Trusts, Foundations and offshore funds

As I was quoted in the New York Times on 18 June 1970, I defined the ambiguous term “offshore fund” as “A fund incorporated in a country or territory where there are no or minimal taxation or government restrictions and that has been designed to sell primarily to investors who are not resident in the country or territory of incorporation.”

My definition was used later both by the U.S. Congressional Inquiry into the offshore Industry and by S.E.C. the Security Exchange Commission. I spent 19 months before, with a team, making comprehensive research into the offshore industry and publishing the first offshore fund directory for institutional investors in 1969.

I wrote many articles about the offshore industry, and had large quotations, in all major financial newspapers and magazines ranging from the FT, Euromoney, Herald Tribune, and The Times and a feature article in Fortune Magazine in August 1970.

During a 3-4 year period, I had become an expert and authority on the offshore industry and was head of Intervestment Management Research. Offshore funds had in 1970 an estimated total assets of US$ 6 billion, now into many trillions.

I had come some way, as a young man, I already in 1965 was introduced to trust and foundations, trusteeship and fiduciary activities, offshore funds, all with a lot of small prints, when the clients signed. However, I had to seriously learn all this, and become quite an expert, so much so that I later become a co-trustee for many foundations and acted as a fiduciary agent for many. Trusts have existed since Roman times and have become one of the most important innovations in property law.  I advised professional, clients as to Liechtenstein, Panama and Bermuda foundations and trusts. My partner in M. Hauschildt et Cie and co-founder with me in 1974 was Bryan Jeeves, who due to the event in Denmark, formed himself the highly respected Jeeves Group which operates all over the world.

As an introducing agent to several Swiss banks, including first Banque Pariente in Geneva and later UBS, Edmund Safra’s Trade Development Bank and sometime later on Bank Landau & Kimche and Bank Julius Bar in Zurich. I very early learned that most of the bankers recommended establishing a Liechtenstein trust, mostly, looking back, to obtain more annual fees and have a structure in place if something happened, a legal entity they could “sit on” for years.

At the time, I only received a small fee for the introduction to the banks, later on, it becomes common to receive a share in the bank’s fees and brokerage. After my time, this becomes even more profitable for introducing agents.

Going back to this period I was mostly dealing with Cayman Island, Bermuda and Bahamas, Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney Island. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man – place very good at exploiting their clients and are able to charge ridiculous fees for little or no work.

I had very early the same experience with Liechtenstein and Bermuda. Later when working with people like Dr. Batliner in Vaduz and Appleby in Bermuda, I started sharing the front end and annual fees, this somewhat kept me “in” on milking the cow, year after year. This became normal, especially as I sometimes became a co-trustee with the lawyers of the various trusts. This fact saved me when the events took place in Denmark in 1980, however, it also turned out bad for many clients, as lawyers were the only trustee and were able to charge huge fees, exploiting the clients. 

Anyone interested in “Offshore”, must read “Money Land” Why Thieves & Crooks Now Rule the World & How to Take it Back, by Oliver Bullough, one of the best books I have read recently. He gives a biting indictment of offshore finance and reveals the obscene dark side of globalised finance, a shadow realm of oligarchs and gangsters, unimaginable power and zero accountability. Another good book by Olver Bullough “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.” 

As to the recent publication of the Panama Papers

Panama Papers: The Most Explosive Revelations from the Biggest Document | Vanity Fair

I met Jurgen Mossack on several occasions back in the early seventies, when he worked as a lawyer in London. He was at the time a collector of gold coins as I was, and we met a Spink & Son, a company I later represented in Scandinavia. Although I was no longer in the business of setting up “offshore entities”, I did tell him that he should go back to Panama and copy the trust laws of Liechtenstein and Cayman, as he was a Panamanian. He did some years later, and I believe, in 1986 merged his office with another Panamanian lawyer and politician, Ramón Fonseca Mora. Interestingly, I used their company services indirectly in 2005, I also in my “Justitslig.com” mentioned in 2010 that Cameron’s father made all his money offshore.

I recently saw the film The Laundromat, the 2019 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Steven Søderbergh. I did not like the film which I found stupid, and somewhat ridiculous, as it did not show the real point; this activity, offshore, will not stop. If Panama is not offering offshore trust and corporate services, other countries will, moreover, the US offers the greatest tax benefits. In fact, the USA is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world. States like Nevada, South Dakota, Delaware and Wyoming offer the greatest fiscal benefits. The United States has bullied the rest of the world into scrapping financial secrecy but had not applied the same standards to itself.

I was naïve and ignorant when I, in the late 1960s, considered that governments would stop all this offshore activity. In fact, it is mostly left alone by governments in developed countries, as these offshore places offer the opportunity to hide their loot and ill-gotten gains from corruption.

It appears that even the Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz was naïve.

After the leak of more than 11 million documents detailing sensitive and often terrifying information about offshore financial and legal activities, the Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz was enlisted to help Panama reform its practices. But nothing could have prepared him for what came next.

The Real Scandal Behind the Panama Papers | Vanity Fair

I have just seen (December 2018) that the FCA in the UK has given Santander Bank a fine of £32.8 million fine over probate failings. The FCA states the impact of the failings was:

• probate and bereavement processes would stall and remain incomplete, meaning that funds would not be transferred to those entitled to them despite Santander being informed a customer had died; or
• certain funds belonging to deceased customers would not be identified and transferred to those who were entitled to them and were unaware of the existence of those funds.

The FCA states that a bank is required to have an effective process for dealing with a deceased customer’s accounts and investments from notification of death to the transfer of funds to those who are entitled to receive them.”

I know for a fact, that in the 1950s and 60s Swiss banks loved when their client died (I am sure they still do) and an estate was created. Because this allowed them to more or less take the money into their own assets, moreover, engage lawyers and authorities, legitimizing their actions, all costing large fees and being paid out of the estate. The procedure for any beneficiary would be so many problems and hassle that few could go through the process, and many would expose themselves to going to prison or paying a huge amount of tax.

As to Swiss bank accounts, at the time (as to my experience mid-1960s) it was common practice for most foreigners to have numbered accounts, not using their names or even addresses. They would have to go to the bank and state their account number(shorten to a few digits) and thereafter show their signature and passport. Although the bank had a photocopy of the passport, they made sure not to connect the passport to the numbered account, as they later could state they did not know the client.

Going back to the 1930s the Swiss have learned from the attack by the French and German authorities, where clients of Swiss banks were even imprisoned and put to death.

In the 1960s the Swiss banks did not require that the client appointed beneficiaries of the account and the requirement for “paperwork” did not exist, normally only one page. Such a numbered account was very profitable for the banks. The client who wanted to appoint beneficiaries, was always recommended to use a judicial structure like a trust, so the bank could take part in a never-ending fee arrangement, moreover, appoint a trustee.

Since clients were always advised not to have any papers related to their accounts, just in case, it was somewhat very difficult for relatives to come along and claim the assets in the accounts. We had a standard procedure of not accepting anyone and told them first to go to the Embassy in Bern and establish their credentials, many did not do this out of fear, and the last thing they wanted was to tell their respective countries that a relative had left money for them in Switzerland. 

The Swiss banks defended this advice because most foreigners came from countries where even having a Swiss bank account, could result in that they could be arrested and even executed. In most European countries like Germany, France, and Italy, the fiscal authorities were constantly on the lookout and could punish their citizens, very harshly, just to show an example.

During my time, I know of cases where French and German citizens either had to leave their country or face long jail sentences, just because they had a “secret” Swiss Bank account. The fact, that people had established such accounts, made them vulnerable to blackmail from family members or in case of divorce.

As to the so-called secret Swiss bank account, if a US citizen had an account with substantial sums, the US authorities had ways to approach the weakest senior member of the bank and offer a 40% “finder fee” in addition, to protection in the US and even a new name and papers, in return for details as to the account. Somewhat similar methods were used by Germany and other European countries to get criminals to steal data on Swiss and Liechtenstein bank clients. 

However, through the years, it did not stop wealthy families from finding ways around such control, to hold on to their assets and estates. 

Most offshore structures we established for business clients, were for the client involved with import or export business and we used re-invoicing set-up or quietly moving patents and royalties into offshore entities. This allowed companies and trusts to hide the ownership and beneficiaries, allowing royalties to be out, without any tax liability. 

Later on, this becomes the case with several large Scandinavian companies, such as Maersk, IKEA, and Lego. In the late 1960s, a few Scandinavian and German companies were able to use the out-of-site offshore companies to buy “themselves out” locally at arm’s length, no one ever was prosecuted or found out at the time. 

What later made a big difference in the world of tax evasion and avoidance was when foreign exchange trading become common among international companies. This truly allowed for swift profit and losses, wherever required, it becomes even better when derivatives become an instrument of preference.

The Gnomes of Zurich

The term “gnome of Zürich” originated in a meeting of the Labour politicians in November 1964. The politicians blamed Swiss bankers for raising speculation against the pound. During the meeting, politician George Brown criticised the Swiss bankers and said, “The gnomes of Zürich are at work again”. Later on, it was then used by many other politicians of the time. In the late 60s, I met George Brown several times and had several discussions with him, mostly in bars.

During the mid-1960s, I introduced many clients, to the Swiss banks, from the British elite and together with a few Germans during those years. One of the banks had already many clients in the United Kingdom, including the former Home Secretary and the then-present minister of transport, at the time. It was strictly illegal to have a Swiss bank account and indeed a criminal offence, but that had not stopped the Home Secretary, in charge of the Police, Prosecution, and Prison Service, from having such an account, moreover, having the money paid into the account from third parties. 

At the time, it was strictly illegal to take money out of the United Kingdom, due to strong enforced exchange control by the Bank of England. It was risky for a domiciled citizen to take money out of the country and most Merchant Bank did not want to be directly associated with this, however, they knew people like me and I only acted as an agent without even giving them an introductory fee.

The Labour government restricted the allowance of Sterling to take out of the country to £25 Pounds. If you were stopped at Heathrow with 50 Pounds, they would seize it all. If you had, one hundred they would arrest you and give you a large fine. That was Exchange Control

The Swiss banks did not take “cash” out of the country; in fact, money never left the UK, at least the transaction I was involved with at the time, was all back-to-back. There was cash involved, as clients had initially to pay the money in cash so they could not be traced. So the client came to me with small bags of £10,000 Sterling at the time, the most I received in one go was £35,000, otherwise, they slowly built up larger amounts. I would then pass this money on to another agent, who deposited the money as normal in an account in London.

Later on, I went to a bank in the City and paid the money. The money put together in £100,000 units would be sold to many International corporations, ranging from General Electric, Ford, Unilever and Shell, and the US. These companies would buy local Sterling at a discount rate, and in return deposit US Dollars or Swiss Francs in the Swiss banks.  £100,000 was a lot of money then, I paid a secretary around £10-12 per week and they took shorthand dictation and spoke French fluently, as the Geneva bankers conducted their business in French.

So a back-to-back transaction took place, which as far as the client was concerned, took place the same day, so when I received e.g. £25,000 cash in London, he could call the Swiss bank and have this confirmed over the phone, that the money had been credited his account in Geneva or Zurich. 

The Secretive Mr Stone

One of the people I worked with was Mr Stone, an accountant living in Hampstead London, he had two sons, and his story was unique.

He did not smoke and did not tolerate anyone smoking in his presence. I never smoked so we got along fine. Smoke reminded him of the smoke from the chimneys in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His story was very special. He had just married when arrested and his wife and he had been shipped off to Auschwitz, as so terrible many.

Nearly all perished in this death camp; however, he was one of the few who escaped. His wife did not escape, but for some miracle, she survived. After the war, she was moved to various refugee camps and ultimately ended up in a camp close to Paris in France.

He not only escape from Auschwitz, but he also got to London, where he joined the BBC services after the war and made a special broadcast to Continental Europe. One day he received a letter from France, from a woman who wrote that she had heard his voice on BBC many times and just wanted to tell him that she listen to his broadcasting as he sounded like her husband. She knew that he was not her husband, who she believed had died in Auschwitz, although, some had told her that he escaped, something she did not believe.

She wrote that she knew that he, Mr Stone, therefore, could not be her husband. Little did she know, that he had changed his name to Stone in order to Anglo sized the Jewish name. Further, he had been told that his wife had died in Auschwitz. After a few letters, it becomes clear to him that she was his wife and he travelled to Paris and got her out of the refugee camp. Later in London, they had two boys.

Apart from this story of his life and how they found each other after the war, he was enigmatic and secretive, despite we become close in many ways and his wife and he had a lovely and welcoming home.

As to arranging the various transfers, we used various codes speaking on the telephone, as to inform the Swiss banks, mostly making out we were acting as a travel agent, making inquiries or confirming travel arrangements. The amount of money could always be stated in people travelling and their status referred to 10,000, 100,000 and 1,000,000. The telephone and telex in Switzerland were never listed at a bank.  We always assumed that the telephone calls would be recorded and never took any risk calling from our own phones.

This was an excellent business for me, as a young man earning good money and having a unique introduction to the world of “private banking” very private, further to many members of the British ruling class and Swiss Banking. 

So much so, I could walk into Coutts bank in Mount Street in Mayfair in 1965 and open a bank account, only with them making a call to my Swiss bank. Without any deposit, Coutts gave me a credit on two issued cheques of mine for £38,000.

At the time I had stagged an IPO, one normally stagged for tenfold the number of shares, in order to get an allocation of some shares, as most IPO was much oversubscribed. Until that time, the cheques would always be returned and not cashed, having the investor to issue a new cheque for the shares allocated and not applied for. However, the companies I had been stagging (their public offering), cashed the initial cheques in full, thereby creating an unsecured bank overdraft for me of £38,000. At the time a very large amount, you could buy a new large house in Hampstead for £15,000 and less, I was paying secretaries speaking 3 languages, did shorthand and French dictation £ 12 a week. The sum was so large, that I only once later in the year made such an amount by accepting millions of East African Shillings from a person named Hussein Jaffa from Uganda. 

The Indian Fleeing Uganda 

Idi Aim in Uganda had put pressure on the Indian population to leave, and nearly all did. I did help a few at the time, but more than a year later, when I attended another business, I was presented with a Mr Jaffa. Strange enough, Hussein Jaffa came to my office in Park House, 116 Park Street Mayfair, one Saturday after the staff had left at 13:00, carrying two “cheap” large suitcases, he entered the reception, where the porter/concierge call me directly telling me that a “foreign-looking” person asked to see me. He was somewhat reluctant to allow him to go upstairs alone in the lift; nevertheless, I told him that I would look out for him. Mr Jaffa was Indian and he came with several millions of “dirty” banknotes all denominated in East African Shilling, all money owned by fleeing Indian families from Ida Amin. Money possibly gathered by many families, as their life savings, I never knew. 

Although my office was close by, a few hundred meters, to where I lived with my wife and two children, in 35-37 Grosvenor Square, I had to take a taxi there with the two large dirty looking suitcases, which made even the porter in my building wonder. Both our Nanny and my wife tried for hours to count the money, some of which were so dirty. 

I told Mr Jaffa that I was not in this kind of business any longer; however, I would make an exception this time, as I could see his expectation for the Swiss equalling amount was quite unknowledgeable. I felt I could make some big money here. He told me that many families had put their last savings together and he acted for them and took them to Mr Mogens in London. I did not know the people he mentioned and never knew. When I told him that I could not give him a receipt, as I was unable to count the money, he said he did not need a receipt! He gave me a present, some small African native carved figures of elephants and other animals including one in Ivory. His case, become the exception to the normal trade I did because he handed me cash which I had to transport to Switzerland. At the time, foreign currency was not subject to exchange control.

However,  what I did taking this money out of the United Kingdom, was totally out of my character then, because, I did not drink alcohol or take drugs or anything. Nevertheless, the next day I took the two suitcases on a British European Airways flight to Geneva, allowing the suitcases to go by normal transport at check-in on the rail with all the other suitcases. They were never opened at Heathrow or Geneva airport. 

At the time, I normally stayed at Le Richemond in Geneva, however, as this trip had not been planned, they did not have a room and I was referred to a newly built hotel Le President, now Hotel President Wilson. When arriving at the hotel, I asked to see their safe deposit boxes, and when I saw them I asked if I could take them all. From that day on, they always asked me, when I came back if I required all the deposit boxes. 

People’s misfortune is Others gain

What I learned early in life was something I did find distasteful; possibly an early revelation about the morals used in banking and finance, more about the legal and accounting advisers who surrounded the detailed aspects of banking. The fact that the bankers had been given a legal clearance to charge, what they liked, moreover – always exploit other people’s misfortune, like lawyers and many other professions.

Having gone through a “house instruction” of a Swiss Bank, I never forgot being told, that we really make our money on other people’s misery, when they are either dead or subject to difficulties ranging from fiscal investigation to divorce and the break-up of families. The Swiss bankers go into hibernation with their money and our legal department and outside lawyers move in, just charging. Since we escrow the money, we earn interest, not the client, on their money! Many numbered accounts will never be claimed. 

All their account has been set-a-side, immediately upon us receiving notification of their problems and trouble. When one of the other people was briefly asked, what happens to the client’s money when they die and have not listed beneficiaries of the account, he was told off, are you stupid, “that is our money then”. Despite, teaching us about the normal procedure when a relative, child, or wife comes to the bank claiming that their father had an account with the bank, the response was a Big NO! Thereafter, if they ever succeeded in proofing that their father had left money in the bank – it would take years. 

I recall giving a friend advice, who was a lawyer in the early 1970s set out his practice in Zurich as a one-man band. I told him that if he had a good office address in Bahnhofstrasse, he eventually would find himself having a rich widower one day coming to his office or a client who was subject to either divorce or “official” investigations from the country they came from. All this allows him to be “retired” for life – charging fees. 

I never forget my partner Bryan Jeeves and I sitting in the best restaurant in Vaduz, having a great lunch, as usual, he pointed out to me a local Vaduz lawyer, who had stolen millions (allegedly more than 20 million D.M) from the most famous German football player at the time. When confronted about this Bryan said: what can the German superstar do – Nothing, because if he told the German authorities, he would go to jail for many years and for sure nothing is happening here in Vaduz. 

Years earlier, I had a complaint to a bank charging my client huge fees (for nothing) and objected, they told me who is the client going to tell. I still felt bad about it but the client had to accept what had happened, even though he thought that I was involved. This lesson meant that I did move my introduction banking business away from that specific bank. However, at the time, I had to accept that this was the business I was in and they all got away with charging the client too much. 

Another bank, I regularly dealt with offered a price for counterfeit US dollars. Where we had an obligation to hand such counterfeit currency over to the Swiss National Bank for destruction, this specific banker always offered a good rate, if the counterfeit was good, I recall even up to 10-15% of nominal value, e.g. the fake currency notes denomination. Others told me that the banker had good contacts in the Soviet and Eastern Countries. Therefore, the people ending up with the counterfeit notes could never show their holdings of American Dollars, they risked being imprisoned and executed. The money could be left under the madras or dug into the garden for decades, and they would never find out that their money was counterfeit. 

After seeing Indian families fleeing Uganda and arriving with fake US Dollars, being confronted with such devastation and family ruin, it is very difficult to have to tell the people that their hard-earned money, which they all had faith in, is worthless.

Lloyds, a flagship institution

I enjoyed many lunches in Lord Nelson’s dining room in the old Lloyds building and introduced the first foreigners to become members of Lloyds, two Norwegian ship-owners.

To be a part of the most profitable syndicates (underwriters), one had to have a connection (also the right background and school tie). Like the powerful city people either Masons or members of some of the main livery societies in the City, further, have an account of the main Merchants’ Banks. It was normal for clients of the main Merchants’ Banks to be introduced to Lloyds since the bank could confirm the assets of the client. 

The City of London 

Even Lloyds emerged and inevitably had links to the Atlantic slave trade. I got to work with many people who already were so-called members of Lloyd’s syndicates (Maritime and general underwriting). Their membership allowed them, without putting up capital or making any investment, a substantial annual income from Lloyds. They had to undertake to risk a certain amount for the various syndicates they took part in. In order to join Lloyds, one had to show a certain amount of wealth and assets, which could be in property, land, bonds, or equities.  Many members of the aristocracy and ruling class enjoyed these privileges of income from Lloyds.  Some newcomers were directed to more risky syndicates and ultimately lost a fortune because if the syndicate had bad underwriting risks on its books, members had ultimately to pay up, even though it meant some went into personal bankruptcies.

The professional active members, could always select the best insurance deals for their own syndicates and place the risky underwriting with the outside members’ syndicate.

At the time Merchant Banks was above morals and ethics, later when I started putting my dinner conversation together, I realised that these people, morale did never come into it, moreover, that is how the world had always operated. The few exploited the many.

I recall many visits to the Baring’s offices in the late 60s early 70s and dining in their director’s dining room. One had history right in front of you, where ever you looked on the walls. The Barings had represented so many countries, and done so many deals in their more than 200 years of history and most were detailed recorded. However, they at the time operated out of London and I specifically recall their first step abroad, when they became a founder shareholder in the Australian merchant bank in the mid-sixties. In the 1970 and 80s, they expanded all over the place and the whole game ended in Tokyo and Singapore. The two Barings I knew were the old traditions of Merchant Banking. 

I had my first taste of backstabbing and betrayal by my business partners when I 1966 formed Intervestor S.A. in Luxembourg, one of the first investment holding companies in Luxembourg. Not having any olders to advise me, two of my business partners, all the old school, with a background of good schooling and City education, “simply stole” the company in front of me. Edward La Coste and Barrie Hoare, I have later learned that the British are the most experienced backstabbers and even smile when they put the knife into you from behind.

Thankfully, I got a chance to know better people, when I 1968 established one of the first financial and estate planning companies in Europe, Associated Financial Planning (AFP) together with the Duke of St. Albans, the Marquess of Reading, Euan Inchbald and James Talbot, I received far more inside into the working of the City. Specifically from our twice a week lunches and social life. I also got to know some quite decent people, with morals and ethics working in the City.

James Talbot was head of the largest investment trust at the time F&C Foreign and Colonial. Michael, Marquess of Reading held the highest title in the British peerage ever attained by a Jew, he was a stockbroker.

Charles, 13th Duke of St. Albans taught me so much about French food and wine, as his wife Suzanne Marie-Adèle, was French and an inventive cook, artist, and writer. Even my wife Elizabeth become inspired and went to the Cordon Bleu School for Culinary Arts.

At the time we had an investment trust, ScanInvest, established in Luxembourg, with the management company in Bermuda. This meant that we once a month had to fly to Paris, landing at Orly in the morning, going to Place de la Concorde, to the offices of Clifford Turner, the lawyers, to hold our monthly board meeting. Since these board meetings were a formality, (to show the minutes had been recorded in Paris) after 30-40 minutes, Charles had the lunch menus from a different chosen restaurant brought into the meeting, so we could decide what we would eat and drink at “normally” a 3 hours wet lunch, giving us enough time to just rush to Rue Saint Honore and buy a little gift for the wives, before back to Orly airport and London.

At the time, the Inland Revenue demanded that investment decisions had to be seen to be made outside the UK when operating an offshore investment trust. The same was the position of the IRS in the USA, so the saying goes, that offshore was just off Wall Street and Throgmorton Street in the City of London.

When we give the order to buy or sell stocks and bonds, we telephone the broker, thereafter, we sent a telex to Bermuda, which copied the telex and sent this to the London broker, in order to show that the telex instructions had come from Bermuda. At the time the stockbrokers did not have to “clock” their dealings, they could do everything in the book, front running and selecting the best deals for themselves and buying shares for their account ahead of a firm’s strong buy recommendation to clients – all normal.

The Background of the City

What I learned about the City, the slave and sugar trade had given a solid foundation to the creation of the City and British wealth, in addition to the loot from all the colonies.

London City after the 17th century was made possible mainly because of Britain’s financial institutions, trading houses; insurance companies and banks emerged to underpin Britain’s overseas trade and empire.

I had no real knowledge of this and indeed about the foundation of the big money, like the slave trade and later the sugar plantations. The large trading houses even had their own army and paid the British Navy for protection. Fear and torture were used to drive black workers to cut, mill, boil and “clay” the sugar, so it could be shipped to Britain as part of a lucrative “triangle of trade” between the west coast of Africa, the Americas and Britain. The trade-in slaves, and the goods they were forced to produce – sugar, tobacco and eventually cotton – created the first lords of modern capitalism.

The Slave Trade

As to the slave trade;” We can only begin to understand slavery’s influence on Britain today by first allowing 500 years of human history to flash before our eyes. Beginning in the last decades of the 1400s, we see African people kidnapped from their families, crammed into the dark pits of slave forts, and then piled into the bowels of ships. We see voyagers and traders, such as John Hawkins in the 1560s, becoming some of the first British men to make massive fortunes from this trade in kidnapped Africans. 

By the late 17th century, we see the British coming to dominate the slave trade, having overtaken the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. We see tens of thousands of merchant ships making the “middle passage”, the voyage across the Atlantic that transformed captives from Africa into American slave commodities. Half of all the Africans transported into slavery during the 18th century were carried in the holds of British ships. 

From the 15th to the 19th centuries, more than 11 million shackled black captives were forcibly transported to the Americas, and unknown multitudes were lost at sea. Captives were often thrown overboard when they were too sick, too strong-willed, or too numerous to feed. Those who survived the journey were dumped on the shores and sold to the highest bidder, then sold on repeatedly like financial assets. Mothers were separated from children, and husbands from wives, as persons were turned into property. Slaves were raped and lynched; their bodies were branded, flayed and mutilated.

Many slave owners, in their diaries, manuals, newspaper writings, and correspondence, readily admitted the punishments and violations they exacted on black people on the cane fields and in their homes. Take, for example, the unapologetic recollections of violence and predation that comprise the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a British slave owner in Jamaica in the mid-1700s. Thistlewood recorded 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 136 enslaved women in his 37 years in Jamaica. In his 23 July 1756 entry, he described punishing a slave in the following manner: “Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag in it whilst his mouth was full and made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.” 

“The owners of slaves in British society were not just the super-rich. Recent research by historians at University College London has shown the striking diversity of the people who received compensation, from widows in York to clergymen in the Midlands, attorneys in Durham to glass manufacturers in Bristol. Still, most of the money ended up in the pockets of the richest citizens, who owned the greatest number of slaves. More than 50% of the total compensation money went to just 6% of the total number of claimants. The benefits of slave-owner compensation were passed down from generation to generation of Britain’s elite. Among the descendants of the recipients of slave-owner, compensation is the former Prime Minister David Cameron. (The Guardian 29.03.2018 By Kris Manjapra)

Afua Hirsch, a Guardian columnist wrote recently: “The African American intellectual WEB Du Bois was right when he described the enslavement of at least 12 million Africans as “the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice”. In the Caribbean, Britain received, in the words of Nobel prize-winning economist Arthur Lewis, 200 years of free labour – from over 15 million black people, and those who were indentured from India.

The proceeds from this enslavement, and the heavily exploitative years of “apprenticed” labour that followed it, provided the profits with which Britain modernised its economy. The systemic poverty that remains in the Caribbean can be directly traced to the era of enslavement and colonialism, at the end of which Britain walked away leaving 60% of the region’s black inhabitants functionally illiterate.

The common complaint about reparations is the alleged unfairness of burdening today’s generation with debt arising from their ancestors’ wrongs. Yet where is the outrage that this generation contributed towards the more than £300bn in today’s money notoriously paid to Britain’s slave owners for the loss of their human “property”? Their compensation under the Slavery Abolition Act – comprising an astounding 40% of the national budget at the time – was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.

The pattern is clear. Reparations have been paid to those who profited from African enslavement, rather than those who were enslaved.
As the historian Ana Lucia Araujo has written, to this day no former slave society in the Americas, no former slaves or their descendants, and no African nation, has ever obtained any form of reparations for the Atlantic slave trade.

The following has been written more than 15 years after I wrote this, published in the Guardian newspaper: The truth, which has gone largely undiscussed in Britain for the past 200 years but has been powerfully laid out in recent books by Olusoga, Sathnam Sanghera and others, is that huge portions of the wealth generated during Britain’s era of empire, and the Industrial Revolution, are inextricably linked to transatlantic slavery in the Caribbean, the US, South America and beyond.

Apart from Black slavery, one must not forget that millions of slaves of European origin present the Ottoman Empire and in most North African countries for hundreds of years. Also, Crimean Tatar raiders enslaved between 1 and 2 million slaves from Russia and Poland-Lithuania over the period 1500–1700. The North African slave markets traded in European slaves which were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, and as far afield as the Turkish Abductions in Iceland and in Porto Santo (Madeira). During the 15th and 19th centuries men, women, and children were captured to such a devastating extent that vast numbers of sea coast towns were abandoned.

Back in the 1960s, I saw no difference between the City banks and institutions and what I had learned about Swiss banks and the early merchants’ banks on the Continent “they all do it”. Moreover, as the Swiss bankers said we could not consider what is legal or illegal today in any country because tomorrow the law could be changed, how can we show respect for other countries’ laws? How can we morally consider, if an African dictator is good for his country or a socialist Politician in Europe exploiting the population with his own rhetoric and ideals, well knowing that he creates a state, which steals from the few, hardworking and creative citizen. 

The expansion of overseas trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in the Atlantic, relied on credit, and bills of credit (like modern travellers’ cheques), which were at the heart of the slave trade. Similarly, maritime insurance, which was focused at Lloyds of London, thrived on the Atlantic slave trade. 

There were no banks in the City until the mid-17th century, and even a century later, banking was under-developed outside London. However, slave traders and planters badly needed credit. A slave voyage from Liverpool to Africa then on to the Caribbean, before heading home, could take more than 18 months. In addition, each point of the trade – buying and selling Africans, buying and importing produce (mainly sugar) cultivated using the labour of enslaved people – involved credit arrangements. Merchants and traders in London, Bristol, and Liverpool bought the planters’ produce, so in effect, British merchants became the bankers of the slave trade. Little did I realise this when I visited the partner’s dining rooms in the very exclusive interior of some of the Merchant Banks. Or when I was dining in the White’s and Boodle’s private members’ clubs with members of families who made their money in the slave and sugar trade. 

Provincial banking in the UK emerged first in the 18th century because of the need for credit in the long-distance Atlantic slave trade. For example, Liverpool merchants involved in slave trading later formed Heywoods Bank, which eventually became part of Even Barclays Bank came out of the slave trade, the Liverpool merchants involved in the slave trade formed Heywoods Bank, which later became Barclays. 

Other modern banking names, such as Lloyd Bank, emerged in this way and inevitably had links to the Atlantic slave trade. The Bank of England was also involved. When it was set up in 1694, it underpinned the whole system of commercial credit, and its wealthy City members, from the governor down, were often men whose fortunes had been made wholly or partly in the slave trade. The Bank of England stabilised the national finances and enabled the state to wage its major wars of the 18th century. These wars were aimed at securing and safeguarding overseas possessions, including the slave colonies, and to finance the military and naval means that protected the Atlantic slave routes and the plantation economies. 

I read recently an interesting interview with Carmen Callil in FT, where her book Oh Happy Day is mentioned. It is the story of Callil’s English forebears, who lived in dire poverty in the Midlands in the 19th century, and about her great-great-grandmother’s first love, who was transported to Australia for stealing hemp. But more than that, it is a reckoning with Britain and the imperialist state of mind.

Callil first read about the transportation of convicts when she was a student at Melbourne University. “I sat in the state library and wept and wept and wept,” she says. The terrible treatment of the convicts — and Callil recounts in graphic detail how they were chained, flogged and abused — was almost matched, in Callil’s view, by the grimness of 19th-century England.

“I think it’s a question of elites, really,” she says. “If you think about the story of my great-great-grandmothers . . . because they weren’t considered real human beings, you could ship them off anywhere.” A version of the same view led in turn to the devastation of the Aboriginal people. “The Aborigines died from the diseases the Europeans imported, and from imperial ignorance of their culture,” says Callil. “They knew nothing about it. They thought they were not human beings like whites.”

A lot of the English elite are educated but they’re not intelligent . . . The lack of acceptance of their true history has corroded the British body politic

Resurrecting the lives of her ancestors was a political project. “[The English] seem to know nothing about the story of the countries they invaded, and what it meant to them,” says Callil. “It’s not taught in schools, and I wanted to tell a story that made a claim for the British to face up to their historical past. We’re living with a government that’s tuned in only to how great the British empire was. But the British empire was seriously un-great for 99.9 per cent of the people they invaded. It was terrible!”

In the book, she writes witheringly of the policies pursued by David Cameron’s Conservative government. At times, she draws a straight line from the elites of the 19th century to those of today, suggesting that the enduring British values are those of brutality, ignorance and greed. “I do think that a lot of the English elite are educated but they’re not intelligent . . . I think that the lack of acceptance of their true history has corroded the British body politic. Because I do not believe they could treat their own people as, say, George Osborne did during austerity, if they had the faintest idea of their historical inheritance. It’s blinded them to how their own people live in this country.”

The White Slavery

As to white slavery In America: “Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.

Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labour accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary workforce. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America’s colonial masters.

These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London’s back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much-maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America’s first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others.

Around 1618 at the start of their colonial slave trade, the English began by seizing and shipping to Virginia impoverished children, even toddlers, from London slums. Some impoverished parents sought a better life for their offspring and agreed to send them, but most often, the children were sent despite their own protests and those of their families. At the time, the London authorities represented their actions as an act of charity, a chance for poor youth to apprentice in America, learn a trade, and avoid starvation at home. Tragically, once these unfortunate youngsters arrived, 50% of them were dead within a year after being sold to farmers to work the fields.

A few months after the first shipment of children, the first African slaves were shipped to Virginia. Interestingly, no American market existed for African slaves until late in the 17th century. Until then, black slave traders typically took their cargo to Bermuda. England’s poor were the colonies’ preferred source of slave labour, even though Europeans were more likely than Africans to die an early death in the fields. Slave owners had a greater interest in keeping African slaves alive because they represented a more significant investment. Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans on plantations, as they were viewed as valuable, lifelong property rather than indentured servants with a specific term of service.

Corruption was rampant in the headright system and included double-counting of individual slaves, land allocations for servants who were dead upon arrival, and per head fees given for those kidnapped off English streets.

Purveyors of slaves often worked in teams of spirits, captains, and office-keepers to kidnap people from English ports for sale in the American labour market. Spirits lured or kidnapped potential servants and arranged for their transport with ship captains. Office-keepers maintained a base to run the operation. They would entertain their prey and get them to sign papers until an awaiting ship became available. Spirits and their accomplices were occasionally put on trial, but court records show that they got off easily and that the practice was tolerated because it was so profitable.

The indentured servant system of people who voluntarily mortgaged their freedom evolved into slavery. England essentially dumped its unwanted in the American colonies, where they were treated no better than livestock. Servants were regularly battered, whipped, and humiliated. The disease was rampant, food was in short supply, and working and living conditions were grim. War with local native Indian tribes was common. Severe punishment made escape unrealistic. Initially, running away was considered a capital crime, with clemency granted in exchange for an agreement to increase the period of servitude.

In the 1640s, the transportation of the Irish began. Britain’s goal was to obliterate Ireland’s Catholics to make room for English planters. Catholics who refused to attend a Protestant church could be fined. If they were unable to pay, they could be sold as slaves. Following the end of the English Civil Wars in 1651, English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell focused his attention on Ireland, where the people had allied with the defeated royalists during the conflict. Famine was created by the intentional destruction of food stocks. Those implicated in the rebellion had their land confiscated and sold into slavery. Anyone refusing to relocate was threatened with death, including children.

Scots were also subjected to transportation to the British colonies for religious differences, as England imposed Anglican disciplines on the Church of Scotland as well. The English army was deployed to break up illegal church assemblies and imprison or deport religious protesters.

Cruelty to servants was rampant. Beatings were common, and the perpetrators, buttressed by juries made up of fellow landowners, were rarely punished for abuse or even murder. Infanticide by unmarried women was common, as they could be severely punished for “fornication.” The mother faced whipping, fines, and extra years added to her servitude. Her offspring faced time in bondage as well. If the mother was the victim of rape by the master, he faced a fine and the loss of a servant but wasn’t subjected to whipping.

By the early 1770s, the convict trade was big business, more profitable than the black slave trade because criminals were cheap. They could be sold for one-third the price of indentured servants. England’s jails were being emptied into America on a significant scale. Additionally, merchants who traded in convicts from England and Ireland received a subsidy for every miscreant transported to America. Up to a third of incoming convicts died from dysentery, smallpox, typhoid, and freezing temperatures. Upon arrival, they were advertised for sale, inspected, and taken away in chains by new masters.

Following the Revolutionary War, the British continued to ship convict labour as “indentured servants” to America. During that time, seven ships filled with prisoners made the journey, and two successfully landed. In 1789, convict importation was legally banned across the U.S. America would no longer be the dumping ground for British criminals. It took another 30 years before the indentured servant trade ended completely.”

My own experiences with Swiss Banking 

As to the Swiss bankers and lawyers, I still recall a lawyer telling me that all his client’s secrets were kept only by him in the office, as he feared staff could blackmail some of his clients. Even Edmond Safra, the banker, kept his personal notes and important papers in a language very few could understand, an ancient Sephardic or Arabic script. 

Edmund Safra established TDB (Trade Development Bank) in Geneva. In 1965, he was only 35 years old and I met him many times. As I am not Jewish, otherwise, I would have stayed working more closely with him. He had the fortune that his father and grandfather passed on the wisdom about human beings, their greed, fear and the family tradition of banking. Safra went on in 1966 to New York and founded what was to be his most successful American operation, the Republic National Bank of New York. 

One of the first offshore companies, I established in the Channel Islands, was in Alderney, wherein in the mid-1960s, we had nominee directors who were sheep farmers, paying them less than £10 p.a. 

I worked already back in the late 1960s with Dr Batliner in Liechtenstein and later in 1973 formed an unlimited partnership with Bryan Jeeves, CMG OBE in Vaduz, and Zurich in 1974. Our unlimited partnership with M. Hauschildt et Cie still exists in Zurich. I suggested to Jürgen Dieter Mossack in the 1970s, when he was working in London, to go back to Panama, establish a business selling Panama and its legal entities as a business, and compete with Liechtenstein as a foundation. Panama had taken their new trust law from Liechtenstein and Bermuda, all working well until the “Panama Papers” and all the dirty washing was hanging out. 

In the early seventies, I got Bryan Jeeves engaged more actively in the offshore trust business, after working in the 1960s selling Encyclopaedias and working with his family transport business in the United Kingdom and on the Continent. Bryan had married into an important Liechtenstein family and had a son. He became my partner in M. Hauschildt et Cie in Zurich, an unlimited financial company. It was our intention to seek a banking license after 5-8 years of operation; however, events in Denmark prevented all this. At the time of the event in Denmark, Hauschildt et Cie was solvent with over four million Swiss Francs.

 (see: https://www.jeeves-group.com/about-us/people/bryan-jeeves/)

In 1968, I was the co-founder of the first company to do serious research into offshore investment trusts (closed and open-ended) and we published an institutional investors report for several years. This later resulted in me personally testifying to the US Congressional investigations into offshore funds in the early 1970s. I was an established authority on offshore investment and family trusts, specific open and close-ended investment trusts, quoted regularly in the New York Times, and even with a special article in Esquire Magazine. 

All were built on the laissez-faire, the zero-tax, secrecy-enhancing foundation of the 1960 companies law.  I even recall the days of Jean Doucet in the Cayman Islands with his fraudulent set-up.  I worked with Bill Walker who even helped draft the trust legislation in Cayman, all taken from the Bahamas. 

The Cayman Islands in the early 1960s had no telephone service and electricity did not extend to all districts of Grand Cayman. There was no piped water supply or sewage system. Mosquitoes were so thick at certain times of the year they even suffocated cows. Many of Cayman’s roads were unpaved. There was no tourist industry in Cayman, except for a few scuba divers. I recall that jets could not land at the small airport. 

The Banks and Trust Companies regulation in Cayman directly copied from the Bahamas; Liechtenstein’s trusts and British laws influenced the Trusts Law. 

When Lynden Pindling in the Bahamas became the first black premier of the British colony, things really started moving for the Cayman Islands as it took business away from the Bahamas, at the time one of the well-established offshore financial centres. With Pindling and his party’s rise to power came the winds of independence and an increase in racial tensions, not a place one wanted to set up a company.

Bahamas’ financial investors and its offshore banking industry, already nervous because of the uncertainty, started looking to move to other jurisdictions in the late 1960s to great benefit for the Cayman Islands. 

For family reasons at the time (an excuse), ignorance, and indeed that, I believed the whole business could not continue I did not engage myself in this lucrative business, something I so many times later regretted having been there from the start. 

My change of direction was entirely due to the fact that I could not believe in a business, where a London barrister, who I worked closely with, was involved first with setting up the trust law in Cayman, later advised the Labour government on how to close the loopholes and then later again charged big fees to advise the Cayman Island how to get around the changes to UK fiscal law. Surely, such madness could not continue, I was so wrong. I even said that governments would simply prevent all this, in the future, I was indeed wrong. Further, I did not believe in the morale of the business, just charging large fees and effectively most of the time had a hold on their client by holding the secret of many of their client’s actions, actions which could result in clients going to prison or worse. 

Perhaps, I did not have the patience and did not see the constructive in all this, I do not know. Moreover, I did not have any older to advise me. I was so wrong because where could all the corrupt politicians bring their money and secrets. As we have seen in recent history, we allowed all the politicians and thieves stealing billions from Africa, South America, and Asia to deposit their money in London. We have seen how all the Russian Oligarchs have succeeded in cleaning their money via offshore structures, advised by prominent lawyers and accountants.

London  –  the Money Laundering Capital of the World

Since I first came into contact with City, witnessing the expertise of law firms, accountants, and international bankers, I knew this was a set-up of great scope and with the ultimate support by the government and the power lobby of politicians. Already back in the 1960s, London welcomed African dictators money, civil servant’s loots from Africa, and South America. Frankly, no questions asked, only look at how much to charge. It has always been a known fact, that City could get away with murder, not even the Swiss could compete.

I believe, it has always been a hundred years of tradition by the British to attract capital and loots from ill forgotten gains by politicians and criminals from all over the world. I think the British tradition of corruption laid the foundation.

A Caribbean diplomat to United Nations told me years ago, that the British ruled the colonies by corruption, not paying civil servants, so they could rob the locals and remain loyal to the British for allowing their positions. Recently, the Guardian revealed that it had received documents from a three-year investigation by the Latvian and Moldavian authorities into what has been dubbed the Global Laundromat. According to the newspaper “these documents show that between 2010 and 2014, British registered companies and British-based banks helped move out of Russia at least $20bn of the proceeds of criminal activities.

This should come as no surprise. In 2016, the Home Affairs Select Committee concluded that the London property market was the primary avenue for the laundering of £100bn of illicit money a year. The investigative journalist Roberto Saviano has said of the international drug trade: “Mexico is its heart and London is its head.”

London has not become the global capital of money laundering by accident. Money launderers and those financing terrorist activities have two main requirements. The first is a place crowded with financial transactions, in which their own will be easy to lose. The second is a place where those who enable the setting up of companies and the opening of bank accounts are prepared to turn a blind eye to who is the owner of a business. Secrecy over the beneficial ownership of companies is the main conduit of money laundering.

Three academics—Michael Findley, Daniel Nielson, and Jason Sharman—undertook an experiment, detailed in their book “Global Shell Games.” They tried to set up a company in the way that a money launderer would (refusing to provide ownership information and other markers), emailing 7,400 solicitations to lawyers and corporate service providers in 182 countries. Contrary to what you might think, it is more than three times harder to obtain an untraceable shell company in tax havens than in rich, developed countries such as the UK and the United States.

At the moment, the UK is a member of two organizations, the OECD and the European Union, which routinely publishes blacklists of countries that are deemed “high risk” when it comes to money laundering and a “danger to the international financial system”. The UK, the US, and Switzerland have never been blacklisted. Instead, the usual pariahs of the west—Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and so on—appear, along with small states such as Antigua or St Kitts and Nevis.

This motley collection of countries presents the most marginal threat to the international financial system. They are merely powerless to respond to being listed. Former US official Juan Zarate has boasted that a dedicated team at the US Treasury uses its influence to get American enemies blacklisted and friends left alone, in the name of counter-terrorism. Banks face large fines for facilitating transactions with countries on these lists, and as a result, they have withdrawn services, leaving these countries stranded financially. Caribbean countries have lost the most corresponding relationships with international banks. The EU and OECD are in danger of pushing countries into the hands of the very people they listed them for helping.

There is a word in German—Lebenslüge—meaning the lie you have to tell yourself to live your life. It is appropriate here. We prefer to think that the success of the City of London and our property market relates to our skills honed in ancient universities, not the banking of nouveau riche criminals. Once British newspapers have salivated over the details of the latest money laundering ring, they quickly return to the narrative that the real threat lies on small, palm-fringed islands.

Yet in the Findley, Nielson and Sharman study, they were never able to set up a shell company in Caymans, Bahamas or Seychelles. The politicisation of the blacklists has enabled London to become the global centre of money laundering. These criminals will not be defeated until our capital and others are no longer protected. Quite accidentally that time may come soon. Some in the City of London think that Brexit will allow them to prosper—but it could instead give the EU the opportunity to add it to a list.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/london-the-worlds-money-laundering-capital

“LONDON — London has become the money-laundering capital of the world with billions of dollars in stolen funds illegally hidden in the city’s booming property market, according to an investigation that will be broadcast Wednesday.“

A team of undercover reporters, one of whom was disguised as a corrupt Russian politician, secretly recorded some of London’s top real estate agents offering to help facilitate illicit transactions despite British laws that require the agents to report suspicious activity to the authorities.

Openly bragging to the property brokers that he had pocketed millions in back-handers, “Boris” explained that he was a Russian health minister. All five of the real estate agents approached, who stood to gain commissions of up to $500,000, appeared willing to recommend ways to hide the money through offshore companies or passed on details of lawyers who might be able to do the same.

Roman Borisovich, the anti-corruption campaigner who posed as Boris, said he was stunned that none of the brokers challenged his legal ability to purchase the properties.

“It’s just appalling,” he told the makers of From Russia With Cash. “The fact that they would all suggest different ways of going ahead with the deal with clearly stolen money; this is brazen, this is in their face, and all of them are willing to proceed.”

In the undercover footage, “Boris” clearly explained that the money he had made personally while procuring drugs for the Russian healthcare service could never be discovered. “The most important thing is I need to buy it very discretely—I’m a Russian government official. Every contract brings a little to my pocket,” he told one of the unsuspecting real estate agents.

“Nobody is surprised, nobody is shocked, it’s business as usual,” he said afterwards.

While some of the real estate agents, who were selling properties worth up to $25 million, said they didn’t want to know the details, others offered detailed advice about how to funnel the cash through shell companies operating anonymously.

None of them suggested there was any reason that the deals should not progress.

Jonathan Fisher QC, a financial crime lawyer, watched in horror as “Boris” and one property marketer, which are known as estate agents in Britain, plotted the purchase of a $15 million home in West London.

“It’s 100% consistent with the using of this mechanism to handle the proceeds of crime—in short to money-launder,” he told Channel 4.

“It’s a miserable and incredibly disappointing account of what estate agents, some estate agents are plainly up to in Central London, and I’d rather thought, naively, that following the introduction of the money-laundering regulations in 2003 that applied to estate agents from that point onward, I’d rather thought we’d gone past that stage.”

Keith Gorny, a broker at state agency Marsh and Parsons, described on camera that he had identified two offshore trusts in Jersey that specialized in Russian clients. “In terms of structuring the purchase, I’ve spoken to a couple of people. Your best route will be through a Jersey trust that will, in turn, own a company that owns the property,” he said.

Marsh and Parsons, which advertises with the slogan “The Only Way is Ethics,” denied any wrongdoing and said they would respond fully once they had seen the program.

On camera, Gorny suggested that foreign buyers who insisted on the utmost discretion were a growing part of the top-end London property market. “80% of my transactions, actually more I’d say now, are to international overseas-based buyers, and I’d say 50 to 60% of those were conducted in various stages of anonymity,” he said.

Chido Dunn, who works for Global Witness, an international anti-corruption organization, said Britain was leading the world in helping criminals hide their assets. “Stolen billions don’t fit under mattresses—people only steal them if it is somewhere safe to put them and the U.K.’s property market is providing that safe haven,” she said. “London is, in effect, the money-laundering capital of the world.”

Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin, was a consultant on the documentary, which was his idea. “The idea to make it came from rage at the ‘looting machine at work in London: billions of dollars are being laundered through London property from Russia and all the other dictatorships of the world,” he told The Daily Beast. “This is impoverishing their people and propping up those regimes. The UN estimates corruption enabled by rackets like this kill 3.6m people a year by stealing their public services. Victorian brick has become the global reserve currency of kleptocracy. I came up with the idea for #FromRussiaWithCash to expose how easy it is to launder money in London—and also show how Britain’s elites are themselves being transformed for the ill.”

The men who plundered Europe’: bankers on trial for siphoning €60bn

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/20/the-men-who-plundered-europe-city-of-london-practices-on-trial-in-bonn

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

Martin Shields and Nick Diable are accused of tax fraud in the ‘cum-ex’ scandal that exposes the City’s pursuit of profit

They have been called “the men who plundered Europe”: a group of cowboy traders, seasoned tax lawyers and mathematical whizz kids who are alleged to have conspired in the heart of the City of London to siphon at least €60bn in taxpayers’ money from the state coffers of several EU countries.

In Britain, the so-called “cum-ex” scandal, named after the complex derivatives juggling act employed, gained little attention amid the frenzied debate around the UK’s departure from the European Union when the fraud scheme was discovered in 2017.

But in continental Europe what Le Monde has described as the “robbery of the century” has done almost as much to shape the view of Britain as Brexit itself. Dutch media has called it “organised crime in pinstripe suits” and one of the original German whistleblowers said he now welcomes Britain’s exit from the EU in the hope it could weaken the influence of London investment banking on European financial institutions.

This week, a British former investment banker involved in developing the scheme for the first time gave the public an insight into how the scheme worked and what spurred on its architects.

Speaking at a regional court in Bonn, Martin Shields, one of two former bankers on trial for 34 instances of serious tax fraud between 2006 and 2011, painted a picture of a London banking scene that lured in the brightest scientists from the country’s top universities and used them to boost their profit margins – without teaching them about the moral and legal consequences of their actions in return.

Q&A
What is a cum-ex deal?

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A cum-ex deal, from the Latin meaning with-without, is a complex set of share transactions with the purpose of getting the state to reimburse a tax that was never paid in the first place.

Cum-ex transactions work by trading shares at high speed on or just before the dividend record date – the day the company checks its records to identify shareholders – and then claiming two or more refunds for capital gains tax that had in fact only been paid to the state once. Because the pay-out is automated, the trade can be repeated again and again.

Some financial experts have likened the practice to the banking equivalent of parents claiming child benefits for multiple children when they only have one.

“This was the environment at that time: a financial industry that – at least as far as I could see – was geared towards maximum profit optimisation,” the 41-year-old told a packed courtroom on Wednesday.

“One tool to achieve this goal was tax optimisation: avoiding taxation as far as possible – and taking advantage of any opportunities that could be found or created. This was not the clandestine approach of a few. Rather, I saw it as the clear and openly communicated expectation of most major banks and their customers.”

Hailed as a maths prodigy at school, Shields accepted a junior position at Merrill Lynch after studying engineering, economics and management at Oxford University because the trading room floor offered him a thrilling, dynamic environment. He was not alone: of 120 engineers in his year group at university, Shields added, only five went into engineering.

Wearing a navy blue suit and the latest Apple Watch 5 with a white strap, Shields on Wednesday used a Powerpoint presentation to talk the court through the “cum-ex ecosystem” of labyrinthine trade chains he helped conceive and control, which prosecutors say cost the German state €450m. A translator tasked with rendering City trader jargon into German legalese was struggling to keep up.

The financial rewards were breathtaking: for the five years in which Shields practised cum-ex trades through Gibraltar-based investment vehicle Ballance Capital, his personal income amounted to €12m. In 2010 Shields and his wife managed to purchase a £9.7m mansion on Chelsea’s Egerton Crescent, followed by a €6m Edwardian terrace on Shrewsbury Road, Dublin’s most expensive residential street.

While Shields did not respond directly to the charges of serious tax fraud this week, he said in hindsight he had started to feel regret about devising the schemes, which hoovered up money that could have otherwise been spent on building roads, hospitals or nurseries.

He told the court: “I often ask myself whether if I had my time again I would do things differently. Knowing what I now know, the answer is obvious. I would not have involved myself in the cum-ex industry.”

He had made the “difficult decision” to cooperate with the investigation, which increases his chance of reducing a potential 10-year jail service. Co-accused Nick Diable (39), who worked with Shields for Germany’s fourth-largest bank HypoVereinsbank (HVB), will also give testimony in the trial, which is expected to last until next year.

Shields said cum-ex trades were practised on an “industrial scale” in the first decade of the 21st century and involved a vast network of banks, companies, brokers, lawyers and financial advisers. Even the most basic cum-ex deal involves at least 12 transactions.

The banks and financial institutions he mentioned in Wednesday’s and Thursday’s court session included Clearstream AG, a 100% owned subsidiary of Deutsche Börse AG that processes the dividend compensation payments and which Shields appeared to suggest played an active part in keeping the cum-ex bonanza going after German lawmakers tried to close a loophole in 2007.
A spokesman for Deutsche Börse, which was raided in connection with the wider investigation in August, said it was cooperating with the authorities.

During Shields’s appearance this week, the backbenches of the court were packed with numerous lawyers representing high-profile banks and financial institutions that could be dragged into the scandal if the judge in Bonn rules that cum-ex trades did not merely exploit a legal loophole but violated the law at the time.

Three characters mentioned in the testimony were notable by their absence from the court proceedings: Shields’s long-time boss and later business partner Paul Mora, and the renowned German tax lawyer Hanno Berger, who allegedly introduced him to cum-ex methods at HVB. A third man, Dubai-based British citizen Sanjay Shah, is alleged to have copied their methods to defraud the Danish treasury on a vast scale.

Until 2015, Mora was a director of the Cinnamon Club, an opulent Indian restaurant located in a Grade II-listed Victorian building next to the Department for Education and popular with politicians and business people. According to Die Zeit, the restaurant was where cum-ex deals were contrived and later celebrated, and one insider referred to it as the “cum-ex lounge”. Mora has denied wrongdoing, telling New Zealand media that all his trades were “approved by legal experts and undertaken in accordance with the advice”.

In separate investigations into the same scheme, the justice minister of North-Rhine Westphalia said that Cologne prosecutors are now conducting 56 probes with a total of about 400 suspects related to cum-ex. More than 400 individuals and companies have been charged in connection with the scheme in Denmark.

Estimated losses include an estimated €31.8 bn Germany, at least €17bn for France, €4.5bn in Italy, €1.7bn in Denmark and €201m for Belgium“The Cologne investigations have now reached a point that prosecutors say that cum-ex wasn’t a legal tax-driven trading strategy, but organised white-collar crime of unimaginable magnitude,” the minister said.

Continue……..

How Corrupt Is Britain?

In my experience very, if you define corruption and what it really means. In the old days, it was natural that those who did not succeed in getting a professional education or had a good university background could always end up in the City, because of school, military or club connections. This was a kind of corruption and I have observed many, which never meant the use of a little brown envelope. The systemic corruption in planning, in some places, does involve money.

David Whyte, a professor at the University of Liverpool, recently produced a comprehensive guide that includes other examples of serious corruption in the UK. Editor of the book How Corrupt Is Britain?

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

Just how corrupt is the UK?

By Ian Fraser (from an article 13th May 2016)

” How corrupt is Britain?

Over the past few days, quite a few people have been insisting Britain isn’t corrupt. They claim to see nothing wrong with Cameron describing countries such as Afghanistan and Nigeria, whose leaders were in London for the Anti-Corruption Summit in Lancaster House this week, as “fantastically corrupt”. When Cameron was caught on camera uttering these words in what he thought was a private conversation with the Queen, his clear insinuation was that their former colonial master is, by comparison, whiter than white.

On social media, many people subsequently claimed they could see nothing wrong with the prime minister’s remarks. As evidence, they cite Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, according to which Britain is the 10th least corrupt country of 168 countries surveyed. Or, to be precise, Britain is ranked 10th= “least corrupt country”, alongside Luxembourg and Germany. By contrast, Afghanistan, where Britain fought a war from 2001-to 14, was ranked 166th, and Nigeria, which was a British colony until 1960, was ranked 136th.

Unfortunately, however, the methodology Transparency International uses to produce its corruption index is flawed. It is based on subjective “perceptions” of corruption garnered from pre-existing surveys and interviews — whose very subjectivity means there’s a risk of reinforcing existing stereotypes — not from primary research.

Another issue is Transparency International’s somewhat narrow definition of “corruption”. Its annual survey focuses solely on whether politicians and public officials demand, and get bribes. This follows the World Bank’s narrow definition of corruption: “the abuse of public office for private gain”.

However, in a recent piece in the Washington Post, Sussex University professor Dan Hough wrote:
“The Corruption Perceptions Index . . . says nothing about corruption in private business – say the Libor scandal in Britain or the recent VW emissions scandal in the United States. These events involve private actors, but they have very real public impacts, whether on the interest rates that people pay on their mortgages or on public health.”

In the FAQs section of its latest CPI report, Transparency International acknowledges that its approach is at best partial, stating: “The Corruption Perceptions Index is an indicator of perceptions of public sector corruption, i.e. administrative and political corruption. It is not a verdict on the levels of corruption of entire nations or societies, or of their policies, or the activities of their private sector.”
In short, TI acknowledges its index falls short of giving the full picture.

Off the scale

Even though “brown envelopes” are less ubiquitous here than they are in places like Afghanistan and Nigeria, there can be no doubt that Britain is seriously corrupt.

The failure to prosecute any of the bankers who are widely believed to have committed fraud in the run-up to the banking crisis and our so-called “two-tier justice system” is clear evidence of that.

This was yesterday encapsulated by the announcement from Scotland’s state prosecutor, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, that it had found “insufficient evidence” to press criminal charges on Fred Goodwin or other former directors of RBS, despite what is widely considered to have been the bank’s fraudulent rights issue in April 2008. That was capped by the appointment of the Lord Advocate who presided over the fruitless, five-year RBS inquiry, or should I say “whitewash”?, Frank Mulholland, as a judge in Scotland’s top commercial court, the Court of Session.

The bailing out of kleptocratic banks with more than £1.3 trillion of taxpayers’ funds in 2008-9 without demanding or enforcing structural or behavioural change on the banking sector is another sign of, at best, “crony capitalism” and, at worst, “corruption”. One might argue that the rebranding of criminal fraud as “mis-selling” and “misconduct” is another; as is the UK government’s shameful kowtowing to the congenitally corrupt HSBC, which saw Cameron’s government last year water down much-needed post-crisis banking reforms after Europe’s largest bank rattled its sabre and threatened to remove its headquarters from the UK.

Other signs of insidious corruption in the UK include the ability of the former prime minister, Tony Blair, to (i) appease bankers by enfeebling City regulation, mainly in 2002-07, a period when he and fellow Labour cabinet ministers repeatedly intervened to prevent the FSA from doing its job in order to protect banks from much-needed scrutiny; (ii) take a $3m-a-year senior advisory role with JPMorgan Chase within weeks of leaving Downing Street. And don’t get me started on the other roles that Blair has fulfilled since 2007, including his notorious £5m deal to launder the image of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, a man accused of horrendous human rights abuses.

The revolving door between Westminster/Whitehall and the City of London/private sector is not the exclusive preserve of former prime ministers. Former chancellor Alistair Darling is now a director of the US banking giant Morgan Stanley and former chief secretary of the Treasury Danny Alexander, who lost his Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey parliamentary seat in the May 2015 general election, is now vice-president and corporate secretary of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. And of course, another former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, last December joined the global advisory board of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund manager.

According to a piece in the Daily Mail, these four are the tip of the iceberg. Nearly 400 former government ministers and senior civil servants have, since 2008, cashed in on their experience in government in order to pass through the gilded revolving door into the lucrative private sector and regulatory jobs. The revolving door also works in the other direction with, for example, Stephen Green, former chairman of HSBC, being ennobled by Prime Minister David Cameron so he could become a trade minister. As the revolving door has spun at warp speed, so the scope for corruption has intensified.

Attempted cover-ups

There are plenty of other signs of institutional corruption in the UK, including the appalling Hillsborough cover-up and the Tories’ attempted cover-up of alleged election fraud related to money spent on ‘battle buses’ during last year’s general election campaign, a matter which is now being criminally probed by more than ten police forces.

Then there’s the captured and atrophied state of our financial regulators, a situation which gives banks and other financial institutions more or less free rein to fleece their clients at will, without any fear of retribution; the leeway and credence given to “Big Four” accountancy firms even though, by their own actions, they have shown themselves to be useless and corrupt; the way in which almost every UK inquiry the audit and other failures of PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY either never really happens or ends up getting suppressed; and the way in which Tony Blair succumbed to bullying by the Saudis to drop the Serious Fraud Office’s probe into BAE Systems bribes associated with Al Yamamah, the $150 billion arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia (see my earlier blog Britain Is Fast Turning into a Banana Monarchy and Geoff Gilson’s blog).

Stench offshore,  Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

I would single out the recent failure of David Cameron’s government, despite the revelations contained in the Panama Papers, to force Britain’s Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, which include the British Virgin Islands, and indeed the City of London itself, to become more open and transparent and to cease acting as a hiding place for tax evaders, money launderers, drugs barons, fraudsters and corrupt politicians to stash their ill-gotten gains as the most glaring recent example of corruption.

The governments of Nigeria, Kenya, France and Afghanistan all recently committed to providing public registers of the beneficial ownership of companies, trusts and foundations. But the UK’s tax and secrecy havens are refusing to make any such commitment and Cameron has no intention of forcing their hands.

Dirty money from tax-evading oligarchs and other nefarious individuals is inflating London’s property bubble (in the process turning the capital into even more of an unlivable city for ordinary mortals) at the same time as adding what is perceived to be much-needed liquidity to London’s financial markets. However, in welcoming it, we’re effectively giving a “getaway vehicle” to international gangsters. In the process, we’re fuelling international crime, war and terrorism and depriving developing countries including Russia, China and India of hundreds of billions of dollars that is rightfully theirs.

None of this would be possible were it not for the UK’s notoriously feeble anti-money laundering defences.

In its excellent “Don’t Look, Won’t Find” report, Transparency International highlighted how so-called professionals in banking, accountancy, law, estate agency and company formation — as well as direct sellers of products and services to wealthy foreigners including auction houses, purveyors of luxury goods and private schools — are ushering in this toxic tide. Most of the 22 regulators that are supposed to stem the flow of “dirty money” into the UK were revealed to be far more interested in cheerleading and lobbying for their member firms (which of course make huge sums from laundering dirty cash) than in regulating them. Such self-regulation has become an utter farce.

Scotland’s company factories

The situation in company formation is particularly worrying. Anyone from anywhere in the world can set up the opaque UK registered Limited Partnership (shell company) for a relatively small fee, on a no-questions-asked basis.

Companies House admits that verifying the identities of those who incorporate such vehicles, or checking whether they have legitimate intent, are outside its remit. Last summer Richard Smith and I, when researching the role of Scottish limited partnerships in a $1bn Moldovan bank fraud, discovered that such vehicles are now widely recognised as “Europe’s secrecy vehicle of choice” and are widely favoured by organised criminals, tax evaders, fraudsters and money launderers.

18 Royston Mains Street, EH5 1LB

Today these secrecy vehicles are being churned out at a rate of 6,000 a year (up from 500 a year in 2008) by “company factories” based in a twilight zone of modest ex-council flats in housing schemes in places like Edinburgh and Inverness. We found that a single ground-floor, one-bedroom flat located in the neighbourhood where Irvine Welsh set Trainspotting (pictured left), was not only home to two company formation businesses —Royston Business Services and Arran Business Services — but was also the registered address of 425 companies. One of the firms based in the flat, Fortuna United LP, was, according to investigators Kroll, pivotal to a $1bn bank fraud that has devastated Moldova’s economy and caused the collapse of the former Soviet republic’s government.

At least 90 per cent of the Scottish limited partnerships churned out by these “company factories” have anonymous general and limited partners (corporate “beneficial owners”) located in offshore secrecy havens such as the British Virgin Islands, Marshall Islands, Seychelles, Belize and Panama. Fortuna United was controlled by two firms purportedly based in the Seychelles — Trafford United Ltd, where the flat’s owner ViktorijaZirnelyte is the sole director, and Brixton Ventures Ltd, where her fellow Lithuanian RemigijusMikalauskas is the sole director.

Scottish limited partnerships along similar lines to Fortuna United — whose opacity is so impregnable it’s virtually impossible to verify the purpose to which they’re being put, who controls them or the sums being channelled through them — are today being heavily marketed by company formation businesses across Central & Eastern Europe and further afield. These include Darwin Tax (believed to be a feeder for Zirnelyte and Mikalauskas), Five Consult, Gestion Baltic, Inlat Plus, LTSS and Sanemto, all Riga-based, and agents based in jurisdictions including Belarus, Belize, Cyprus, Dominica, Greece, Ukraine (where there are a great many providers), Panama, Russia and Hong Kong.
Panama-based World Merchant, part of Nevis-registered OP Group Services LLC, is currently advertising SLPs as the “ideal entities for international merchant accounts”. On its website, World Merchant adds:-

Under Scottish law . . . the tax transparency [of Scottish LPs] means that, provided no business is done in the UK and provided the two partners are located in tax-free jurisdictions (we typically prefer Belize, Nevis or Panama), no tax is payable anywhere. The LP is free to do business tax-free in the whole world outside the UK, even including the European Union. An SLP can be set up at a relatively low cost by our preferred incorporation partner, Offshore Pro Group. The typical time required for setting up a new partnership is 5-7 days.

If it was not for the ready availability of anonymous shell companies registered in supposedly reputable tax havens and jurisdictions such as the UK, time could be called on the offshore game. Without them, the corrupt would be unable to loot developing counties without leaving fingerprints, and western firms allegedly including Rolls-Royce, Petrofac and Weir Group would have no anonymous conduits with which to grease the palms of overseas officials and politicians in the hope of securing lucrative contracts.

In ‘Dirty Oil‘, her excellent BBC Radio 4 ‘File on 4’ documentary on the Unaoil scandal, first broadcast on Tuesday 10th May 2016, Jane Deith revealed how UK-based shell companies, including Comex Industries LLP, were allegedly being used by Monaco-based Unaoil to funnel bribes to, among others, Iraqi politicians.

There’s no suggestion, though, that any of the above-mentioned company formation businesses knowingly create or serve companies or partnerships that are used in offshore tax evasion, corruption or fraud, or that they could be especially useful for such purposes.

Despite David Cameron’s recent grandiloquent claims, neither the British nor the Scottish government seems willing to do anything to address this particular open sore, as the revised beneficial ownership rules he keeps trumpeting don’t apply to Limited Partnerships with overseas partners. If you can face reading more on some of the uses to which Scottish LPs are being put, I’d recommend A billion-dollar bank fraud in Moldova, and 20,000 opaque British corporations (by Richard Smith and me) and The billion-dollar ex-council flat (by the BBC’s Tim Whewell).”

London ‘laundromat’ – The recently published report from the intelligence and security committee on Russian interference in UK politics.

Welcoming oligarchs with open arms (from the report, see page 15)

49. Whilst the Russian elite have developed ties with a number of countries in recent years, it would appear that the UK has been viewed as a particularly favourable destination for Russian oligarchs and their money. It is widely recognised that the key to London’s appeal was the exploitation of the UK’s investor visa scheme, introduced in 1994, followed by the promotion of a light and limited touch to regulation, with London’s strong capital and housing markets offering sound investment opportunities. The UK’s rule of law and judicial system was also seen as a draw. The UK welcomed Russian money, and few questions – if any – were asked about the provenance of this considerable wealth. It appears that the UK Government at the time held the belief (more perhaps in hope than expectation) that developing links with major Russian companies would promote good governance by encouraging ethical and transparent practices, and the adoption of a law-based commercial environment.
50. What is now clear is that it was in fact counter-productive, in that it offered ideal mechanisms by which illicit finance could be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’. The money was also invested in extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment – PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions were all willing beneficiaries of Russian money, contributing to a ‘reputation laundering’ process. In brief, Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal, and there are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene and accepted because of their wealth. This level of integration – in ‘Londongrad’ in particular – means that any measures now being taken by the Government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation.
51. It is not just the oligarchs either: the arrival of Russian money resulted in a growth industry of enablers – individuals and organisations who manage and lobby for the Russian elite in the UK. Lawyers, accountants, estate agents and PR professionals have played a role, wittingly or unwittingly, in the extension of Russian influence which is often linked to promoting the nefarious interests of the Russian state. seek kompromat on competitors, and on occasion, help launder money through offshore shell companies and fabricate ‘due diligence reports, while lawyers provide litigation support. William Browder told the Committee that:

Russian state interests, working in conjunction with and through criminal private interests, set up a ‘buffer’ of Westerners who become de facto Russian state agents, many unwittingly, but others with a reason to know exactly what they are doing and for whom. As a result, UK actors have to deal with Russian criminal interests masked as state interests, and Russian state interests masked by their Western agents.

All this has been an open secret for years – but politician put their blind eye to the whole issue because of MONEY. I recall lawyers and estate agents years ago being paid in cash, lawyers using “client accounts” and million pounds properties paid in cash – no questions asked. This report will not change anything!

 

Do not ever wait to say, what needs to be said! – Time waits for no one

The Barings

I knew two of the Barings in the 1960s and 70s, to me they represented the gentleman merchant bankers, I never forget my visits to their offices, the first time in 1967, very impressive. I met privately with one of the Barings many times and found him a true English country gentleman. I was not surprised what happened to them, however, it was sad such a company failed so fast and hundreds of years of expertise and experience went down the drain.

Having read about the American investment bankers history and their starts in the 19th Century, it was all about the family, as one could not trust outsiders. I had also seen this with many private Swiss Banks. I truly understood this too late, sadly, I had no family and my children were not old enough.

I recall when I in 1986-87 together with Woody Brock visited a number of the largest European banks. We went to the two largest French banks in Paris, two German in Frankfurt and three Swiss Banks in Zurich and spoke to a director and board member in each bank. Since we used a GRID laptop (at the time cost in excess of US$ 20.000), we found that only one director in seven could use a computer and keyboard!

The story of Barings, which was Britain’s oldest merchant bank, is a classic example of how hubris, weak oversight, and a lack of internal checks and balances can bring a company down. In just a few weeks, the Singapore-based trader Nick Leeson racked up hundreds of millions of pounds in losses, disguised them as profits, and fled authorities.

The venerable institution fell into administration just days after management discovered the full scale of the losses, and was sold to the Dutch bank ING for just £1. In the aftermath of the collapse, the Bank of England was roundly criticised, and later stripped of certain powers to create the new Financial Services Authority, whose lack of oversight many believe amplified the effects of the 2008 financial crisis.

Now, what remains of Barings is scattered across the world. The name lives on only through its asset management arm, sold to a US life insurance group 10 years ago, while what remains of the investment bank was absorbed into ING.

The bank’s collapse ended the family control that had lasted for more than two centuries, with its chairman at the time, Peter Baring, retiring soon after ING’s acquisition. It was an inglorious end for what was perhaps the banking world’s most famous dynasty.

Barings was founded on Christmas Day 1762 by John, Francis and Charles Baring, the sons of John Baring, a German wool trader who had arrived in Britain some 45 years earlier.

It began life as a merchant house but soon developed into financing other merchants, becoming a fully-fledged bank. It was its role in Britain’s war efforts, first against the American Revolution and then Napoleon’s France, that really made its name, however. In 1803, the bank financed the Louisiana Purchase, America’s $15m acquisition of land from France that doubled the size of the USA. Three years later it moved to the Bishopsgate office, where it remained until its collapse.

As capitalism swept across Britain, Barings moved from a merchant bank to commercial activities. In 1886, it floated the Guinness brewery, and after a Bank of England-led rescue of the bank in 1890, following Barings’ near collapse when Argentina appeared close to defaulting on its debt, its commercial arm expanded.

In 1984 Barings acquired a Japanese securities business from Henderson Crosthwaite, the stockbroker, and in 1991 a 40pc interest in US investment bank Dillon Read.

In 1992, Leeson, an ambitious young back-office banker who had joined three years earlier Morgan Stanley, was put in charge of Barings Futures Singapore (BFS). The unit’s job was simply to trade futures contracts – largely 10-year Japanese bonds and the Nikkei 225 – for clients.

Leeson was put in charge of both the trading floor and transaction settlement operations. James Bax, who ran Barings’ Asian operations, warned that “we are in danger of setting up a structure which will prove disastrous and with which we will succeed in losing either a lot of money or client goodwill or probably both”.

A year later, BFS began to trade using its own account, attempting to take advantage of the difference between futures on the Japanese and Singaporean exchanges to make a profit. Such arbitrage, referred to inside Barings as “switching”, was seen as “essentially risk-free and very profitable” by management in London, including its chairman Peter Baring, according to the Bank of England’s report into the bank’s collapse.

Leeson, however, set up a secret account, number 88888, which he used to make seismic bets on the Japanese markets.

By the end of 1994, account 88888 had lost 33bn yen (£208m), but Barings’ London management was not aware. Leeson, as head of both front and back office, was able to disguise his losses as debts owed by Barings clients. Leeson’s bonus more than trebled in 1994 to £450,000.

Things came to a head, however, on January 17, 1995. The devastating Kobe earthquake caused $100bn in damage, or 2.5pc of Japan’s GDP, and shook its bond and stock markets. Leeson’s losses ballooned to £827m and he was no longer able to disguise them from Barings management – Peter Baring and the bank’s new chief executive Peter Norris.

On Thursday, February 23, after executives began to ask questions, Leeson and his wife fled Singapore for Malaysia, from where he faxed his resignation. The next day, Peter Baring met Rupert Pennant-Rea, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, to inform him that Barings had been defrauded. The Bank’s governor, Eddie George, was recalled from his Swiss skiing holiday, and rescue was attempted over the weekend. Ernst & Young were brought in as administrators on Sunday, February 26.

A week later, ING had agreed to buy Barings, and Leeson had been arrested in Frankfurt. He would serve two-thirds of a six-and-a-half-year sentence, and was released after being diagnosed with colon cancer, from which he has recovered. Now 47, Leeson’s City days are over, but he remains on the after-dinner speaking circuit, after several years as chief executive of Irish football club Galway United.

Peter Baring, whose resignation as chairman ended 232 years of unbroken family control of the bank, retired, but Norris staged a comeback after being banned from the City for four years. He established a corporate finance business and went on to become chairman of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group in 2009.

A report by the Bank of England’s board of banking supervision found that it “did not have an adequate understanding” of Barings. Two years later Labour made the Financial Services Authority the primary policeman of the banking sector.

Whether 2008 would have been managed better or worse had the events of February 1995 not unfolded as they did, one can only speculate. But the collapse of Barings remains a crucial chapter in Britain’s financial history. 

Christopher Columbus

Over this Covid-19 summer of 2020, we have seen so many attacks on historical figures and statues around the world. Most of these attack has been made in the name of Black Life Matters and other causes. One of the people which statues has been subject to such vandalism is of Christopher Columbus.

Now, I have been reading a fair amount about Christopher Columbus through the years. I can’t see we can blame him for much, he was an explorer, and he felt strongly about his mission. The Spanish King and others exploited his discovery, and he never received the money he had a claim to, 10% of all wealth brought back in the years to come from the new territories.

Tens of thousands of people waded into the debate this summer over statues of historical figures linked to slavery and racism that has raged, signing petitions for and against a growing number of plans for their removal. If we attack Christopher Columbus, statues of all rulers, kings and explorers should be taken down. Even in the UK, there were many attacks on the past and statues. See The Guardian

CCN showed a program in June about Christopher Columbus, with a very one-sided view, with no objectivity. This programme made me react with a written comment to CCN, which they did not bother replying to. I made my comments, spending just a few hours on the Internet (the comments are in Italic), it is worth reading 10 Things People Get Wrong About Columbus:

Why Christopher Columbus wasn’t the hero we learned about in school

By Alicia Lee, CNN,  June 12, 2020

That rhyme has long been how American students were introduced to Christopher Columbus in elementary school.

Students are taught that Columbus is the one who discovered the Americas, sailing across the Atlantic in his three ships: The Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. The Italian explorer is even celebrated every October during a federal holiday named after him.

But the man credited for discovering the “New World” has long been considered a contentious figure in US history for his treatment of the indigenous communities he encountered and for his role in the violent colonisation at their expense.

Dozens of cities and states — such as Minnesota, Alaska, Vermont and Oregon — have already replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.

Now, in response to the nationwide protests and conversations surrounding racial inequality, people have been tearing down statues of Columbus to bring awareness to the cruelty he brought upon indigenous people.

Statues of Christopher Columbus are being dismounted across the country

So what did Columbus really do and why is he being labelled as a “tyrant” rather than the hero we were taught to believe?

“We should question why we as Americans continue to celebrate him without knowing the true history of his legacy, and why a holiday was created in the first place,” Dr Leo Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and assistant professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, told CNN in 2016.

He wasn’t the first to discover the Americas

There’s no doubt that Columbus’ voyages had an “undeniable historical impact, sparking the great age of Atlantic exploration, trade and eventually colonisation by Europeans,” according to historian David M. Perry,

Not everything you learned about Christopher Columbus is true

But Columbus wasn’t the first to discover the New World. Indigenous people had been living there for centuries by the time he arrived in 1492, and Leif Eriksson and the Vikings beat him to it five centuries earlier.

In fact, I have found that many academics and scholars totally disagree about many things about Christopher Columbo, so much is unknown and undocumented as to his life. I recently saw a documentary made by the Spaniers about Columbus, which I find incorrect in many ways to other historical experts facts. One has to be objective, whatever is made by various countries, ranging from Italy to Portugal about Christopher Columbus they all want him to be more connected to their respective country. Just like all history is written by the rulers of today, they can change everything to their own “truth” and objective.

He enslaved the natives (so did all the kings and rulers at the time, even China today)

During his voyages through the Caribbean islands and the Central and South American coasts, Columbus came upon indigenous people that he labelled “Indians.”

Columbus and his men enslaved many of these native people and treated them with extreme violence and brutality, according to History.com.

Columbus foremost aim was to preach Christianity. He did successful spread the glory of the Christian faith, taking possession of the land not only for Christendom but also for Spain. Even the Pope ordered him to enslave for Christianity.

This is more than 500 years ago, all people in Europe and other places, considered this normal behaviour. What happened just before the Hundred Years War Between England and France lasted for more than a hundred years (1337–1453)?.

Throughout his years in the Americas, Columbus forced natives to work for the sake of profits. Later, he sent thousands of Taino “Indians” to Spain to be sold, and many of them died during the journey. The natives who weren’t sold into slavery were forced to look for gold in mines and work on plantations.

The British sugar planters did this for hundreds of years.

Many national institutions in Britain and France establishment was founded on slavery and the profit from sugar-growing using slaves. Most aristocrats and royalty in Europe was established on enslaving others and stealing their wealth, including stealing from Asia and Africa. Just look at China and Arabic countries today, how they deal with enslaved people. What did the British 350 years after Christopher Columbus do, try to enclave all Chinese with Opium? What about Captain Cook and what he did to the Australia Continent?

While he was governor of what is now the Dominican Republic, Columbus killed many natives in response to their revolt, according to History.com. To prevent further rebellion, he would have the dead bodies paraded through the streets.

What does China do in Xinjiang, taking millions of people as hostage to be brainwashed? Stalin killed possibly 50-80 million people, and Mao’s long march killed maybe 100 million. Spanish Inquisition, (1478–1834) In practice, the Spanish Inquisition served to consolidate power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but it achieved that end through infamously brutal methods. Brutality and fanaticism associated with the Inquisition show what we can do to fellow man.

The Inquisition, in historical ecclesiastical parlance also referred to as the “Holy Inquisition”, was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy. The Inquisition started in 12th-century France to combat religious dissent, particularly among the Cathars and the Waldensians. One of the earliest accounts came from a former Spanish secretary to the Inquisition named Juan Antonio Llorente (1756–1823). According to Llorente, nearly 32,000 “heretics” were burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition, and another 300,000 were put on trial and forced to do penance

He brought new diseases

The indigenous societies of the Americas “were decimated by exposure to Old World diseases, crumbling under the weight of epidemic,” Perry wrote in his CNN op-ed.

What did Denmark bring of illnesses to Greenland? What has China created of pandemics in recent years? The British created the first Dutch concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War, 400 years after Columbus. The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable.

North American colonists’ warfare against Native Americans often was horrifyingly brutal. But one method they appear to have used—perhaps just once—shocks even more than all the bloody slaughter: The gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox. The virus causes a disease that can inflict disfiguring scars, blindness and death.

Colonial weaponising of smallpox against Native Americans was first reported by 19th-century historian Francis Parkman, who came across correspondence in which Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief of the British forces in North America in the early 1760s, had discussed its use with Col. Henry Bouquet, a subordinate on the western frontier during the French and Indian War. Nobody knows exactly how many Indians died of smallpox in the dreadful epidemic of 1837–38. Figures range from a responsible 17,200, based on interviews with the most ravaged tribes of the Plains, to a hyperbolic 150,000.

The impact on a relatively small population of hunter-gatherers and now nearly extinct small farmers was on the level of the Black Death in Europe and far beyond the influenza epidemic of World War I in terms of proportional loss of life and reduction of culture—though in fact more Plains Indians may have died of influenza, tuberculosis and pneumonia once confined to reservations on short rations in the 1880s than succumbed to smallpox in 1837–38.

The epidemic of 1837–38 also spawned a narrative of deliberate white genocide against the original Americans: “smallpox in the blankets”—white Europeans and white Americans deliberately promoting the spread of smallpox among unsuspecting American Indians to clear them off the land. Smallpox in the blankets is one of those stubborn legends that can’t be dismissed as a myth because it is founded in a mixture of limited historical facts and widespread circumstantial evidence.

Based on Raphael Lemkin’s definition of “genocide”— a term he coined in 1944 to describe what the Turks had done to the Armenians during World War I, the Soviets had done to the Ukrainians and upper-class Poles in the interwar period and what the Nazis were then doing to the Jews— the United States had practised cultural genocide against American Indians since the 1870s but had not practised actual physical genocide.

As to concentration camps. The original, most infamous concentration camps were not designed during the Nazi era. Rather, you have to go back to the Boer War in South Africa in the 1890s and early 20th century to discover the use of such dreadful institutions. The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable. Over 26,000 women and children perished in these concentration camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps

“Spanish general named Weyler first implemented the use of reconcentrados, or “camps of reconcentration” to enclose the Cuban civilian population loyal to Spain in what were meant to be safe areas. This was during the Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s, when the Spanish empire was faced with a guerrilla insurrection. Those outside the designated camps were to be deprived of amenities and forced into submission. In practice, about 25,000 died in the “camps of reconcentration” due to poor diet and disease

The first modern concentration camps in the United States were created in 1838. Around this time, the United States was getting bigger. However, Native Americans lived in the lands that the United States wanted to take over.

In 1830, the United States Congress and President Andrew Jackson had passed a law called the Indian Removal Act. This law said that all Native Americans had to leave the United States and move to “Indian Territory,” west of the Mississippi River. However, many Cherokee people would not leave their lands. In May 1838, the United States government decided to force the Cherokee to leave the United States.

First, soldiers forced about 17,000 Cherokee people, and 2,000 of their African-American slaves, into concentration camps, where they had to live during the summer of 1838. 353 Cherokee people died in the camps from dysentery and other diseases. Finally, the Cherokee were forced to travel to the area that is now Oklahoma. (At the time, Oklahoma was not in the United States.) The government also forced other Native American tribes to leave their lands and move west.”

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp

“Russia used prison camps, especially in places in the Arctic or Siberia, a long way from the main cities. The first prison camp in Russia was built in 1918. However, after the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, the Soviet government started sending many more people to forced labour camps. By 1936, there were 5,000,000 inmates in these camps.”

Stalin & Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

“The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р, romanised: Holodomór;] derived from морити голодом, moryty holodom, ‘to kill by starvation), also known as the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, the Terror-Famine and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33,[10] was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.

The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognised by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A United Nations joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.[19]By late 1933, the worst of the famine had run its course. There’s no definite estimate of how many people died. But most scholars agree that at least 2 million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1930 and 1933. However, during any famine, the number of people who die from starvation isn’t the best way to determine the total death toll. The stress of long-term hunger makes people more likely to develop deadly illnesses like typhus and cholera. These diseases were prevalent in Ukraine during the famine and killed millions of additional people.

Some have suggested that if you add the number of people who died from disease or were deported to Gulags by the Soviets, the total tally for the Holodomor is probably somewhere around 7 million. For comparison, it’s estimated that around 12-13 million people died during the Holocaust. It’s a staggering number, and if Stalin did plan the Holodomor, or at least let it happen, then it ranks among the worst crimes in human history.”

Evidence of widespread cannibalism was documented during the Holodomor:

“Survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was “not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.” The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.” I spoke to an old woman in Ukraine during one of my many visits to the country, and she told me that she had witnessed cannibalism when she was a teenager. She told me that they even had to watch during the night because babies and small children could be stolen, even by the military.

“Stalin considered independent peasants, or “kulaks,” to be a serious threat to the success of Communism. These peasants were really only different from other peasants in that they might own a little bit of land. But Stalin created a set of policies designed to completely eliminate the entire class of people. Their farms were seized and the kulaks were either sent to gulags or moved to collective farms. These collective farms were under the strict control of the communist party, and production quotas were set by the state. This mass collectivisation of farms produced food shortages across the Soviet Union.”

https://historycollection.com/holodomor-stalins-genocidal-famine-starved-millions-1930s/3/

“During the period of the Holodomor, millions of people across the entire Union were starving to death, so the famine wasn’t isolated to Ukraine. But there’s evidence that Stalin went to special efforts to make the situation in Ukraine worse. Food quotas for Ukraine were set higher than the area could actually produce, which meant that the authorities were pulling more food out of Ukraine than the people who lived there could afford to give. And the Soviets passed laws that stated any theft of “Socialist Property” was punishable by death. Of course, “Socialist Property” included food.”

I could go on to the terrible mass killing of Armenians by the Turk, of African’s in Rhonda, of the Poll Pot, the Cultural Revolution in China and so on. Do not blame Christopher Columbus; someone else would have discovered the American Continent one day.

The Taino population weren’t immune to diseases such as smallpox, measles and influenza, which were brought to their island of Hispaniola by Columbus and his men. In 1492, there were an estimated 250,000 indigenous people in Hispaniola, but by 1517, only 14,000 remained, according to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

Some historians believe that the impact of European and African settlers in the New World possibly killed as much as 90% of the native populations and was deadlier than the Black Death was in medieval Europe, OMRF said.

CNN’s Leah Asmelash, Holly Yan and Lauren M. Johnson contributed to this report.

After reading now so much about Christopher Columbus, the fact, that he may be the son of a Polish king, who lived in Madeira, and is berried close to where we lived, caused me to write the latest information about Christopher Columbus.

Christopher Columbus’s True Identity Unmasked

The fact that Columbus used some 80 Portuguese toponyms to name the New World, that he never wrote in Italian, but did write in Portuguese flavoured Spanish, and referred to Portugal as his homeland constitute clues to his Portuguese identity. To substantiate the noble birth, Rosa points out that Columbus and his two brothers had easy access to four courts in Europe, and one brother even lived as a guest of the King of France, all of this long before 1492.

Christopher Columbus Last Will a Forgery

Among the more intriguing new pieces of evidence, Rosa shows that the Last Will of 1498 (Mayorazgo or deed of primogeniture), where Columbus supposedly claimed to be “born in Genoa,” is a forgery written by a Genoese interloper long after Columbus died. Henry Harrisse had considered the 1498 Last Will a forgery from a later period, but Rosa was the first to prove that the document was falsified.

After reading the known biographies of Columbus, one realizes that there are enough bits and pieces to support the idea that Columbus, his biographer son Fernando, and the court of Spain made herculean efforts to obscure his true identity and origins. Columbus even changed his name in Spain to that of Cristóbal Colón in order to distance himself from his true lineage. Cristóbal Colón is the only name he ever used during his public life and there is no record in Spain of what his original name was. That by itself does not prove Columbus was royalty, but it appears that, if the identity was successfully obscured during his lifetime, it is almost impossible at this point in history to definitively prove Columbus’s true identity without forensic research. All that remains is the evidence that the obscuring was done and a few clues pointing to his true identity.

Over the centuries, many respected historians came up with different opinions about the true birthplace of Columbus. They had to speculate about what the truth might be since little evidence remains. The majority of scholars came to a conviction that Cristóbal Colón, discoverer, was the same person as Cristoforo Colombo, a Genoese wool-weaver, while other historians supported their own convictions that the wool-weaver and the discoverer could not be the same person.

The Italian historian, Paolo Emilio Taviani, a fierce proponent of the Genoese Colombo wrote: “What wild imaginings could have generated a Greek Columbus, an English Columbus, three French Columbuses, and, as if that were not enough, a Corsican Columbus, a Swiss Columbus, and three Portuguese Columbuses? For an explanation, we can look only to the immeasurable greatness of Columbus’s achievement and to its profound consequences on the course of human history.”

Antonio Ballesteros Beretta wrote: “One person is responsible for the polemics about the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and that person is his own son Ferdinand, who, in his biography of his father, displayed ignorance and doubts on a subject which, on the contrary, he should have known well. His dubious attitude” continues Ballesteros, “about the Discoverer’s origins has given rise to an endless series of hypotheses, some of which are farfetched and fantastic.” Ballesteros adamantly stuck to the belief that Christopher and his son Ferdinand were peasants who wanted to conceal, with a “claim of noble ancestry, their humble wool-weaving origins.”

Another historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote that “The Catalan, French, Galician, Greek, Ibizan, Jewish, Majorcan, Polish, Scottish, and other increasingly silly Columbuses concocted by historical fantasists are agenda-driven creations.” Like many, Fernández-Armesto, claimed that the“ evidence of Columbus’s origins in Genoa is overwhelming,” referring to certain Genoese documents purported to be “beyond the possibility of doubt” about Columbus’s early life. They claim those documents identify the discoverer Colón as the son of Domenico Colombo, a wool-weaver from Genoa.

These Genoese documents were proudly published by the City of Genoa in 1892 and 1896 in a collection of books known by its short tile of Raccolta Colombiana. There one can clearly see that the Cristoforo Colombo of Genoa was by trade nothing more than a lanaiolo: a lowly wool-weaver, son of another wool-weaver.

The Genoese theory discarded many inconvenient truths and invented details to mesh the weaver’s life with the discoverer’s life

Mr Taviani and the other supporters of the Genoese Columbus, however, completely downplayed the fact that the discoverer was a man with extensive schooling who moved within noble circles and that, in Spain, Columbus’s origins were maintained secret from the public. Thus, the Genoese theory discarded many inconvenient truths and invented details to mesh the weaver’s life with the discoverer’s life.
One of the questions we asked Mr Rosa was how could these accepted documents be contested?

“In actuality, there should not even be a need to contest them, because anyone who spends a few hours looking at them will realize that the documents from Genoa are related to a completely different person and have nothing to do with the life of the discoverer. However, since those documents have been accepted for over a century as being related to the discoverer, one is forced to explain them,” Mr. Rosa stated.
When pressed for more specifics, he advises reading his books carefully as they cover 22 years of scientific research that tackle each issue step by step. “However”, he cautioned, “keep in mind that most of the documents in the Raccolta Colombiana are fodder and irrelevant to the solution of Columbus’s identity. Some of the documents do not even exist from the date they were supposedly created but are only referenced in other documents centuries later. Other documents are forged to add information that was not there initially.”

In fact, copies of documents that made it out of Genoa prior to the start of the Columbus controversy, such as Antonio Gallo’s chronicle, do not even mention Columbus, while Gallo’s copy found in Genoa today does. Of the four manuscripts that are attributed to Gallo, where the “Columbus brothers” are mentioned, (British Codex, Torino Codex, Civica Genoa Codex and Federici Codex) NOT ONE is from 1506, when Gallo wrote his chronicle. They are copies done in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Interestingly the Codex stored in the Library of Copenhagen “Ms. Reale antico fondo n. 2205″ the oldest writing from the sixteenth century – therefore written long before the British, Torino, Civica and Federici codexes – has nothing in it about “Columbus brothers”! Clearly, Gallo had not written this additional text about Columbus before he died, someone added it later. The famous Asseretto Document was doctored in the Italian publications to remove several blank pages, fraudulently making it look like the text was continuous.

These are only some examples that show how unreliable the Genoese documents and the Raccolta Colombiana are in solving the mystery of Columbus’s identity. “What the Raccolta Colombiana did was a help to cover up the truth for yet another 100 years” claims Rosa.

Considered one of today’s leading scholars on the life of Columbus, Mr Rosa points out that Ferdinand Colón, the discoverer’s son, claimed that his father descended not only from Italian aristocracy but from the legendary Roman General Colonius and that people were wrong to call him “Christopher Columbus” in Latin, warning that the correct Latin form is “Christopher Colonus.”

While historians widely inferred that Christopher Columbus used this noble persona to ingratiate himself to the good graces of the Spanish court in an elaborate illusion to mask a humble weaver background, Rosa thinks Ferdinand was telling the truth. The historians, going against solid evidence in Spain and Portugal, came up with the wrong solution swapping “Cristobal Colón” for a “genovés Cristoforo Colombo.”

The particulars were not always obvious, but because of his familiarity with the Portuguese history of the discoveries and fluency in several languages, Rosa was able to see that something was not right in the official narrative. His biggest clue came when he learned that Columbus had married a Portuguese noblewoman in 1479, a full 14 years before becoming famous in Spain. Knowing that peasants and wool-weavers could never marry nobility, it was apparent something was not correct.

By examining carefully Columbus’s assumed identity more, he was able to show how historians had made several simple mistakes that completely changed the course of their research.

First, they mistranslated the name Colón to Columbus, even though Ferdinand alerted us that Colón is not the same as Columbus. Colombo is Italian, Colombe is French, Colom is Catalan, Palomo is Spanish, Pombo is Portuguese and Columbus is Latin. All these names are the same for they mean Pigeon. However, the discoverer’s name was Colón, as in the English colon, and semi-colon, coming from the Greek κωλον (kólon) meaning Member, just as Ferdinand also informed us.

Second, although many contemporary Spanish writers referred to Cristobal Colón as “ginovés” historians missed the important point that in 15th Century Spain, ginovés was slang for “foreigner” and not necessarily confirmation that Columbus was from Genoa. These are two honest mistakes that have led historians on a wild-goose chase to Genoa.

Instead of relying on previously published biographies, Rosa went directly to the medieval sources from multiple kingdoms, plus ancient genealogy and heraldry, in order to cross-reference the historical events with the personalities. In addition, Rosa’s mastery of Spanish and Portuguese, allowed him a more accurate interpretation of these primary source documents, so often prone to errors of translation into English.

By reviewing the ancient documents, chronicles and manuscripts, and taking an active involvement in the DNA studies of Columbus’s bones at the University of Granada, Spain, Mr Rosa was able to disprove the official narrative as nothing more than a fairytale that was based on repeated misinterpretations of the original facts.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Columbus married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Filipa was not only the daughter of a high noble and Captain of the Portuguese Island of Porto Santo but a member of the elite Portuguese Military Order of Santiago, as the newly presented documents show. This makes it impossible for her husband to be a wool-weaver from anywhere. Filipa required the approval of the King of Portugal, Master of the Order of Santiago, in order to marry anyone. Such a granting was a procedure reserved only for someone of high noble standing in Portugal.

It becomes irrelevant what the writers of the last century, such as Tavianni and Morison concocted about the noble Filipa Moniz. Today we have valid documentation that Filipa Moniz was one of the twelve elite “donnas” of the Portuguese Military Order of Santiago. This new Portuguese document alone, according to Rosa, makes the entirety of the history of an Italian wool weaver’s son named Colombo a false account.

Aside from the Order of Santiago document, Rosa was also the first to show Columbus’s original coat of arms and to publish the similarities that exist between it and that of the Polish king. The evidence appears irrefutable that Columbus, who had been housed in the palaces of the nobility, had access to royal courts, and married into nobility, could not be, as our history books tell us, the illiterate son of a poor weaver from Genoa.

“Another nutty conspiracy theory! That’s what I first supposed. I now believe that Columbus is guilty of a huge fraud carried out over two decades.” Wrote Prof. James T. McDonough Jr., of St. Joseph’s University.

Columbus never wrote in Italian or Genoese, not even to his two brothers, and the scholars who have dedicated themselves to in-depth research of Christopher Columbus’s language have declared it to be a rough Castilian punctuated by noteworthy and frequent Portuguese words. This is clearly a clue to his Portuguese birth as are Columbus’s own words written to the Spanish court on March 4, 1493, saying that he “left wife and homeland” (Portugal) to go serve the court of Spain.

Now, 21st Century science is shedding more light on the Centuries-old Italian invention of a Genoese Colombo. Prof. José Lorente’s DNA studies prove that the discoverer Cristóbal Colón’s DNA did not match 477 Colombo families from the Genoa area. This constitutes 477 proofs that Colón was not a Colombo.

So, who was Christopher Columbus, or better Cristóbal Colón, if not a poor weaver’s son from Genoa? With so much uncertainty, how can we be sure of what is the truth?

When pressed to further expound on his theory, pointing to his extensive research, Rosa confidently, and with source documents to verify his assertions, claims “Colón was a royal prince, son of a Portuguese noblewoman from the Italian Colonna family and a man named Henrique Alemão (Henry the German) resident on the Portuguese island of Madeira.”

Turns out that Henrique Alemão was the false name of none other than King Wladyslaw III (a direct descendent of one of Europe’s greatest ruling dynasties, Lithuania’s Gedimin dynasty). After disappearing in the Battle of Varna in 1444, King Wladyslaw III went into self-exile at the Island of Madeira and hid his identity from the public at large. Ferdinand Colón also claimed that his father was a resident of Madeira.

Rosa has pieced together many previously missed clues, including the fact that Prince Georges Paleologue de Bissipat, an exiled Byzantine nobleman living in France nicknamed “Colombo the Younger”, said to be a relative of Christopher Columbus was also a relative of King Wladyslaw III and that Wladyslaw III descended from the “Kings of Jerusalem” just as Ferdinand states Columbus did.

According to Rosa’s book, documents show that some of Europe’s courts knew exactly who Henrique Alemão was and who Cristóbal Colón was. Their high connections explain why the mystery was perpetrated to hide the famous discoverer’s true identity.

Rosa theorizes that Columbus’s original name was Prince Segismundo Henriques, born on Madeira and son of King Władysław III and his wife Senhorinha Annes, a noblewoman from the Portuguese Sá and Italian Colonna families.

Thus the navigator descended from Italian aristocracy as Ferdinand claimed and shortened his mother’s last name Colonna to end up with his new Spanish identity of Colón. The last name, Colón, was mistakenly changed to Colom (Catalan for Pigeon) by the publisher Pedro Posa in April 1493 and picked up by many other printers over Europe. But all who utilized the names Colom/Colombo/Columbus were referencing the wrong person.

Is this just another run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory? Not according to historians from the University of Lisbon and St. Joseph’s University, and most recently renowned Greek historian, Miltiades Varvounis, who wrote that Rosa’s book “is a magnum opus and by no means should be considered a work of pseudo history or just another source of nutty conspiracy theories. Rosa’s numerous reliable findings and solid theories would make Sherlock Holmes jealous. The History of Columbus has many mixed-up facts and personalities, and maybe the time has come for the discoverer’s life to be finally rewritten.”

Although in Portugal and Poland academics have taken to debating and supporting the new findings, it is lamentable that, up until now, there is little or no debate in America or Lithuania to either accept or contradict Rosa’s findings.

It is hoped that Lithuanian publishers, historians and researchers will take an interest in this history-altering evidence, as this book deserves an audience not only in Lithuania but worldwide since Columbus is a world-renowned figure who changed the course of our human history.

Prof. D. Félix Martínez Llorente, of the University of Valladolid, affirmed: “the book is an extensive and well-documented work on the still-enigmatic figure of Christopher Columbus, with evocative and notorious contributions that will, with absolute certainty, be talked about for a long time.”

Based on the extensive research, one can now be assured that the discoverer of America was not the poor wool weaver’s son from Genoa. Hopefully, in the near future, forensic DNA evidence can be obtained to prove that Christopher Columbus descended from Lithuania’s Royal House but hid his royal lineage to protect a paramount secret. The secret that his father, King Wladyslaw III, did not die at the Battle of Varna in 1444, but survived, and rejecting the crown of Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, went to live out his days in secret exile in Portugal, was the reason for the whole mystery surrounding his identity.

King Wladyslaw III’s tomb can be found, not far from our place, in the Madelena do Mar Church. Known as Henrique Alemão, the exiled monarch had the misfortune to drown off Cape Girao when his ship was wrecked as he returned home from Lisbon after a meeting with Manuel I, the King of Portugal.

 

Cecil Rhodes and The Rhodes Scholarship

As to removing historical statues, the debate in Oxford about Cecil Rhodes and The Rhodes Scholarship should be seen and mostly considered by people who benefitted from this scholarship.

CNN writes in July 2020: Hundreds of protesters in Oxford took to the streets outside the famed university’s Oriel College on Tuesday, to demand the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

The long-running campaign to remove the statue has been reinvigorated after the recent Black Lives Matter protests in the US following the death of George Floyd.

Anti-racism protesters in the UK previously pulled down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in the English port city of Bristol on Monday.

Members of the Oxford crowd on Tuesday took a knee, put their fists in the air and kept silent for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck.

I,  strongly believe that many of the people who took advantage of this scholarship should seriously have considered where the money came from before they took the scholarship, but this is also the case with most scholarships and donations. Fascinating many black and people of colour used this scholarship.

According to  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Scholarship “It was established in 1902, and soon became the most famous of numerous international scholarship programs. The founder, diamond magnate Cecil John Rhodes, wanted to promote unity between English-speaking nations and instil a sense of civic-minded leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders irrespective of their chosen career paths. Although initially restricted to male applicants from countries that are today within the British Commonwealth, as well as Germany and the United States, today the scholarship is open to applicants from all backgrounds and from across the globe. Since its creation, controversy has surrounded its former exclusion of women (thus leading to the establishment of the co-educational Marshall Scholarship).

Many Rhodes recipients have achieved fame as politicians, academics, scientists, authors, and entrepreneurs. Notable American political recipients include president of the United States Bill Clinton, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, Governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal, United States Senators John Neely Kennedy and Cory Booker, Congresswoman Heather Wilson, and United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Matthews Burwell. President of Pakistan Wasim Sajjad; prime minister of Malta Dom Mintoff; Australian Prime Ministers Tony Abbott, Bob Hawke, and Malcolm Turnbull; and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, are also Rhodes Scholars. Other notable Rhodes Scholars include journalist and American television host Rachel Maddow, author Naomi Wolf, mayor of South Bend Pete Buttigieg, former president of Planned Parenthood Leana Wen, Title IX and discrimination attorney Ann Olivarius and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow. The current Warden and CEO of the Rhodes Trust, Elizabeth Kiss, is also a Rhodes Scholar.”

As to universities receiving a donation from criminals and tyrants:

Should universities take donations from tyrants? 

What about parents donations? 

Colleges and Universities Fail to Report Billions in Foreign Donations
An Education Department investigation triggered schools to report $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed gifts from foreign countries. Quote from U.S. News & World Reports

By Lauren Camera, Senior Education Writer Feb. 13, 2020, at 11:10 a.m. U.S. News & World Report

COLLEGES AND universities previously failed to report upward of $6.5 billion in gifts from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other foreign countries, an ongoing investigation by the Trump administration uncovered.

Ten schools, including Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Texas A&M University, and Carnegie Mellon University, accounted for half of that figure, disclosing $3.6 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts.

An investigation opened by the Education Department in July triggered the disclosures, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“This is about transparency,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement. “If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. Moreover, it’s what the law requires.”

Department officials announced Wednesday that they’re initiating new investigations into both Harvard University and Yale University after the Ivy League schools appear to have failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts.

Yale may have failed to report at least $375 million, department officials said, choosing not to report any gifts and contracts over the last four years. And in the case of Harvard, department officials said they’re concerned it lacks the ability to provide rigorous oversight and tracking of foreign money – this in the wake of the indictment of the school’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department chair for lying about his involvement with the Thousand Talents Plan, the Chinese government’s overseas recruitment mission of high-level researchers and scientists.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal aid to report gifts from, and contracts with, any foreign source that exceed $250,000 in value and to disclose any foreign ownership or control twice each year.

Fewer than 300 of the approximately 6,000 U.S. colleges and universities report receiving foreign money each year, according to the Education Department. While the majority of that money is funnelled to 50 large institutions, a 2019 report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said those schools “routinely” fail to comply with the law, describing foreign spending on U.S. colleges and universities as “a black hole.”

“Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all,” DeVos said. “We will continue to hold colleges and universities accountable and work with them to ensure their reporting is full, accurate, and transparent, as required by the law.”