Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Emerging Putin’s Geo Aggressions

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Putin has an inside circle and it is bid-rigging and creating wealth though fraud and collusion. Cunning, calculated, measured and well planned, Putin has a global objective. Is he stoppable beyond Syria?

Few have spoken about the national blackout, the cyber-attack on Ukraine’s power grid. If it can happen in Ukraine, it can happen in America. It must be noted who owns and controls companies with ties to infrastructure….Putin’s friends. For a chilling read, go here.

In part: In a statement announcing the sanctions, the U.S. Treasury Department alleged that Putin “has investments” with Gunvor, the oil-trading firm that Timchenko founded but exited a day before he was hit with U.S. sanctions, and “may have access to Gunvor funds.”

Washington has not released any evidence to substantiate these claims, which the Kremlin and Gunvor deny. (The firm also says CEO Torbjorn Tornqvist was in charge of daily operations.)*

Meanwhile, Navalny filed a lawsuit earlier this month accusing Putin of a conflict of interest in awarding $1.75 billion in state financing to a company part-owned by Shamalov, his alleged son-in-law. A Moscow court rejected the lawsuit, saying it did not qualify for consideration under “administrative proceedings.” Full article here.

When it comes to Crimea and most recently Ukraine, does anyone care? For a data cache on Russian aggressions on Ukraine, go here.

According to Ukrainian officials on March 1 Russia sent three trains with ammunition to the occupied city of Ilovaisk and two tanks and four armoured personnel vehicles to Novoazovsk.

NATO’s top commander says Russian military activity in eastern Ukraine is increasing. Earlier, General Philip Breedlove also warned of ‘disturbing trends’ – including more sniper fire and shelling on the frontline. The NATO leader claims Russia has placed “well above” 1,000 pieces of military hardware in Ukraine over the past 12 months. More here.

Then comes Kazakhstan, where it appears covert pro-Russian adjustments are next up for Putin and Kazakhstan is taking notice.

Reuters in part: Demographically, the region therefore has much in common with Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and the eastern Donbass region, whose majority Russian-speaking populations pulled out of Kiev’s orbit with help from Moscow.

There is no separatist rebellion in northern Kazakhstan, but the ethnic Russians, who make up more than a fifth of the country’s 18 million population, are feeling increasingly insecure and some sympathize with the separatists in Ukraine.

The Ukraine experience has made the Kazakh authorities highly sensitive to any signs of disloyalty by ethnic Russians. Ethnically based political parties are banned.

Last year, a court in eastern Kazakhstan sentenced a user of Vkontakte, a Russian-based social network, to five years in prison for posting a poll which asked people whether they would support the idea of that region, which also has a big ethnic Russian population, becoming part of Russia.

“Their bodies are in Kazakhstan but their minds are in Russia,” said political analyst Dosym Satpayev, talking about what he described as the significant portion of the Kazakh population influenced by Russian media.

“There are signs that (the authorities) in Kazakhstan are beginning to realize it also faces a separatist threat,” said Satpayev, who runs the Risk Assessment Group, a think tank.

There are no signs of Moscow promoting separatism in Kazakhstan, although it wants to keep the country in its orbit. More here.

So beyond the matter of Putin taking over Syria, then gaining power and control in Afghanistan again, there is the matter of the Arctic. Enter ICEX.

Military: The U.S. Navy’s submarine force is setting up a temporary command center on a sheet of Arctic ice, where U.S. underwater capabilities will be put to the test in the increasingly strategic High North.


The five-week submarine drill coincides with separate war games in Norway called Cold Response involving 16,000 U.S. and NATO forces. Marines have been launching stinger missiles and maneuvering tanks, and the Air Force has dispatched three B-52 Stratofortress bombers.
Together, the exercises underscore the emergence of the Arctic as an area of concern as melting ice caps raise the prospects for competition over vital undersea natural resources. The area could become a flash point between the U.S. and Russia.


“The Arctic environment plays a key role in national defense,” said U.S. Submarine Forces commander Vice Adm. Joseph E. Tofalo in a statement announcing the launch of Ice Exercise 2016. “With over a thousand miles of Arctic coastline, the U.S. has strong national security and homeland defense interests in the region.”


Then ICEX drill, which is being conducted in the Arctic Ocean, aims to evaluate the terrain and assess the readiness of U.S. submarines operating under ice. It does not explicitly address concerns of a growing Russian military presence.
Still, Russian activity in the High North has grabbed the attention of top U.S. military commanders.
“We are facing a very challenging situation in the Arctic,” European Command’s Gen. Philip Breedlove told lawmakers last week. “Many of our NATO allies, Canada and the U.S. are concerned about what we see as the militarization of the Arctic now by Russia.”
Since 2008, Russia has been steadily upgrading its forces in the Arctic: reopening air bases, restoring air-defense radar stations and building new submarines. The moves are all in response to new security challenges brought on by melting ice and the prospect of new shipping lanes.
Moscow’s actions reflect a focus on “goals beyond the Arctic region,” the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a recent report examining Russian military capabilities and intentions in the region. More here.

Is there some negotiating or new deal that can stop Putin? Anyone?

 

 

 

Boeing Secret Deals with Iran, Skirting Sanctions

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Why Boeing kept Iran dealings under the radar

Author: Saam Borhani

alMonitor: Barely a week after the Jan. 16 lifting of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Tehran hosted its first international business summit in years. The event, sponsored by the Centre for Aviation (CAPA), brought together 400 executives of the global aviation industry to re-establish links with their Iranian counterparts after a decades-long estrangement. What raised eyebrows in Tehran and Washington, however, was the conspicuous absence of Boeing, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer. Boeing’s curious decision to skip the CAPA event raised questions about the United States’ commitment to the sanctions relief mandated under the July 14, 2015, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The decision Boeing made to stay home, likely prompted by unease as to the confusing web of remaining US sanctions, is a harbinger of things to come for the delicate dance between Iran and American business.

It turns out that Boeing, while skipping the high-profile CAPA event in Tehran, has actually been unofficially negotiating behind the scenes with Iranian civil aviation officials for a considerable time. Indeed, weeks after European rival Airbus signed a multibillion dollar deal for 118 passenger jets with Iran, Washington finally gave the go-ahead for Boeing to begin official negotiations and to apply for special licenses to sell aircraft to the Iranians.

As the world cashes in on an Iran ready to do business, the United States risks being late to the game because of a mixture of political sensitivities, confusion about the remaining American sanctions and structural impediments that make trading with Iran prohibitively risky for all but the most adept American companies.

American trade with Iran is known to attract seething headlines in both countries. A simple form on McDonald’s website about franchise opportunities in Iran last year prompted warnings of an impending cultural invasion of the country in the Iranian right-wing media. Similarly, US companies risk the wrath of special interest groups devoted to inflicting reputational damage because of trade with Iran. Halliburton and Hewlett-Packard are prominent examples of companies that have been attacked in the American media for previous legal business relations with Iran.

Groups such as United Against a Nuclear Iran have also been successful in convincing around half of the state legislatures to pass measures punishing companies operating in Iran. These local laws have directed state pension funds with billions of dollars in assets to divest from targeted companies and sometimes have barred these companies from public contracts. The impact of these state “sanctions” on the JCPOA is not clear and may yet prompt a political and legal battle between the federal government and state officials. Indeed, the harm to the reputations of US companies by such local punitive measures is a strong deterrent to engaging with the Iranian consumer. It is also an issue that is likely to continue, as long as Iran remains listed as a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department.

For American companies large enough to weather bad publicity, the remaining and now largely unilateral US sanctions on Iran represent a potentially costly minefield. The JCPOA allows for licensed sales of American airliners to Iran and the legal importation of Iranian foodstuffs and rugs. Besides these specific carve-outs, US companies may trade with Iran under the general licenses that were available before the JCPOA and under specific licenses granted by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Treasury Department’s sanctions administrator. In addition, foreign subsidiaries of US companies that are not under the control and direction of US persons may trade directly with Iran. Maintaining a robust compliance system and routinely checking company interactions with Iran to make sure that they do not run afoul of OFAC regulations is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Indeed, any American company that trades with Iran under the terms of the JCPOA, and especially under the complicated foreign subsidiary clause, must be large enough to support sufficiently adept legal compliance teams. Small and medium-size US businesses are thus effectively shut out of a presence in Iran for this very reason.

For the large multinational American companies that may be able to gain a foothold in Iran, there remain structural constraints that residual US sanctions place on legal trade with Iran. The United States has made it clear that no payments linked to Iran may be processed through its financial system. This means that profits made by American businesses in Iran will likely not be able to be directly repatriated and probably will remain offshore in segregated foreign accounts. American companies must also contend with strict bars on doing business with any Iranian entities that remain on OFAC’s “specially designated nationals” list, the Iranian government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Each of these barred entities took over vast parts of the Iranian economy as a result of the international sanctions that have now been lifted.

The JCPOA has opened small opportunities for trade between American and Iranian firms. However, the remaining labyrinth of hard-to-understand restrictions will likely spook most Americans.

Both the Iranian and US governments have a vital interest in seeing that the JCPOA is an enduring agreement — and this partly depends on sanctions relief benefiting Iranian and American private sectors in a way that would effectuate the “buy-in” of JCPOA skeptics. A mutually beneficial trading arrangement that connects the private sectors of the United States and Iran — despite political differences — would strengthen the nuclear deal by attaching a direct economic cost to nonadherence. The limited avenues for legal trade, if quickly institutionalized, can be insulated from the historically volatile political relationship between Iran and the United States.

In this vein, a quiet Iranian commitment to protect American investors in Iran and to tone down the harshest anti-US rhetoric, at least with respect to American business, would give space for Wall Street to influence a change in Washington’s largely monolithic view of a hostile Iran. More importantly, a quiet US commitment to actively support legal trade with Iran — with the same zeal that it uses to enforce sanctions — would give the Iranians space to consider future negotiated compromises.

 

Report for California, What About your State?

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Golfing, tequila and spa treatments: These are the gifts given to California lawmakers in 2015

LATimes: State legislators accepted more than $892,000 in gifts last year, including foreign trips, expensive dinners, concert and sports tickets, golf games, spa treatments, Disneyland admissions and bottles of tequila and wine, according to filings released Wednesday.

Lawmakers had their expenses covered by others for educational and trade trips to France, China, Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico and Israel.

 

In fact, travel costs dominate the gift tallies from last year with a large number of lawmakers deciding to fly overseas for conferences or policy meetings paid for entirely by influential interest groups and foundations.

The travel included 21 lawmakers who attended a conference in Maui in November at a cost of about $3,000 per person, paid for by a nonprofit group funded by oil and tobacco firms and other interests lobbying the Legislature.

The flood of gifts, especially from groups tied to interests seeking favorable treatment at the Capitol, raises red flags for ethics experts including Bob Stern, former general counsel for the Fair Political Practices Commission and a co-author of the state Political Reform Act.

“The people that make these gifts are trying to influence legislators and create goodwill, and clearly it does,” Stern said. “The average citizen doesn’t get these gifts. It’s only when you are in a position of power that you get these gifts.”

The total value of gifts is up by about $50,000 from 2014. A group with interest in promoting climate change policy helped send a large delegation of legislators led by Gov. Jerry Brown to a United Nations summit on climate change held in Paris in December.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) had $4,077 of his travel expenses to Paris covered by the Climate Action Reserve, which advocates for solutions to climate change.

In all, De León received $30,200 in gifts, among the most of any lawmaker. Much of it was for educational trips to Japan, Mexico and Australia.

The $14,055 cost for de Leon’s Australian trip to look for drought solutions was covered by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy, a San Francisco think tank financed by special interests including PG&E, Shell, the State Building and Construction Trades Council and Chevron.

Claire Conlon, a spokeswoman for De León, defended both the travel and the way it is financed.

“As elected representatives of the world’s seventh-largest economy and a gateway to international trade corridors, building global relationships and studying best practices in other countries is an essential part of the job description,” she said. The funding arrangements with “respected nonprofits” mean “not a single taxpayer dollar is being spent,” she added.

De León also reported gifts of USC football tickets, bottles of tequila, meals and a tie. The disclosure forms that lawmakers must file annually do not require detailed descriptions of the gifts, so there is no way to know the brand of tequila or color of the tie.

Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) reported receiving $37,900 in gifts, the most of any lawmaker, much of it to cover the cost of educational trips to China and Argentina.

“I represent a diverse coastal district with thousands of globally focused employers creating good jobs for our local economy,” Allen said. “The trips involved important public policy, environmental, economic and cultural exchanges, and I was honored to serve as part of these educational legislative delegations. Not a single taxpayer dollar was spent, and I fully reported and disclosed all such travel.”

Sen. Anthony Cannella (R-Ceres) reported $31,100 in gifts, including expenses for trips to Singapore and Australia. He also received more than $1,100 in green fees for golf paid for by supporters including the prison guards union and the California Independent Petroleum Assn.

A spa treatment, costing $396, was provided to Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) by the Legislative Black Caucus.

In the Assembly, Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) received the most gifts, $33,832 worth and mostly involving overseas travel. Her $17,000 trip to Taiwan was paid for by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Foundation and her $14,348 trip to Australia with De León was covered by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy.

Evan Low (D-Campbell) received more than $31,000 in gifts, including a trip to China paid for by a group called U.S.-Asia Innovative Gateway, and a trip to Newport Beach paid for by the California Independent Petroleum Assn. He also received a $287 ticket to a Giants baseball game from PG&E.

Many of the gifts received by lawmakers would have been prohibited by legislation the governor vetoed two years ago. The bill would have banned nontravel gifts over $200, and barred tickets to amusement parks, professional sports games and concerts, as well as green fees for golf.

The public can read each legislator’s gift report on the FPPC website.

In vetoing the gifts bill, Brown wrote that it would be “adding further complexity without commensurate benefit. Proper disclosure, as already provided by the law, should be sufficient to guard against undue influence.”

The size of some of the gifts received last year troubled Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor and president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission.

“It’s fair to ask public officials to forgo gifts over certain thresholds,” she said.

A new bill proposes to outlaw travel gifts like the annual Maui convention put on by the Independent Voter Project, which received financing for the event from groups including the Western State Petroleum Assn., Shell Oil, Sempra, tobacco giant Altria, AT&T, the California Cable and Telecommunications Assn. and Koch Industries.

Many event sponsors send lobbyists or representatives to rub elbows with the elected officials poolside or on the golf course.

When Sharia/ISIS Goes Capitalist and Trading

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Islamic State ‘earning millions by playing the stock market’

Group using cash looted from banks in Mosul to speculate on international currency markets

Telegraph: Isil is making millions of dollars for its war chest by playing foreign currency markets under the noses of bank chiefs, it was revealed today.

The terror group is earning up to $20m (£14.29m) a month by funnelling dollars looted from banks during its takeover of the Iraqi city of Mosul into legitimate currency markets in the Middle East.

It then makes huge returns on currency speculation, which are then wired back via unsuspecting financial authorities in Iraq and Jordan, a parliamentary committee was told on Wednesday.

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (Isil) extraordinary venture into white collar crime is now a major source of income, along with oil smuggling and extortion from people living in Isil-controlled areas.

Details of the scam emerged during a hearing of a specially-convened Foreign Affairs sub-committee set up to examine Britain’s role in Isil financing.

The hearing was told that Isil finance chiefs would play the international stock markets using cash looted during their 2014 take over of Mosul, in which the group got its hands on an estimated $429m from the city’s central bank.

They also used money “siphoned off” from pension payments that are still being made by the Iraqi government to civil servants living in the city.

The details were revealed to the hearing by John Baron, the sub-committee’s chair, who demanded to know whether the British government – which has pledged to help cut off Isil’s finance networks – was taking proper action against it.

“The cash that Isil has looted, along with siphoned off pension payments, is routed into Jordanian banks and brought back into the system via Baghdad,” he said. “That allows the system to be exploited by Isil, in that they take a turn (profit) on the foreign currency actions and siphon that cash back.”

The profits were channeled back into Isil coffers by “hawala” transfers, an unregulated system of money transfer whereby cash payments are made via agents in one country after a similar amount is presented as collateral in another.

Infographic: How Does ISIS Fund Itself? | Statista

Tobias Ellwood, a junior Foreign Office minister, admitted to the committee that there was a “porousness” in the local financial system but said that work was now underway to shut it down. It had been done without the active connivance of bank staff, he added.

In December, the Central Bank of Iraq named 142 currency-exchange houses in Iraq that the US suspected of moving funds for Islamic State. It banned them from its twice-monthly dollar auctions in a bid to stop the terror group getting its hands on the cash – a main source of exchange in war-torn Iraq.

But Mr Ellwood conceded: “Iraq could have moved faster on this”. Asked if the similar moves had been made in Jordan, he said he was unable to give an answer.

“Jordan plays an important role in the (anti-Isis) coalition,” he added. “Work is being done to close it down, I don’t think there is anything near as much from that source of revenue as before.”

The committee heard claims that Isil’s “rake off” from foreign currency speculation was a “significant part of their income stream”, although Mr Ellwood said he thought that estimates of $20m were excessive.

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Spiegel: Some members of the intelligence community even view spying in the global financial system with a certain amount of concern, as revealed by a document from the NSA’s British counterpart — the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — that deals with “financial data” from a legal perspective and examines the organization’s own collaboration with the NSA. According to the document, the collection, storage and sharing of “politically sensitive” data is a highly invasive measure since it includes “bulk data — rich personal information. A lot of it is not about our targets.”

Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial database Tracfin, which collects the “Follow the Money” surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers, already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in 2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin data is stored for five years.

Monitoring SWIFT

The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. What’s more, even new, alternative currencies, as well as presumably anonymous means of payment like the Internet currency Bitcoin, rank among the targets of the American spies.

The collected information often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury’s blacklist.

In one case, the NSA provided proof that a bank was involved in illegal arms trading — in another case, a financial institution was providing support to an authoritarian African regime. Full article here.

Freed Dealer, Obama Released, Kills 3

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Crack Dealer Freed Early Under Obama Plan Murders Woman, 2 Kids

JW: A convicted crack dealer who left prison early as part of the Obama administration’s mass release of federal inmates has been indicted by a grand jury for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend and her two kids in Columbus, Ohio. The gory crime drew national attention because the children, ages 7 and 10, were murdered to eliminate them as witnesses in the brutal massacre of their 32-year-old mother.

This week a grand jury in Franklin County returned a 10-count, death-penalty indictment against the ex-con, 35-year-old Wendell Callahan, for the triple murders. Callahan broke into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and stabbed the three victims, according to a statement issued by Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien announcing the indictment. The bloody crime scene was discovered by the woman’s current boyfriend, who subsequently engaged in a fight with Callahan before he fled. The indictment includes charges of aggravated murder with prior calculation and design and aggravated murder of victims under the age of 13. “There are multiple charges regarding the three victim deaths because there are different methods to commit the crime of murder and the Prosecutor’s Office typically charges all methods”, O’Brien stated. Callahan is in jail on $3 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned later this week.

Callahan should have been in jail when the crimes occurred, but he was released four years early because federal sentencing guidelines for crack dealers got reduced. The change is part of President Obama’s effort to reform the nation’s justice system as a way of ending racial discrimination. The initiative was technically launched back in 2010 when the president signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made it retroactive, leading to the early release of thousands of violent thugs like Callahan.

In November the administration began releasing 6,000 drug convicts coined “non-violent” offenders whose sentences were too long under the old guidelines. News reports quickly surfaced contradicting the administration’s assessment that the newly released convicts were not violent. Among them was the leader of a multi-million dollar operation that smuggled drugs from Canada to Maine. Prosecutors refer to the 29-year-old con as a “drug kingpin” who was one of “America’s Most Wanted.” Shortly before the administration’s mass release of drug convicts, federal prosecutors warned that drug trafficking is inherently violent and therefore the phrase “non-violent drug offenders” is a misnomer. The nation’s prosecutors also cautioned that reducing prison sentences for drug offenders will weaken their ability to bring dangerous drug traffickers to justice.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the administration is rewarding thousands of criminals with get-out-of-jail cards, huge amounts of taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs to help them find housing and jobs. In the aftermath of the mass release of federal prisoners Judicial Watch reported on two “re-entry” programs to ease the transition from jail. One received $1.7 million and ordered public housing facilities not to reject tenants with criminal records. The other allocated $20 million to the Department of Labor (DOL) to help ex-cons find work and thus end the “cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration.”

More here including photos.

Hillary calls for sentencing reform too.

This all began in 2013 between Obama and Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch continues to carry the baton.

VOA: WASHINGTON— U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced a major shift in how the federal government plans to prosecute nonviolent criminals involved in drug crimes, with the aim of easing overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.

Holder outlined several policy changes in a speech to the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco.

The attorney general said too many Americans go to prison for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason.  His main focus was low-level drug crimes that can often bring minimum mandatory sentences of five or 10 years in prison.

Holder says the federal government will now follow the lead of several states that emphasize drug treatment and community service programs as alternatives for non-violent drug offenders who are not associated with criminal gangs or drug cartels.

“Widespread incarceration at the federal, state and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable,” he said. “It imposes a significant economic burden totalling $80 billion in 2010 alone and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.”