Nigerian financial scams and the fur flies...

The EC has adopted a proposal (IP/06/1586)today to ban the import, export and sale of cat and dog fur in the EU.

Markos Kyprianou, Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, said: “The message ...has been loud and clear. [Consumers] .. do not find it acceptable to farm cats and dogs for their fur .... nor .. products containing such fur sold on the European market. [This] ban ... will mean that consumers .. can rest assured they will not inadvertently buying products containing cat or dog fur."

2 UK Ministers have taken the time off from worrying about Iraq, Afghanistan , Worldwide Terror, Flu epidemics Ian McCartney, Minister for Trade and casually signing certificates for peerages says..

" I am leased that the European Commission has made this announcement. I know there has been a lot of concern and I am keen we get the ban in place as quickly as possible."

Ben Bradshaw, the curiously coiffured Minister for Animal Welfare who showed total unconcern about the welfare of cod when responsible for controlliung North Sea fishing quotas said (no doubt dabbing a tear away) "An EU-wide ban should be ..... implemented as quickly as possible."

Have you ever heard such absolute bollocks ?

Having been to North Korea and eaten dog, (where they are farmed just like sheep) I can say it is quite tasty, not unlike red duck meat, apparently the skin, boiled in water to remove the hair and in fat like pork scratchings it makes a tasty snack - which somewhat redeems these 4 legged , disease spreading, shit machines which I wholeheartedly hate and despise - slightly more than their owners.

Let us be clear. There is nothing desirable or interesting about a dog.

Cats make pleasant companions, I have never (knowingly) eaten one, but had several as household pets.

Why should anyone shrink from their further use and amusement to mankind as glove linings or collars for coats ? We breed, kill, skin , eat, cows, reindeer, kangaroos, sheep, goats, and turn their hides into coats, handwear, headwear, footwear, floorcoverings, amusing ornaments.

Why not cats and dogs ?

Techno freaks, nerds, gauleiters will be delighted that , "Several Member States are already employing effective detection methods to check for cat and dog fur on their markets (e.g. Mass Spectrometry, DNA testing etc)."

Would that some of this forensic effort could be directed to discovering the loss of £4.5 BN. to the Treasury from VAT fraud this year - or Nigerian Financial scams - see a 65 page report published today from Chatham House "NIGERIA-RELATED FINANCIAL CRIME AND ITS LINKS WITH BRITAIN" by Michael Peel

Which commences
"Financial crime linked to Nigeria is a large and pressing problem for the British authorities,which are short of the information and resources needed to deal with it."

For example

On one day in 2005, a check at Heathrow airport revealed £20m worth of forged cheques and postal orders in courier mail from the African country's capital, Lagos.

In one incident last year at a parcel centre in Coventry, customs officials seized more than £1m in chcheques hidden in a single handbag sent from the country.

A survey of 220 packages sent from Nigeria to Britain contained forged cheques with a face value, in sterling and foreign currency, of £46.1 million.

Checks carried out at Heathrow on a single day in 2005 discovered more than £20 million of forged cheques and postal orders in mail sent from Lagos by courier. (The couriers had been warned in advance of the inspection) Other, unannounced, interceptions have found that almost the entire weight of mail from Nigeria consisted of forged documents.

Five years after President Sani Abacha's departure and after at least $1.3 billion looted by him had processed through British financial institutions there are far greater priorities that our harassed port / immigration officials have than the stupid sensitivities of the pet lovers.

This exchange in the House of Commons to people interested in these sort of things is interesting to those sort of people....

Dr. Cable: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer which London banks were found by the FSA to have handled funds stolen from Nigeria by General Sani Abacha; and which banks were criticised for lax money laundering controls. [7995]

Ruth Kelly [holding answer 15 October 2001]: The Banking Act 1987 restricts the FSA's ability to make its findings public. Under the new Financial Services and Markets Act, which comes into force on 1 December, the FSA will have wider powers to disclose this information.

Transparency International (from Democrat's Diary July 2005) reported that ...

"The UK was strikingly unhelpful when the new Nigerian government authorities first asked the British for help in retrieving the stolen goods and so far has not repatriated any substantial amount of the money known to be sitting in London's banks."

The Foreign Office does not keep a formal log of victims’ reports of Nigerian "advance fee frauds", arguing that the police have much more important things to do with their time. ‘It’s cruel to say,’ notes one British banker ‘but it only affects the stupid and the greedy, frankly.’

In Britain, the police say constraints of resources and time stop them tackling mail fraud more aggressively. They are not able to alert all potential victims whose names they find on cheques, so they do not tell any at all.

Just let me here one of these "underesourced" Plods chasing cat furriers ......

PS Cheney / Abacha / Halliburton bribery

A Halliburton London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler (58) a London based lawyer (Kaye Tesler, Tottenham) for Halliburton - the bagman who controlled the secret $180 million “slush fund” set up (according to French press reports) by Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) — admitted in mid-May, 2004 under oath (after being threatened with an International arrest warrant) , making 2 payments from the slush fund totaling nearly $1 million to two top KBR executives.

Halliburton in partnership with French petro-engineer Technip built the (then) world's largest US$6Bn gas-liquefaction factory in Nigeria — for Shell, in partnership with a large French petro-engineering company, Technip.

Tesler (who started his soliciting with Linklaters and Paines) got his hands on this slush fund when he was acting as advisor to Nigerian dictator General Sami Abacha and controlled his personal fortune — through a front company called TriStar that Tesler set up and controlled in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. The source of the slush was according to Georges Kramma a co-operative (well to the French investigating Judge Van Rymbeke) top official of Technip, a Madeira (Portugeuse territory) consortium set up by Technip and Halliburton. Christopher Welton, chief of Technip’s investor-and-analyst relations confirmed to Newsweek that Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary “was the chief principal and decision maker in the venture.”

French press reported that some or all of the US$180Mn was “retro-commissions” and were, in fact, bribes given to Nigerian officials and others to grease the wheels for the refinery deal (which required Nigerian government approval) and its construction. One witnesses was the former Nigerian oil minister Dan Entete — who may have used the money to buy apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy.

What fascinated many was that in his sworn testimony, (Le Canard Enchaine reported ), Tesler admitted making two payments from the $180 million fund to Halliburton executives;

1. A US$385,000 payment to Albert J. “Jack” Stanley, president of KBR and a close associate of Dick Cheney — a payment which Stanley had sent to a numbered bank account in Zurich, baptized “Amal”:
2, A US$350,000 payment to top KBR exec William Chaudan — who had the money routed to an anonymous bank account in sunny Jersey (an island off France not the State of).

A US DOJ enquiry under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act curiously ran into the ground after having asked for documents - no suggestion of course that Cheney's old pal John Ashcroft interfered with the smooth course of Justice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,,1339743,00.html
In June 2004 Halliburton cut ties with Jack Stanley, and said he had received as much as $5m in "improper personal benefits" related to the Nigerian scandal.
http://www.kt.uklaw.net
Kaye Tesler (Nominated and short listed for Lemmas award sponsored by the Law Society for marketing and management and Finalist DTI E-Commerce awards says the company website) operates from shop front premises and in a Guradian story they are reported as being founded in the 1970s by Mr Tesler's partner, Michael Kaye. Its website describes Mr Tesler's practice as including "private law, commercial law, tax and international commerce", with a charge-out rate of £250 an hour. The firm also deals with routine matters like conveyancing and wills.

According to Companies House records, Mr Tesler has been a director of 12 property and IT companies since 1990.... the company continues in business.

Kaye Tesler meanwhile happily continue with their business.

Mr Cheney is VP of the United States.

Halliburton have just IPO'd part of KBR (17% of the company 27.84 Mn shares at US$17 per share = US$473 Mn. on 15th November 2006. The 27.84 million share offering, which represents about a 17 percent stake in the company, sold for $17 per share, valuing KBR at US£2.7Bn. KBR booked US$16 Bn of business in Iraq and pulled out totally last month. (Closed US$22.37 today)

Sani Abacha died in 1997 at his palace in Abuja accompanied by 2 prostitutes of aheart attach apparently overdosing on Viagra. he is credited with having looted US$4MN from Nigeria, his family offered initially US$1.2 Mn but his son Mohammed maintains all the funds the family has were legitimately acquired

...and ...er .... that's it.