Category Archives: Whistleblower

Panama Papers Snares Another Clinton Tax Haven?

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First the Panama Papers revealed the Podesta Group. John and Tony Podesta, the founders have connections to a Russian bank which is blacklisted. John Podesta is the architect of the Hillary presidential campaign.

  John Podesta, a real operative in the White House for years.

John Podesta was an Obama advisor and upon leaving that role, he said his greatest regret not revealing more about UFO’s. Sheesh…

The mailman must be real busy and overworked at the address below.

This Delaware Address Is Home to 200,000 Shell Companies—Including Hillary Clinton’s

In wake of ‘Panama Papers’ scandal, renewed interest in tax avoidance efforts

FreeBeacon: The address “1209 North Orange Street” in Wilmington, Del., has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.

In the wake of the recent “Panama Papers” scandal, this unassuming brick office has received renewed scrutiny from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and advocates for corporate tax reform.

But one of its tenants may come as a surprise—a company owned by Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.

According to records, one of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.

Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.

The “1209 North Orange Street” building is the headquarters for the Corporation Trust Company. The firm acts as a registered agent for thousands of corporations that are not actually located in Delaware, including the Clintons’ companies.

Anti-secrecy advocates say the building is prime evidence that Delaware has become a corporate haven that’s comparable to more well-known, offshore locales.

“If you imagined a building with 1,000 corporations in it, you’d imagine a building like the Empire State building,” said Richard Phillips, a senior policy analyst with Citizens for Tax Justice. “But apparently 285,000 companies claim [1209 North Orange Street] is their address.”

“What this shows is this is not really the address of companies that are doing real business. This is the address of a lot of companies that are just shell companies,” he added. “In this case, it doesn’t even look like they have mailboxes. They just claim that address as the places they’re doing business, even though they’re not doing business there.”

Similar registered agents have come under scrutiny in recent years. While campaigning in 2008, President Obama slammed the “Ugland House,” a five-story building in the Cayman Islands that is reportedly home to over 18,000 companies.

“That’s either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record,” said Obama.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment on why the Clintons, who live in New York and have no evident residential ties to Delaware, set up companies in the state. But the presidential candidate isn’t alone. Experts say Delaware is the most popular place to register a company in the United States, due in part to its established system of business case law and tax incentives for intellectual property and real estate holdings.

One of the biggest draws may be the state’s lack of disclosure requirements—businesses can be created completely anonymously, allowing the owners to avoid public detection and even hide income from U.S. authorities.

According to advocates for corporate tax reform, Delaware’s laws rival well-known secrecy havens like the Cayman Islands and Panama.

“General secrecy laws and the ability of these corporations to hide the identities of those who own it, that’s what makes [Delaware] an onshore tax haven, and that’s what makes it just as bad as the Cayman Islands,” said Phillips.

Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”

The Clinton Foundation also has three shell companies in Delaware, according to its amended financial disclosures released last year.

One is the Acceso Fund, LLC, which was registered by the Corporation Trust Company at 1209 North Orange Street in 2009. The Clinton Foundation has used the company to channel money to its Colombia-based private equity fund, Fondo Acceso.

The private equity fund, which is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, has invested in telecom and food processing companies in Colombia, the Free Beacon reported last November.

Another Clinton Foundation company, Acceso Worldwide Fund, Inc., was registered in 2013 by the Corporation Services Company, located in Wilmington, Delaware.

A third company, the Haiti Development Fund, LLC, was registered in 2010 by National Corporate Research, Ltd, located in Dover.

In Delaware, limited liability companies such as WJC, LLC, and ZFS, LLC, are not required to file annual statements disclosing their directors or owners. The Clintons also registered both companies in New York after they were established.

There is no evidence the Clintons are using the entities for any nefarious purposes, and it is perfectly legal for non-residents to set up corporations in Delaware. But even if corporations stay within the law, critics say Delaware shell companies can sometimes be used to legally circumvent taxes in other states.

According to a report published last December by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Delaware’s popularity as a hub for shell companies is “responsible for the loss of billions of dollars in revenue in other U.S. states.”

“It’s legal tax avoidance,” said Phillips. “We would say it’s immoral, or not the best thing for the country.”

Anti-secrecy advocates also say the laws make it easier for criminals to evade federal taxes or finance terrorism, all under the radar of the public and U.S. authorities.

“Some anonymous shell companies have financed terrorism and supported corruption and human trafficking and Delaware is a traditional hub for creating these fake companies,” said Andrew Hanauer, campaign director at the Jubilee USA Network.

Jubilee USA Network and other groups have been advocating for legislative reform. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), and Rep. Carolyn Maloney recently put forward legislation that would force U.S. companies to disclose their actual owners.

The Clinton campaign did comment on whether Hillary Clinton supports the legislation. The campaign also did not comment on whether she or Bill Clinton have any other companies registered in Delaware.

But the concerns over corporate secrecy and tax avoidance have trickled into the Democratic presidential race, with Sen. Bernie Sanders incorporating it into his stump speeches. Clinton has also railed against tax havens on the trail and vowed to take action.

“Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,” said Clinton during a campaign event last Wednesday.

“Now some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and anyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable,” she added. “But it’s also scandalous how much is actually legal.”

Recall the Chatter About Being Prosecuted as a Climate Changer Denier?

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The standing is being set for this to happen. How did we get here?

Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming

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Bloomberg: The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”

My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.

(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”

That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.

State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the game away when he explained that they would be pursuing completely different theories in different jurisdictions — some under pension laws, some consumer protection, some securities fraud. It is traditional, when a crime has actually been committed, to first establish that a crime has occurred, and then identify a perpetrator. When prosecutors start running that process backwards, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re looking at prosecutorial power run amok.

And that approaches certainty when attorneys general start sending subpoenas to think tanks  that ExxonMobil might have supported. What exactly would the subpoena prove? That ExxonMobil supported opinions about climate change? That the opinions tended to be congruent with its own interests? That this opinion might have been wrong, and if so, might have encouraged wrong beliefs in others? This is a description of, roughly, every person or organization in the history of the world, not excluding attorneys general. It’s also not illegal. Especially since, as the New York Times points out, “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology.” This isn’t preventing consumers from buying into a Ponzi scheme; it’s an attempt to criminalize advocacy.

I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.

But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.

Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)

Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.

The enemies of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil should hold their applause. In a liberal democracy, every guerrilla tactic your side invents will eventually be used against you. Imagine a coalition of Republican attorneys general announcing an investigation of companies that have threatened state boycotts over gay-rights issues, and you may get a sense of why this is not such a good precedent to set.

The rule of law, and our norms about free speech, represent a sort of truce between both sides. We all agree to let other people talk, because we don’t want to live in a world where we ourselves are not free to speak. Because we do not want to be silenced by an ambitious prosecutor, we should all be vigilant when ambitious prosecutors try to silence anyone else.

He Did it, He Turned Over the Fast and Furious Documents

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  Maybe the whistleblowers will receive some vindication like Sharyl Attkisson.

Obama relents in fight over Fast and Furious documents

Politico: Four years after asserting executive privilege to block Congress from obtaining documents relating to a controversial federal gun trafficking investigation, President Barack Obama relented Friday, turning over to lawmakers thousands of pages of records that led to unusual House votes holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.

In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama’s privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration’s drive to keep the records secret.

Both sides had until midnight Friday to file an appeal. Instead, the Obama administration turned over a set of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“In light of the passage of time and other considerations, such as the Department’s interest in moving past this litigation and building upon our cooperative working relationship with the Committee and other Congressional committees, the Department has decided that it is not in the Executive Branch’s interest to continue litigating this issue at this time,” Justice Deparment legislative liaison Peter Kadzik wrote in a letter Friday to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush confirmed that the administration does not plan to appeal. He argued that Jackson’s ruling validated Obama’s initial claim of privilege.

“The Department of Justice is pleased that the district court … continued to recognize that the deliberative process component of the executive privilege exists and was a valid basis for the Department to withhold certain documents when requested by the House in 2011. Although the Department disagrees with the district court’s conclusion that the privilege was overcome in this particular case by disclosures and statements made in other contexts, the Department has decided not to appeal the court’s judgment and has provided a production of documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,” Rodenbush said in a statement.

While the House largely won in the January decision, it did file an appeal earlier Friday afternoon, apparently unaware of the administration’s plans to comply with the judge’s order. The appeal suggested that House leaders were dissatisfied with aspects of Jackson’s rulings that narrowed the set of documents the administration had to turn over.

“As we’ve long asserted, the Committee requires and is entitled to these documents,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “They are critical to the Committee’s efforts to complete meaningful oversight. The Committee has a duty to understand and shine light on what was happening inside DOJ during the time of this irresponsible operation. Yet DOJ has obstructed our investigative work for years.”

After getting word that the Justice Department was turning over records, Chaffetz updated his statement, indicating that the House plans to press its appeal to get records beyond the ones the administration is providing.

“Today, under court order, DOJ turned over some of the subpoenaed documents. The Committee, however, is entitled to the full range of documents for which it brought this lawsuit. Accordingly, we have appealed the District Court’s ruling in order to secure those additional documents,” Chaffetz said.

Guns sold by dealers or informants used in the ATF operation wound up at numerous crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. In December 2010, two of the weapons were found at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

Obama’s privilege claim in the Fast and Furious fight was broad-ranging, seeking to cover not only internal deliberations about how to respond to congressional inquiries but also discussions about media strategy related to the congressional probes.

The June 2012 claim in the Fast and Furious case was the only formal assertion of executive privilege by Obama to try to defeat a congressional demand for records or testimony, though the administration has raised executive privilege concerns when declining to comply with other congressional inquiries. Most of those were resolved through negotiations. The administration has also asserted executive privilege in response to a variety of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

 

 

 

 

 

The Rally General Mattis Movement

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Ever wonder how the real political machinery works? While everyone is focused on Cleveland, the delegate count and accusations of lies, there is much more. Have you thought about those who have dropped out of the race? What is Jeb Bush or Rick Santorum or Bobby Jindal doing for this race? Everyone is fretting over a brokered convention and Paul Ryan but there is more going on.

Has anyone thought about the ‘why’ against Trump and affects to the Senate? What about that person who is the fresh face or a VP in the mix?

The Secret Movement to Draft General James Mattis for President

Gen. James Mattis doesn’t necessarily want to be president—but that’s not stopping a group of billionaire donors from hatching a plan to get him there.

Mak/DailyBeast: An anonymous group of conservative billionaires is ready to place their bets on a man dubbed “Mad Dog,” hoping to draft him into the presidential race to confront Donald Trump.

Think of it as a Plan B should Trump be nominated by the Republican Party in Cleveland: swing behind retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis and press him into service yet again as a third-party candidate.

Mattis is the former commander of Central Command, which includes the strife-afflicted conflict zones of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, and has developed a reputation among troops as a general officer who cares about the little guy. This reputation blossomed into the political realm during the 2012 presidential contest, when a Marine Corps veteran started an online campaign to write-in Mattis on presidential ballots—it ultimately lacked the backing to take off.

But this situation involves far bigger players: Close to a dozen influential donors—involving politically-involved billionaires with deep pockets and conservative leanings—are ready to put their resources behind Mattis. At their request, a small group of political operatives have taken the first steps in the strategic legwork needed for a bid: a package of six strategic memos outlining how Mattis could win the race, in hopes of coaxing him in.

The general has received the package of memos, according to two individuals involved with the project.

Mattis, who is also nicknamed the “warrior monk” for his contemplative devotion to the military arts, would be a fallback option for anti-Trump forces. But since the next series of GOP nomination contests heavily favor Trump, this is not exactly a fantasy scenario.

“Everyone is hoping that Ted Cruz pulls it out, but I think a great deal of Republicans would rally behind an American hero if the choice is between Mattis and Trump,” said John Noonan, a former Jeb Bush aide now involved in the project to draft Mattis.

“He’s a man of character and integrity. He’s given his life to his country. How do you ask someone like that to leap headfirst into this toxic mud-puddle of a race? It’s damn hard. But Trump is a fascist lunatic and Hillary has one foot in a jail cell. That means the lunatic can win. I’d be first in line to plead with the general to come save America,” Noonan added.

The strategy would not be for Mattis to win, at least at first—the operatives behind this potential bid would only be seeking to deny Trump and Clinton the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the general election outright. And there is also the incredible logistical challenge of getting Mattis on the ballot in a large number of states.

 

“The process is actually quite simple, but it’s difficult,” one of the strategists concedes in a memo, and the chances of Mattis winning the White House outright as a third-party candidate are “very low.” But if the retired military officer could win several states won by President Obama in 2012, they might be able to block Clinton, thus forcing the incoming House of Representatives to make a decision on the next president of the United States.

With the House split, the strategists reason, Mattis could be the consensus choice.

“The theme of 2016 is ‘all bets are off’ and this is a cycle where the unexpected has become the defining characteristic of this election,” said strategist Rick Wilson, who is also involved in the project. “In a moment when American politics on the left and right has been upended, and where the frontrunners of both parties are compromised, the time may be upon us where a uniquely qualified, and uniquely credible third-party alternative like General Mattis can take the stage.”

Another limiting factor is Mattis himself, who is disinclined to run. These strategists hope he could change his mind if he were to feel compelled to serve his country.

Those close to him are skeptical that his mind could be changed.

“It is difficult—if not impossible—to see him accepting being drafted,” said a source close to Mattis.

Still, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol poured fuel onto the fire Feb. 22, after Trump victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Speaking at a fundraiser for the Hoover Institute, where Mattis is a visiting fellow, Kristol suggested—perhaps jokingly—that the former four-star general might be conscripted into the race.

“No way!” shouted back a jocular Mattis, from the audience.

Mattis, who declined to speak with The Daily Beast, has previously suggested that he could not endure the political correctness required to be a contender for the White House. But given Trump’s myriad controversies, this may not be a problem this year.

“I’ve lived a very colorful life and I’ve said some things,” Mattis told an audience last year, according to the Marine Corps Times. “But not once have I taken them back, and I’ve never apologized for them—and I won’t. I like the enemy knowing there are a few guys like me around.”

The pro-Mattis donors, who want to stay anonymous for the time being, have assembled a core group of seven political operatives, led by Joel Searby, a Republican consultant based in Florida. The group of strategists also includes lead attorney Mohammad Jazil; ballot access specialist Matthew Sawyer; and former George W. Bush pollster Jan Lohuizen, along with a finance team and a “top firm” that has been secured to lead the ballot access petition gathering, members of the team tell The Daily Beast.

Wilson and Noonan co-authored a memo on how Mattis might capitalize on the current media environment, arguing that Trump’s “fake-macho act falls apart” before a bona fide American hero like Mattis. The general’s overall bearing “immediately blows a hole into the central narrative of Trump: his toughness,” they argue in a memo obtained by The Daily Beast. “[A]nd the drama of watching it fall apart under fire would be amazing television.”

Comparing him to President Dwight Eisenhower, the memo concludes that Mattis has “all the iconoclastic, authentic style of non-politician Trump—and all the serious government service credibility of Hillary Clinton.”

Some conservatives, disgusted with Trump’s candidacy, have already warmed to the idea of a run by Mattis—including conservative commentators Erick Erickson and Kristol.

Kristol told The Daily Beast that he had “huge respect and admiration” for Mattis—and Gen. John Kelly, another high-ranking general.

“I don’t know whether they’re ideally suited for the presidency,” he said. “But I do know they’re a hell of a lot more suited for it than Donald Trump.”

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Sabato: Trump Shifts Six Senate Races Toward Democrats

TWS: The rise of Donald Trump and the general “polarization” of politics have pushed six Senate seats toward the Democrats, according to Larry Sabato and his “Crystal Ball” forecast.

Sabato’s updated forecast bodes particularly ill for Sens. Rob Portman and Pat Toomey, Republicans who are defending their turf in major purple states. Because there is a strong correlation between the success of a presidential candidate and Senate hopefuls of the same party, Sabato argues that the GOP could endanger itself if it nominates a general election candidate unpalatable to the general public.

“Considering the rise of Donald Trump, the polarization in U.S. politics, and a higher rate of straight-ticket voting, this could be bad news for the GOP,” Sabato writes.

“Assuming the GOP nominee for the White House is either Trump or Ted Cruz, we think the Democrats will fare reasonably well down-ballot (more so with Trump than Cruz, though Cruz will also have a difficult time carrying many swing states).”

Portman and Toomey’s seats are now rated as “toss-ups”, a move from “leans Republican”. Sens. Roy Blunt and Richard Burr are now just slight favorites. And even Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa institution and chairman of the committee that oversees judicial nominations, is no longer a sure bet to win a seventh term, though his shift from “safe” to “likely” reelection was made “mostly out of an abundance of caution”, Sabato writes. Grassley has won more than 60 percent of the vote in his five reelection campaigns.

The only seat currently held by Democrats that was reevaluated belongs to Coloradan Michael Bennet. That race moves from “leans Democratic” to “likely Democratic”.

Republicans currently hold the Senate with 54 seats. However, of the 34 Senate races being contested in 2016, Republicans are playing defense in 24 of them.

 

 

It Continues, Panama Papers Proves the Elite’s Dark World

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Panama Papers: How German Biz May Have Empowered Venezuela to Forge Passports for Hezbollah

Hezbollah Israel threats

Getty Images

The massive legal firm data leak known as the Panama Papers have exposed business dealings that allowed the government of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez to use Cuban money to purchase advanced passport technology from Germany. Venezuela would later be accused of falsifying passports for Hezbollah terrorists.

Breitbart: The revelation surfaced as part of the 11.5 million documents leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, later handed over for aid in analysis to a number of journalistic outlets, most prominently the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ has set up a website to help parse the information in these documents, and one website specifically for the revelations surfacing on the government of Venezuela.

It is there that the ICIJ has revealed in a Spanish-language report that Mossack Fonseca helped the governments of Cuba and Venezuela establish a shell corporation to engage a German technology company to buy state-of-the-art passport printing technology.

According to the report, late dictator Hugo Chávez established a project in 2005 to update the Venezuelan passport system, which would first require identifying a seller of the appropriate technology to approach. Venezuela, then as now, enjoying patronage from the government in Havana, would use Cuban money to buy the new technology. This made the purchase much more difficult, as few respectable corporations would feel comfortable doing business with the communist dictatorship.

Venezuela found a vendor: the German company Bundesdrukerei. In an email surfacing as part of the Panama Papers, a representative of that corporation makes clear: “the fundamental reason why this company does not want to sell to Cuba and Venezuela directly is because of the reputational issue. They fear their competition will create adversarial propaganda against them for selling to totalitarian governments.”

Mossack Fonseca then stepped in to design an elaborate currency exchange system to disassociate Cuba with the funding, a system known in Latin America as a “financial bicycle,” because the money is peddled through so many different currencies as to render its origins barely recognizable. Many corporations use this system to generate income, switching into cheaper currencies with higher interest rates and waiting for the money to grow before returning the money to its original form. In this case, Mossack Fonseca cycled the money through the currencies of at least four countries in addition to Cuba and Venezuela, then put the money in a shell corporation: Billingsley Global Corp. Billingsley bought the technology after receiving an influx of 64 million euros.

Venezuela got its passports, and Cuba retained the right to access and control the software that creates the passports.

Like most of the known revelations in the Pentagon Papers, this exchange is of questionable legality at worst, completely acceptable for a global banking lawyer at best. What makes this particular discovery notable is the years of evidence mounting that Venezuela and Cuba used the Venezuelan passport system to fabricate false documents for Hezbollah terrorists.

A 2015 report estimated that the government of Venezuela has issued over 500 passports to members of the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah. The terrorists would then use the passports to travel more freely through the Western Hemisphere, as their real identities and nationalities would trigger more thorough investigations into their backgrounds. Spanish reporter Emili Blasco found evidence that current Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2007 to discuss an agreement for distributing the fake passports.

A former diplomat in Venezuela’s Baghdad embassy, Misael López Soto, testified before fleeing the embassy in a video posted online that he was forced to flee after receiving multiple death threats for attempting to notify Caracas that his embassy was distributing dozens of falsified birth certificates, passports, and other government documents to known members of Hezbollah. The terrorists would pay between $5000 and S15000 for each document.

A report in February at the UK-based Asharq Al-Awsat cited a former Venezuelan diplomat as alleging that a “Cuban company” had made an agreement with Venezuela to issue the contracts. No details were provided, but such an agreement fits the Panama Papers description of the incident.

The governments of either nation have yet to remark on this particular allegation.

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The Dark Art World, remember the movie the Monuments Men? Seems the art that was looted but some was never recovered or was it?

This is a long yet quite detailed summary of the art world where owner’s names are never mentioned or buried in layers of obscure companies all performed by the Mossack Fonseca law firm. Below are but a few paragraphs. To read the whole summary, go here.

  • Panama Papers provides unprecedented look at connection between international art trade and offshore secrecy
  • Billionaire art dealers use offshore company to shield painting allegedly looted by Nazis
  • Identity revealed of the man secretly behind the 20th century’s most important modern art auction

ICIJ in part: When high-dollar art changes hands, it often lands in a free trade zone known as a freeport. As long as art is housed in the freeport, owners pay no import taxes or duties. Critics worry the freeport system can be used to dodge tax or launder money since precise inventories and transactions are not tracked. According to the international professional services firm Deloitte, 42 percent of art collectors it surveyed said they would likely use a freeport. The oldest freeport, with the most art, is in Geneva. Its complex of storage facilities is said to contain enough treasure to rival any museum in the world.

The Nahmads began as a banking dynasty of Sephardic Jews from Aleppo, Syria. In 1948, Hillel Nahmad relocated his wife and eight children to Beirut.

Three of his sons — Giuseppe, David and Ezra — eventually moved to Milan and, by the early 1960s, had become active art dealers. Giuseppe, the patriarch of the family, had a taste for expensive sports cars and, according to his brother David, once dated Rita Hayworth. He also pioneered treating the art business like a stock market, buying and holding paintings until exactly the right time to sell to maximize profit.

He died in 2012. David assumed the mantel of family leader. He and his older brother Ezra both named their sons Hillel after their grandfather. The two sons both go by Helly. Together the four continue the family business.

The two surviving brothers are worth a combined $3.3 billion, according to Forbes. They live in Monaco, among other locales. In addition to currency trading and art dealing, David Nahmad is also a championship backgammon player. Each son has a namesake gallery. Ezra’s son has the Helly Nahmad Gallery in London and David’s offspring, an identically named one in New York.

The Mossack Fonseca records indicate the Nahmads were early adopters of the benefits of offshoring art.

articles/05Art/160407-art-06.jpgFine art dealer and billionaire David Nahmad. Photo: AP Photo / Lionel Cironneau

Giuseppe Nahmad registered International Art Center S.A. in 1995 through the Swiss bank UBS and the Geneva office of Mossack Fonseca. It may have existed in another form prior to that date. A document in the Mossack Fonseca files mentions International Art Center acquiring the pastel “Danseuses” by Edgar Degas in October 1989.