two different constitutionally “questionable practices” involving surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to recent NSA declassifications published today by the National Security Archive, an independent research organization based at The George Washington University. During the mid-1970s, the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigated a number of such “practices” by NSA, including the so-called Watch List program, which monitored the international communications of anti-Vietnam war activists and other alleged “subversives.” The “Watch List” was one of the questionable activities; the other was the NSA’s creation of a voluminous filing system on prominent U.S. citizens whose names appeared in Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) collected by the Agency. That filing system, abandoned in the early 1970s and destroyed in 1973, stayed secret for years.[1]
The files on well-known Americans were a product of the Agency’s sweeping efforts to track the communications of Cold War adversaries and to identify the individuals mentioned in them. Ultimately the filing system, and corresponding indexes, surpassed 1,000,000 names, including 73,000 U.S. citizens mentioned in SIGINT collected by the Agency. Among them were politicians, corporate leaders, trade unionists, Hollywood personalities, and journalists, ranging from Church Committee member Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) and actor Joanne Woodward to IBM CEO Thomas Watson and United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock.
The recent NSA release has more information on the Watch List, such as the identities of a number of targeted individuals and organizations: Canadian actor and antiwar activist Donald Sutherland, civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy, journalist Seymour Hersh, antiwar activist David Dellinger, the Venceremos Brigade, and an entire social movement, Women’s Liberation.
Four years ago, the National Security Archive published a newly declassified National Security Agency history that included details about the Agency’s Watch List. As it turned out, the Agency’s history mistakenly folded in the NSA’s filing system on U.S. citizens into the Watch List, which focused on social reformers, revolutionaries, anti-war activists, and their organizations. Thus, the history incorrectly stated that Senator Howard Baker and journalists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker, among others, were on the Watch List. Declassified documents confirm, however, that the NSA included those individuals and 73,000 others as part of the Agency’s name files of U.S. citizens. New documents that the NSA released to the Archive through a mandatory declassification review appeal provide an important corrective to the Agency’s official history by demonstrating that the Watch List and the biographical files were what the Church Committee – the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) – saw as two different “questionable practices” with respect to the Agency’s treatment of U.S. citizens.
To identify people mentioned in intercepted messages and other SIGINT products, the NSA (and its predecessors) created special indexes and sets of biographical files. The index to the biographical files was the “Rhyming Dictionary” used by NSA analysts as they decrypted and reported on SIGINT. Eventually including over a million names, the “Rhyming Dictionary” was organized in forward and reverse alphabetical order to make it easier for intelligence analysts to access the names of individuals and to retrieve biographical files as needed. When the Agency began to collect the names of U.S. personalities during the 1960s, it included them in the “Rhyming Dictionary” and created corresponding files that ended up filling 8-10 filing cabinets with over 73,000 entries.
According to the newly declassified documents, among the subjects of biographical files were prominent U.S. individuals. Besides Joanne Woodward, Thomas Watson, and Walter Mondale, the files included Washington Post humorist Art Buchwald, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Arthur Burns, actor Gregory Peck, Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY), New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, civil rights leader Whitney Young, and members of the Senate Select Committee including Howard Baker, Jr., and Frank Church. The Church Committee regarded the creation of files on American citizens by a U.S. intelligence agency as an improper activity, but their specific existence was not disclosed at the time, even though the procedures that generated such files were discussed during hearings.
The NSA’s Watch List, the other dubious activity, had been created in the early 1960s to keep track of U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba. During the following years Watch List targets broadened. After President Kennedy’s assassination, it included possible threats to the president.[2] On 20 October 1967, the Watch List began including anti-Vietnam War and civil rights activists, after U.S. Army intelligence informed the Agency “that Army ACSI, assistant chief of staff for intelligence [General William P. Yarborough], had been designated executive agent by DOD for civil disturbance matters and requested any available information on foreign influence over, or control of, civil disturbances in the U.S.” That comported with the thinking of President Lyndon Johnson who privately claimed that covert financial support from “international Communism” was behind the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was then preparing for a major demonstration in Washington (21 October 1967).[3] To determine whether there were such connections, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began providing hundreds of names for the Agency’s Watch List. During the Nixon administration, the list expanded further to include narcotics traffickers and terrorist organizations.
According to testimony by NSA Director General Lew Allen, in October 1975, U.S. government agencies nominated the names of individuals and organizations that appeared on the Watch List. Thus, to cover the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “requirements on possible foreign control of, or influence on, U.S. antiwar activity,” DIA nominated the names of 20 U.S. persons who traveled to North Vietnam. The FBI “submitted watch lists covering their requirements on foreign ties and support to certain U.S. persons and groups,” with the lists including “names of ‘so-called’ extremist persons and groups … active in civil disturbances, and terrorists.” The FBI lists included about 1,000 individuals. The Secret Service nominated about 180 U.S. individuals and groups that “were potentially a threat to Secret Service protectees.” During 1967-1973, Allen testified, all of the lists combined had a “cumulative total of about 450 U.S. names on the narcotics list, and about 1,200 U.S. names on all other lists.”
Senator Church and his colleagues did not object to Watch Lists of narcotics traffickers or to genuine threats to the president, but they wondered about the “lack of adequate legal basis for some of this activity and what that leads to.” Allen agreed that there was a problem and spoke of “domestic intercepts which cannot be conducted under the President’s constitutional authority for foreign intelligence,” which meant that “we are not authorized by law or constitutional authority and they are clearly prohibited.” As General Allen explained, there were “interpretations which deal with the right to privacy [from] unreasonable search and seizure of the fourth amendment.” It was “self-doubt” (referred to in Document 10) that led the NSA to stop accepting Watch Lists with the names of U.S. citizens in the summer of 1973. When Attorney General Elliot Richardson raised questions about the propriety of FBI and Secret Service requests for information from NSA Allen officially closed down the program.
One of the most sensational revelations of the Church Committee was Operation SHAMROCK by which the major telecommunications companies RCA, Western Union, and International Telephone and Telegraph reluctantly shared their telegram traffic with the NSA and its predecessors from 1945 to the early 1970s. Near the program’s end, NSA analysts were reviewing 150,000 telegrams a month. Information from the telegrams provided grist for the Watch List, which, in the words of Frank Church, “resulted in the invasion of privacy of American citizens whose private and personal telegrams were intercepted.” Church also saw a betrayal of trust by companies whose “paying customers who had a right to expect that the messages would be handled confidentially.” In November 1975 those and other considerations led Church and the committee majority to unilaterally declassify facts about the SHAMROCK program over the objections of President Ford. According to former Committee staffer L. Brit Snider, “This was the “only occasion … where a Congressional committee voted to override a presidential objection and publish information the President contended was classified.”[4]
A mandatory declassification review request by the National Security Archive to the National Security Agency produced the documents in today’s posting. The subject of the request was the sources cited in an endnote to the NSA history. The documents in the Agency’s initial release were excised and more information on the watch list and the Rhyming Encyclopedia was released under appeal. Pending declassification requests to the FBI and other agencies may produce more information on the history of the Watch List.
BostonGlobe: The United States remains an easy mark for drug dealers, terrorists and others who prize anonymity when registering aircraft or getting licensed to fly. So much for the lessons of 9/11.
As he sought to unspool the story behind the tragedy, Asnaldo Del Valle Gonzalez would come face to face with what he calls “the monster,” the web of secrecy that surrounds thousands of planes like the one that devastated his family, making it nearly impossible to identify a plane’s real owners and hold them accountable.
A Spotlight Team investigation has found that lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, over decades, has made it easy for drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even people with links to terrorism to register private planes and conceal their identities. With the US stamp of approval — signified by a number on the tail fin that always begins with the letter “N” — owners often find more freedom from scrutiny and anonymity while traveling. This has allowed criminals and foreign government officials to mask illicit activities or keep wealth hidden from their home countries.
The registered owner of the crashed twin-engine Piper, a company called Aircraft Guaranty, is part of a nearly invisible private industry that sometimes operates from computer terminals inside FAA offices in Oklahoma, busily registering planes on behalf of foreign nationals — and working in a system that allows them to hide their names from the public. More than 1,000 planes are registered in Aircraft Guaranty’s name at an address in a Texas town of 2,500 that doesn’t have an airport. But it’s enough to give clients both anonymity and coveted US registration for their planes.
Gonzalez never did figure out who really owned the plane that crashed into his home — even when the name of the client Aircraft Guaranty had on file, Luis Nuñez, was revealed during court proceedings. A court official who visited the listed Miami address for Nuñez found cobwebs on the doorknob and a package addressed to someone else. A private detective working for Gonzalez’s attorneys spent a year searching for additional clues and for Nuñez, before concluding that he was nothing more than a “phantom person.” The Globe also was unable to locate Nuñez.
More than 16 years after aircraft were used as weapons in the worst terrorist attack in US history, the FAA still operates more like a file clerk than a reliable tool for law enforcement, enabling secrecy in the skies here and abroad. The price to register a plane is still just $5 — the same as in 1964, even though the agency has the power to raise it — generating little revenue that could be used to expand oversight. And the FAA does so little vetting of the ownership and use of planes listed in its aircraft registry that two of the airliners hijacked and destroyed on 9/11 were still listed as “active” four years after. And that’s prompt compared to this: The FAA didn’t cancel the registration for one TWA cargo plane until 2016, 57 years after it crashed in Chicago, killing the crew and eight people on the ground.
Today, thousands of planes are registered using practices that can allow for anonymity of ownership. A Spotlight review shows that one out of every six aircraft is registered through trusts, Delaware corporations, or using post office box addresses, techniques commonly used to make it hard to discern the true owner. The number is likely even higher because the FAA acknowledged that it does not verify the validity of documents filed for the registry’s more than 300,000 planes.
There are 314,529 aircaft with N-numbers in the FAA’s registry.
54,232 of those aircraft are registered using known secrecy tactics.
7,610 are registered to companies known for providing trust services to non-U.S. citizens.
Critics, including federal investigators who’ve scrutinized the aircraft registry, say it is little more than “a big file cabinet” in which precious little information has been verified, leaving the door open for people with bad intentions to hide behind a US registration.
FAA officials essentially agree. They stress that they have a “robust oversight system” that includes a team of special agents to investigate fraudulent plane ownership, but say they don’t have the resources to determine whether information on US plane registration forms is accurate.
“The FAA is constantly working to strengthen the integrity of Registry information,” according to an FAA statement to the Spotlight Team that came after months of correspondence about the registry’s shortcomings. “The agency is developing a plan to significantly upgrade and modernize the aircraft registration process.”
But that’s no guarantee reforms will come swiftly, if at all. The FAA has a reputation for making change at a snail’s pace even when problems are clearly identified: The agency, for example, still doesn’t put a photo of the pilot on airman’s licenses 13 years after Congress called for it.
“It is like walking through thick glue. They just don’t move very quickly at the FAA, and it’s a chronic problem,” said former North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan, who served as chairman for the Senate aviation panel in 2009 and 2010. “I would have thought after 2001 that we would have made more progress by now with respect to verifying the ownership of aircraft.”
Today, the public often only discovers the gaps in US oversight when something goes wrong or criminal investigators get involved:
The Venezuelan air force shot down a US-registered, drug-loaded plane near Aruba in 2015, leaving a trail of bodies and cocaine floating in the bright blue sea. Records showed the aircraft was registered to a Delaware shell company and managed by Conrad Kulatz, a Fort Lauderdale attorney in his late 70s.
Federal agents investigating US-registered planes that bore the hallmarks of drug smuggling in 2013 found that three had been illegally registered here in the name of a Mexican national. He fooled the FAA simply by listing a Texas strip mall near the Mexican border as his address and claiming to be a US citizen.
Early this year, US officials labeled Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, a foreign narcotics kingpin, freezing access to his US assets, including a luxury jet. The Treasury Department charged that the jet, registered at the FAA in the name of a shell company, was actually controlled by El Aissami, who, in addition to drug trafficking, also has been accused of aiding Islamic extremists. But, at the FAA, the jet’s registration remains valid in the name of 200G PSA Holdings.
In 2015, federal authorities broke up a scheme to deliver US airplanes registered through trusts to an Iranian airline that US officials say helps to transport troops and materiel to the brutal regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. Though the sale was stopped, the names of the people who planned to sell the airliners to Mahan Air were not revealed publicly.
With so little oversight, there may be more dangerous people in control of American-registered planes whose names have not come to light. The 9/11 conspirators considered using private crop-dusting planes to launch terror attacks before deciding to hijack commercial planes instead. Three months before the World Trade Center attack, terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was trying to acquire crop dusters in Oklahoma. There is no reason to think his efforts would have been blocked or even noticed by the FAA’s Aircraft Registry just a few miles away in Oklahoma City.
Responding to the Globe’s findings, US Representative Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long promoted corporate transparency, said the public urgently needs to know whether there are other potential terrorists among the thousands of unknown individuals who control US-registered planes.
“The FAA has basically abdicated their responsibilities,” said Lynch, who in July filed a bill requiring that the real owners of US-registered planes be publicly disclosed. “We have all these aircraft being operated by who knows who and for what purpose. . . . It’s not the exception, it is the rule, and I think it is important to hold the FAA accountable.”
Family pictures, fitness schedules, sticky notes, and birthday balloons decorate the computer terminals inside the FAA Civil Aviation Registry’s public documents room in Oklahoma City.
This is where members of the public can look up information on US-registered planes, but the terminals at the back are rarely used, according to the man at the desk, and when a Globe reporter tried one, it was slow and balky. Most of the other terminals — many of them seemingly better machines equipped with double monitors — are used by the same people day after day, and they’ve dotted their workstations with personal items.
They work for aircraft title companies, law firms, and companies that create trusts — the way for foreign nationals to register their planes here legally and without attracting public attention. Companies actually lease terminals in the document room, allowing Aircraft Guaranty to boast to potential clients that it has an office inside the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center.
For anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, the agents will create a legal trust to “own” private aircraft on behalf of their actual owners, whose names are typically not disclosed to the public. The registration form itself is even easier to complete — less work than registering a car in most states. Once the paperwork is done, agents can turn it in at the cashier’s window in the corner of the document room, paying a $5 registration fee whether the plane is a $20,000 Piper Tomahawk or a $20 million Learjet.
Then, the FAA is supposed to review the registrations for completeness, but a 2013 outside review found that the FAA is not very thorough. The Department of Transportation inspector general audit estimated that records for more than half the aircraft registered to non-US citizens through trusts were incomplete.
In part because US plane registration is so cheap, easy, and often anonymous, it is extremely popular for people registering internationally. Two-thirds of business jet owners worldwide register their planes in the United States, according to a 2014 estimate on the website Corporate Jet Investor. Another bonus: US-registered planes are believed to attract less attention when traveling internationally.
Defenders of these “noncitizen trusts” say they’re an important tool for businesses, especially companies that include foreign nationals among their owners or executives. US corporations conducting global business might have key officers who do not meet the FAA’s citizenship requirements. Additionally, noncitizens who plan to relocate planes from the United States sometimes set up trusts so that the plane has a legal owner while in transit.
Under US law, foreigners can’t legally register a plane here unless they have a US citizen or US-based legal entity to serve as their representative in dealing with the FAA. It is a longstanding safeguard that, in practice, safeguards nothing.
Champions of the trust system also point out that the FAA has tightened up the rules in recent years, requiring the trustees to disclose agreements with their clients to the FAA at the time of application for registration. The trusts don’t have to keep the names of their clients in the FAA’s permanent record, but they are supposed to make the information available to investigators when asked.
The FAA checks for the completeness of the paperwork, and trusts are often reviewed by the agency’s legal counsel’s office. However, the agency does not verify that the trust information is accurate, nor are they required to under the law. When the Department of Transportation inspector general tried to get the names of the real owners directly from trust companies in 2013, investigators said some trustees either refused to provide the information or took months instead of the two days allowed by the FAA to turn over the names.
The FAA, similarly, puts few restrictions on who can hang out their shingle as a trust company set up to register aircraft. As a result, the industry is a hodgepodge of banks, businesses, and individuals, including several lacking recognizable websites or phone numbers. At least three operate offshore in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — even though the whole point of such trusts is that they are supposed to provide a US contact for the FAA.
A Georgia-based trust company called Plane Fun Inc. exemplifies the elusiveness of several of the trust agents contacted by the Spotlight Team. Plane Fun lists a modest, split-level home in Snellville, Ga., as its headquarters, with more than 200 planes registered to the address.
But the home is owned by Kathleen Schumacher, who told the Globe she is not involved with the business. “I handle nothing on it; my son does,” Schumacher said. Despite repeated attempts, the Globe was unable to reach Schumacher’s son, Kenneth, who she said is the operator of Plane Fun.
Aircraft Guaranty, with offices in Texas and Oklahoma, is much bigger and more visible than Plane Fun. The nearly 30-year-old business describes itself as “one of the most well respected and trusted Trustee Service providers in the aviation industry.” But, like the manager of Plane Fun, Aircraft Guaranty owner Debbie Mercer-Erwin didn’t want to talk about her work.
Only after numerous attempts to interview Mercer-Erwin, including a visit to the single-family home in Oklahoma City where she has an office, did the Globe receive a statement from the company’s attorney.
Aircraft Guaranty “fully complies with all US laws and FAA and other regulations in providing this specific service to its customers,” wrote attorney Wallace C. Magathan III of Miami. He noted that the firm voluntarily follows federal “know your customer” rules, which require company officials to collect “personally identifiable information” from clients that may include name, date of birth, address, and identification number.
Magathan added that Aircraft Guaranty “is not in the business of thoroughly investigating its customers’ private business affairs.” He declined to answer the Globe’s questions about individual clients.
But detailed information about some of Aircraft Guaranty’s more unsavory past clients has come to light. One of them, Fausto Veliz Urbina, was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison for cocaine trafficking before being deported to Mexico in 2010. According to federal court records in Florida, he registered a plane through Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Mexican shell company, Consorcio Melun SA de CV, in 2012, something investigators discovered while looking at a fleet of planes suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
A former Guatemalan vice president, Roxana Baldetti, has been indicted in the United States on federal drug charges and is currently jailed in her homeland. According to media reports, she regularly jetted around in a Raytheon 400A that FAA records show was registered by Aircraft Guaranty on behalf of a Panamanian company, Best Advisors Group Inc. Baldetti resigned and was arrested on fraud charges in 2015 amid media reports of her many luxury purchases, including multimillion-dollar homes.
And there’s Luis Nuñez, the “phantom person” whose plane — registered through Aircraft Guaranty — crashed into Asnaldo Gonzalez’s house. Gonzalez’s inability to find the real owner prevented his family’s attorneys from suing for damages to rebuild his family’s life.
Analysts say there’s a good reason that trust companies like Aircraft Guaranty are attractive to shady characters: Anonymity is good for business.
“Criminals find that US planes allow them to fly under the radar far more easily than if using some dodgy Russian aircraft,” said Kathi Lynn Austin, an expert in arms trafficking and executive director of the Conflict Awareness Project. “The simple act of flying out of US airspace — where regulatory standards are perceived to be high — conveys a level of legitimacy on its aircraft and its operator. The American flag also makes it easier for corrupt officials to wittingly turn a blind eye.”
In 2009, a jet registered on behalf of a foreign owner through Wells Fargo crashed in a remote area of the Bahamas, triggering scrutiny of the FAA’s noncitizen trust policy. FAA officials briefly shut down the option for foreigners to register through noncitizen trusts, amid concern that some plane owners were making side agreements that made ownership hard to trace, especially in an emergency.
“There was a frustration that everybody had,” Joe Standell, counsel to the FAA’s Aeronautical Center at the time, recently told the Globe. “You let them register airplanes as an owner trust. But look what that does; nobody is accountable.”
Trust companies such as Aircraft Guaranty teamed up with businesses to ensure the survival of noncitizen trusts, arguing they are crucial to companies with multinational executives who want to own American-registered aircraft. In all, a dozen associations along with 70 companies and law firms combined forces to deluge the FAA with comments.
“If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” advised Conrad Kulatz, the Florida attorney linked to the drug-laden plane shot down off Aruba in 2015, in a 2012 e-mail to the FAA. “I have never had a problem arising from trustee registration of aircraft in over 30 years practicing law in South Florida.”
The FAA eventually backed off, allowing foreign plane owners to use noncitizen trusts as long as they met some new conditions: share the trust agreements with the FAA and agree to provide ownership information within 48 hours when requested.
A bright orange fireball erupted on the screen of Jeroen Lucas’s video camera while he filmed a commercial for his media firm in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2015. His frame captured the Aruba skyline twinkling at dawn as a flaming streak twisted and turned over the Caribbean Sea.
Minutes before the flash appeared, a business jet had failed to respond to air traffic controllers, and soon the Venezuelan Air Force marked the private jet in its crosshairs. A shot transformed the white and green Challenger 600 into a Roman candle spiraling through thick gray clouds. The plane crashed in the water, killing three people. More than a ton of cocaine floated on the waves.
The aircraft was obtained by two Colombian drug kingpins, Dicson Penagos-Casanova and Juan Gabriel Rios Sierra, who worked as key members of an international drug trafficking ring that supported multiple cartels bringing cocaine to the United States, federal prosecutors said in the indictment.
But the aircraft’s tail number, N214FW, told a different story, tracing the ownership of the plane to a company incorporated in Delaware, a state that often requires minimal public disclosure about the owners of a business. FAA records showed that the cocaine-packed plane was owned by Dinama Aircorp Inc., formed in Delaware less than two weeks before it purchased the airplane in 2013. According to FAA records, the president and sole officer of the firm was Kulatz, the Fort Lauderdale attorney who, a few years earlier, sent an e-mail to the FAA opposing efforts to make plane ownership more transparent.
There are nearly 200 other planes registered to the same address as Dinama Aircorp in Delaware, including a jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to a Globe analysis. Kulatz and another attorney are listed as the key officers of the firm that registered the seized plane.
Kulatz did not respond to repeated calls and correspondence from the Globe. At one point, a receptionist at his office said Kulatz had retired. In July, the Florida bar association listed him as ineligible to practice law because he did not meet the continuing legal education requirement.
Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra are like many drug traffickers who actively seek American planes because they believe they can more easily “fly under the radar,” according to Benjamin Barron, an assistant US attorney in the Central District of California, who prosecuted the pair. To ensure success, they paid aircraft owners a fee of about 30 to 35 percent of the cocaine shipment and bribed Venezuelan military and government officials, according to federal court records. Kulatz has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with the case.
“They hope they will attract less suspicion particularly by using expensive jets that are US-registered and might appear to be something that a corporation might use,” Barron said. “It’s all a way of avoiding detection and getting the cocaine safely from point A to point B.”
But Delaware makes hiding especially easy for corporations of all kinds, setting some of the nation’s most lenient rules. For as little as $90, people can create a Delaware-based company to “own” anything they don’t want to be associated with by name. Delaware goes further in protecting privacy than most states, not requiring a list of officers for some types of firms.
Transparency International, a global anticorruption organization, calls Delaware a haven for transnational crime and “a place where extreme corporate secrecy enables corrupt people, shady companies, drug traffickers, embezzlers, and fraudsters to cover their tracks when shifting dirty money from one place to another.”
More than one-third of all US aircraft — 122,336 — are registered to corporations. Of those, nearly 11,000 are registered to firms in Delaware.
A review of FAA records by the Globe found that about 3,500 aircraft are registered to more than 2,000 companies located at a single Wilmington address that is home to a business incorporator.
It is impossible to know how many planes are registered to non-US citizens through trusts because the FAA does not keep track. The Globe identified several businesses that provide the service. Together they have more than 7,500 aircraft registered across the country.
Law enforcement officials say these easy-to-create shell companies can be significant roadblocks in trying to convict criminals. A Los Angeles DEA agent who investigates narcotics-related aircraft said the dummy ownership makes it harder for him to draw a direct connection between drug dealers and their product.
“If I can’t demonstrate the individual who owned the aircraft or whose name was on the registration paperwork received money to knowingly and intentionally purchase this vessel in a drug transaction, then almost always there is no prosecution,” said the agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Penagos-Casanova and Rios Serra acquired a second drug-loaded plane that crashed in the Caribbean Sea due to engine failure in May 2015, according to court papers. In all, authorities recovered more than $70 million worth of cocaine from the two planes.
Both men pleaded guilty in US District Court in Los Angeles to “conspiracy to possess cocaine on board a United States-registered aircraft with intent to distribute.” They are awaiting sentencing.
Colombian kingpins are not the only suspicious users of aircraft registered to corporations set up by Kulatz, the Florida attorney. He and his wife are listed as officers of Delaware-based Secure Aircorp Inc., which owns the Gulfstream American 2 jet that was seized in 2014 by the Dominican Republic, according to FAA records.
N522HS was seized as part of an investigation by the Dominican Republic’s Justice Ministry Anti-Corruption Department into possible money laundering and embezzlement by one of the country’s senators, Felix Bautista. According to Dominican media reports, authorities said Bautista attempted to evade prosecution and the forfeiture of his aircraft by changing the plane’s tail number about two months before he was indicted. While businesses and individuals may request specific tail numbers to act as vanity plates, criminals utilize the tactic to evade detection, much like switching a license plate on a car.
FAA officials in a statement said such number changes are routine: “The Registry does not generally deny requests for a number change,” in part because they can still track planes by their serial numbers.
Likewise, FAA officials appeared to have no idea that plane N214FW had been shot down off Aruba or that it was controlled by alleged international drug lords. About 15 months after the plane crashed, the agency sent a notice to Dinama Aircorp reminding the company to renew registration for N214FW. Over several months, the agency sent multiple letters to the same address and all came back to Oklahoma City marked “Return to sender.”
30 years of frustration
Ronald Reagan was president when Congress took the FAA to task for not doing enough to keep criminals from secretly acquiring US-registered planes as well as pilot’s licenses.
At the 1988 hearing held by the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation, members wanted to know why the FAA so rarely revoked aircraft and airmen certifications for individuals knowingly violating controlled substance laws in the Aviation Drug-Trafficking Control Act of 1984. Over a four-year period, the FAA revoked the certifications of only three aircraft and six airmen.
Law enforcement officials explained that criminals were able to hide behind a veil of anonymity created through fictitious owners, fake addresses, post office boxes, illegible signatures on documents, repeated changes in ownership, and the switching of tail numbers. These administrative issues — found on paper and documents — created hurdles for law enforcement officers attempting to fight the US war on drugs.
“Aircraft identification and registered owner identification is an elusive veil, behind which the smuggler finds refuge,” testified Carol Knapik, then a detective with Florida’s Broward County sheriff’s office. “All to his advantage that there is no true piece of identification required for the registration of an aircraft.”
Congress directed the agency to make information in the aircraft registry more reliable, prompting common-sense reforms at the FAA such as using computer software to validate addresses and requiring that signatures be legible.
But after 9/11, the continuing weakness of FAA oversight — and the urgent need for reliable information — became increasingly obvious. An internal agency audit of the aircraft registry in 2010 found unreported address changes and sales that left the ownership of about one-third of the more than 300,000 aircraft on the registry in question. In response, the FAA required reregistration of all aircraft with mandated renewal.
Three years later, the inspector general at the Department of Transportation identified a concerning pattern among trusts set up on behalf of foreigners: 5,600 of the aircraft records maintained by the FAA were incomplete, often lacking key information on owner identities. And, in a follow-up letter, the investigators identified several trust-owned aircraft that should have set off alarms:
An FAA inspector was unable to obtain information about who was flying a US trust-registered Boeing 737 in the United Arab Emirates. The plane was suspected of not following US regulations and possibly being used for illegal activity.
Hours before the United Nations Security Council met in 2011 to approve a no-fly zone over Libya, a US plane registered to a trust approached the Tripoli International Airport without a landing permit.
And one aircraft was registered in a trust arrangement on behalf of a Lebanese politician who was “backed by a well known US government-designated terrorist organization.”
It wasn’t until March 2017, after months of questions from the Globe, that FAA officials sat down with the inspector general to address its seven major concerns. After the meeting, the inspector general said the FAA had addressed three of them, tackling issues of data integrity and security.
‘A crown jewel target’
Today, US air security is a study in contrasts. Since the attacks of 9/11, the government has made enormous changes to security procedures in commercial air travel, creating a whole new agency to screen passengers before they board. Since hijackers seized and weaponized four commercial airliners that September morning in 2001, the public has gotten used to a host of small indignities, from removing shoes to whole-body scans and dogs sniffing their carry-ons, all in the name of safety on planes.
But there have been far fewer security improvements for planes used in general aviation that, collectively, represent three-quarters of all US air traffic.
Partly, that may reflect some security analysts’ view that private planes can do far less damage as tools of terror than airliners.
But private planes have been used in attacks such as Joseph Stack’s 2010 suicide crash into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas, which killed an IRS agent and injured 13 others. Stack had posted a suicide note about the “greed” of the IRS on the same day he burned down his own house and deliberately flew his Piper Dakota into the four-story office building.
The 9/11 conspirators had bigger ambitions for small planes. Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the masterminds who had looked into buying crop-dusters in Norman, Okla., and possessed “a computer disk containing information related to the aerial application of pesticides” when he was arrested, according to his 2001 indictment. The indictment said that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta made similar inquiries in Florida in 2000 and 2001.
In June, all these years later, the head of US Homeland Security called commercial aviation “a crown jewel target” for terrorists.
“The threat has not diminished. In fact, I am concerned that we are seeing renewed interest on the part of terrorist groups to go after the aviation sector,” said John Kelly, then-Department of Homeland Security secretary and now President Trump’s chief of staff, during remarks on enhanced aviation security for commercial flights in June.
Scars that won’t heal
For Asnaldo Gonzalez, the failed oversight of US-registered planes had a devastating effect. The federal lawsuit filed on his behalf by Podhurst Orseck, a Miami-based firm, against the plane’s owner was dropped partly because the true owner couldn’t be found to hold accountable. To this day, nine years later, Gonzalez still cannot afford to rebuild his shattered home.
“Absolutely everyone is in total and absolute silence,” said Alfredo Jose D’Ascoli Centeno, an attorney for the Gonzalez family in Caracas.
Before the crash, Gonzalez’s own multistory dwelling was the largest home on the block. It served as an imposing reminder of an accomplished dream — a house built to fit his entire extended family.
Now the cement walls peel with black and gray scars. The bedrooms, once filled with the laughter of his grandchildren, resemble oversized emptied ashtrays. An old couch, two plastic chairs, and wall decorations of homes shifted sideways are among the only family items left behind in the uninhabitable house.
“What I’m looking for is for everyone involved in this tragedy to be held responsible,” said Gonzalez, who continues to pursue the case in Venezuela. “My family and I are fighting without any type of economic resources, and we will fight to the end. “
As Gonzalez recounts his nightmare, voices of children echo from the elementary school across the street as they change classes and play at recess. His wife, Carmen, folds her hands inside of her lap and presses her lips together. The story makes her breathe in hard.
Gonzalez’s grandson, Joecruz, who was rescued from his burning crib and is now 9, paces in the background as he listens to the familiar story that always ends with the same terrifying climax: The explosion. The terror. The deaths.
Joecruz wears his baseball cap low, covering his dark hair and a burn scar that stretches across his forehead. Below his deep brown eyes on both of his cheeks are two more scars, constant reminders he’s unable to erase.
In the United States, with a starting number such as $500,000, you can buy a passport and with just a little more you can advance to citizenship under the EB-5 visa program. Swell huh? It has been going on for years and even Senator Dianne Feinstein has an issue with it. So, where is President Trump on the matter? Crickets…..
In February of this year, Senator Grassley and Feinstein introduced legislation to stop the EB-5 abuse.
The EB-5 program is inherently flawed,” Feinstein said in a joint statement with Grassley on Friday. “It says that U.S. citizenship is for sale. It is wrong to have a special pathway to citizenship for the wealthy while millions wait in line for visas.”
Roughly 10,000 EB-5 visas are awarded each year, with more than 85 percent going to Chinese investors in 2014, according to a study by Savills Studley, a real estate services firm. The program, begun in 1990 to stimulate the economy, has turned into a convenient way for wealthy Chinese citizens to become permanent U.S. residents and later bring over their family members. More here.
The Chinese, the Ukrainians and the Russians, all oligarchs are the largest exploiters of the program and most of these oligarchs are corrupt, paying for speedy processes with dirty money.
We know there are multiple investigations going on inside the DC Beltway regarding Russian interference and rightly so. Both Democrats and Republicans have some complicity in foreign collaboration.
In March of this year, this site published an extensive summary of Russian relations with people in the Trump camp as well as with Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. Few take a look at Secretary Wilbur Ross and his Cyprus connections. Cyprus is a location where abuse and corruption is as normal as breathing. One interesting person is Dmitry Rybolovlev, who happens to know Donald Trump as well as Wilbur Ross.
Beyond paying for a speedy process to obtain a passport or citizenship, there is also yet another method and that is money laundering illicit funds through U.S. real estate purchases where the buyer’s name is not listed if cash is paid. You dont say…..yup. This site published a summary of such activities in July of 2014.
So, while we have examined the issue in the United States and in Cyprus, it is the same for the European Union.
Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs suspected of corruption are among hundreds who have acquired EU passports under the “golden visa” program – a bourgeois shortcut to European citizenship in exchange for cash investments, the Guardian reported Sunday.
A list of recipients seen by The Guardian includes “prominent businesspeople and individuals with considerable political influence.”
The paper claims that Cyprus alone has made over $US 4 billion selling passports to international oligarchs, “granting them the right to live and work throughout Europe,” completely legally.
However, Cyprus is not alone. “The Golden Visa program for Spain, Portugal, Malta, Greece and Cyprus are the most prominent. Bulgaria and Hungary offer residency and citizenship by investment in Europe through government bonds,” the Golden Visa website states.
The BBC reported about this kind of purchasable citizenship three years ago.
“Just like you diversify an investment portfolio, you want to diversity your passport portfolio,” investment expert Christian Kalin, told the BBC.
The list of individuals who have received Cypriot citizenship includes Bashar al-Asad’s cousin, who was previously placed under American sanctions because of allegations he benefited from corruption. It also includes a former member of the Russian parliament and the founder of Ukraine’s largest bank.
According to Global Witness, an international NGO dedicated to exposing global corruption, global visas have the potential to give applicants fleeing persecution a “get out of jail for free card.”
Portuguese MEP, Ana Gomes, said golden visas are an immoral way to grant citizenship.
“I’m not against individual member states granting citizenship or residence to someone who would make a very special contribution to the country, be it in arts or science, or even in investment. But granting, not selling,” said Gomes.
Gomes also questioned the secrecy of obtaining golden visas. If they’re legal, why is it so hard to see who has them, asked Gomes.
The European Parliament will be debating the legality of golden visas in light of the leak, The Guardian reported.
So, for the leaders of respective countries, the definition of citizenship and the spirit of that loyalty means nothing when it comes to money, dirty money.
Perhaps we should be pushing harder for the Grassley/Feinstein legislation at a minimum….what say you?
The largest bank in Azerbaijan has halted its foreign debt payments and will start restructuring talks with creditors after a currency crisis in the Caspian Sea nation drove the lender to the brink of collapse.
Under a restructuring plan published on Friday, the International Bank of Azerbaijan said its “designated financial indebtedness” was at $3.3 billion as of April 18. It missed a principal and interest payment on a $100 million subordinated loan on May 10, according to an emailed statement from the government-owned lender on Thursday. More here.
What is the Azerbaijani Laundromat?
A scheme to curry influence, pay lobbyists, apologists and European politicians and to launder cash. The $2.9bn (£2.2bn) operation ran between 2012 and 2014 – meaning that on average $3m was channelled out of Azerbaijan every day. The source of money isn’t always clear, but it comes from companies linked to Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, state ministries and the International Bank of Azerbaijan, the country’s largest bank, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection. The cash was transferred into four offshore-managed UK companies. From there, it was spent in various countries, including Germany, the UK, France, Turkey, Iran and Kazakhstan.
How was it done?
By clever use of the west’s financial system. Danske, Denmark’s largest bank, handled the payments via a small branch office in Estonia. It noticed nothing amiss. The organisers of the scheme exploited Britain’s weakly regulated company system. They registered four firms at Companies House in London. These were Hilux Services, Polux Management, Metastar Invest and LCM Alliance. The first two were incorporated in Glasgow, the third in Birmingham and the fourth in Hertfordshire. The beneficial owner of the firms is a secret. More here.
UK Companies at the heart of $2.9 billion money-laundering circle
UK failing to end its complicity in global corruption
4th September 2017, London – A new investigation has shown UK registered companies to be at the centre of laundering $2.9 billion out of Azerbaijan, highlighting that the UK is failing to end its complicity in global corruption. These funds was used to pay-off politicians, purchase luxury goods and act as a slush fund for those close to the Azeri regime using money that appears to have been stolen from the International Bank of Azerbaijan, which is currently restructuring its debt because of funding problems.
The investigation found that four UK registered companies were at the centre of this scheme and essential to its success. These four companies formed a core part of over 16,000 transactions made by the ‘Azerbaijani laundromat’ between 2012 and 2014. Although registered in the UK, previous research by Transparency International UK found that these four companies were ultimately controlled in secretive offshore havens, where the real owners of companies are hidden from public view.
In recent years successive UK governments have made promises to close the loopholes that have left the UK, and its overseas territories, complicit in the laundering of corrupt money around the world. Over two years since the Government first outlined its intention to target corrupt money flowing through the UK, many of the promises have yet to be turned into action.
All four of these companies are either Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs) and Limited Liability Partnerships – forms of company that can be controlled by secretive companies based in offshore havens like the British Virgin Islands. Although new rules rushed in earlier this year require SLPs to report who they’re ultimately controlled by, and similar rules apply to LLPs, there are growing concerns that in practice these are not being enforced effectively.
Duncan Hames, Director of Policy Transparency International UK, said:
“Knowing that UK registered companies were at the heart of a scheme that saw $2.9 billion stolen from Azerbaijan underlines just how damaging it is to be complicit in global corruption. These sums of money can be the difference between life and death for people around the world, and to know that they are instead being used to purchase luxury goods, line the pockets of corrupt politicians and improve the image of dictators, is particularly galling.”
“We are increasingly concerned that action on the promises made by successive governments to close the loopholes that make the UK attractive to money laundering, appears to have stalled. We have seen some regulatory change but it has gone from a core government mission to uncoordinated and piecemeal efforts.”
“We’re calling on the UK Government to immediately enforce new laws to end the use of British companies as the getaway vehicle for corrupt individuals and organised criminal gangs. Much more than lip service is needed to fight global corruption. If a success is to be made of Brexit, the UK must uphold the highest standards of commerce and not end-up reducing itself to an offshore centre exposed to the risk of serving corrupt and repressive regimes from across the globe.”
The UK Government is yet to deliver on its promise to introduce greater transparency around anonymous corporate ownership of luxury UK property, a key destination for laundered money, or produce a comprehensive anti-corruption strategy that sets out how it intends to end the UK’s role as a safe haven for corrupt wealth.
Notes:
The four UK companies at the heart of the Azerbaijani laundromat were Hilux Services LP, Polux Management LP, Metastar Invest LLP and LCM Alliance LLP. More details about the offshore companies controlling them are provided in the table below. Hundreds of businesses with similar secretive corporate structures are registered at the same addresses as these four companies.
photo
Gregory Peck 
Joanne Woodward
