Posted on 11/06/2004 1:25:51 AM PST by kattracks
RAMALLAH, West Bank - As Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lay fighting for his life yesterday in a French hospital, his wife, Suha, was locked in a bitter dispute with Palestinian officials over the fate of his vast secret fortune.Arafat's assets have been estimated at anything between $200 million by Forbes to $6 billion by Israeli intelligence.
The bonanza is managed in a complex network of bank accounts, holding companies and stocks whose details are known only to his closest confidant, financial adviser Mohammed Rashid.
Suha Arafat has access to some of the money, but even she does not know all the ins and outs of the secret accounts. The Arab TV station Al Jazeera reported that Suha Arafat asked Rashid to make out a list of the Palestinian leader's assets and he refused, saying he would only report to the Palestinian Authority.
Al Jazeera said Yasser Arafat had written a will leaving at least some of his fortune to Suha and their only child, 9-year-old daughter Zahwa, but other reports said Arafat has no will, leaving most of his fortune in the hands of Rashid.
Suha Arafat stepped in last week and has tried to seize control of the 75-year-old Palestinian leader after an absence of three years.
Thirty years younger than Arafat, the Sorbonne-educated woman married the Palestinian leader in a secret ceremony in Tunis in 1993.
She played the part of Palestinian first lady for a while, but left their Gaza home in January 2001 and took Zahwa to Paris where she has lived lavishly while Palestinians languished in war-battered refugee camps.
This year, French officials announced they were investigating the transfer of 9 million euros from Swiss bank accounts to accounts in France controlled by Suha Arafat.
"What is so strange," she snapped to Al-Hayat newspaper earlier this year, "for the Palestinian president to send any amount of money to his family and his wife who is protecting the Palestinian interests abroad, and the money came and will come legally?"
Identifying Yasser Arafat's personal fortune and separating it from numerous secret bank accounts that he maintains in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah will not be easy.
Arafat is reputed to have secret bank accounts in Switzerland, Austria, Luxemboug and the Cayman Islands.
He also owns a number of hotels and holiday resorts in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland and Austria. He is the main shareholder in two cellular telephone companies operating in Tunisia and Algeria.
Some of Arafat's businesses are in partnership with Arab politicians, including Rifaat Assad, a brother of the late Syrian President Hafez Assad, and Barzan Al-Takriti, a half-brother of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Al-Takriti is now under arrest in Baghdad.
Originally published on November 6, 2004
A fortune mostly paid for by the UN and the EU over the past few years.
Follow the money....
"Suha Arafat stepped in last week and has tried to seize control of the 75-year-old Palestinian leader after an absence of three years."
----
Are the bones even cold yet?
You will drive yourself crazy trying to figure this out until you come to one conclusion:
The French Are Horribly Anti-Semetic
And in banks while the Palestinian people live in abject poverty.
Don't believe me? ask Sandy Burglar.
We should send Colon Powell back to Paleswine to get our (U.S. taxpayer's) money back
"Arafat's assets have been estimated at anything between $200 million by Forbes to $6 billion by Israeli intelligence."
Well, the Jews would know, wouldn't they? I mean they control the entire world, no?
I wish this guy would just hurry up and die already. Sorry, but it's time for him to go.
Wonder what kind of documents they found about the transactions between Arafat and the Hussein family.
This is far closer to the truth. This is blood money and the longer Yasser was able to prolong the struggle, the more he made. How many deaths of young Palestinians and Israelis was he responsible for? God will judge him most severely for this and hopefully history will as well.
From Bukovskiy, Secrets of the Central Committee:
Then there was Palestinian terrorism-in Leb-anon, in Israel, and throughout the Middle East and Europe. Any imputation of a Soviet connection to this activity was vehemently denied by the Kremlin leadership and its apologists in the West; the CIA studied the question with great seriousness but could never bring itself to say anything firm. Nevertheless, the connection existed, in spades. One of my documents reveals that at the request of Yasir Arafat, the Politburo shipped "special equipment" to the PLO in Tunisia in 1983. Other documents speak for themselves:
USSR Committee for
State Security of the
Council of Ministers of the USSR
MoscowApril 23, 1974
Top Secret
Special Importance
(Special File)To Comrade L.I. Brezhnev:
Since 1968, the KGB has maintained secret working contact with Wadia Haddad, Politburo member of the Peoples’ Liberation Front of Palestine (PLFP), head of the PLFP’s external operations section.
In a confidential conversation at a meeting with the KGB resident in Lebanon in April of this year, Wadia Haddad outlined a prospective program of sabotage and terrorism by the PLFP, which can be defined as follows:
The main aim of special activity by PLFP is to increase the effectiveness of the struggle of the Palestinian movement against Israel, Zionism, and American imperialism. Arising from this, the main thrusts of the planned sabotage and terrorist operations are:
- employing special means to prolong the "oil war" of Arab countries against the imperialist forces supporting Israel;
- carrying out operations against American and Israeli personnel in third countries with the aim of securing reliable information about the plans and intentions of the USA and Israel;
- carrying out acts of sabotage and terrorism on the territory of Israel;
- organizing acts of sabotage against the Diamond Center [in Tel Aviv], whose basic capital derives from Israeli, British, Belgian, and West German companies.
In order to implement the above measures, the PLFP is currently preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against large oil-storage installations in various countries (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong, et al.), the destruction of oil tankers and supertankers, actions against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia, Kenya, an attack on the Diamond Center in Tel Aviv, etc.
W. Haddad asks that we help his organization with the procurement of several kinds of special technology necessary for carrying out certain sabotage operations.
Cooperating with us and appealing for our help, W. Haddad is fully aware of our opposition to terrorism in principle, and does not pose any questions to us connected with this sphere of the PLFP’s activity.
The nature of our relations with W. Haddad allows us a degree of control over the activities of the PLFP’s external operations section, to exercise an influence favorable to the USSR, and also to reach some of our own aims through the activities of the PLFP while observing the necessary secrecy.
In view of the above, we feel it would be feasible, at the next meeting, to give a generally favorable response to Wadia Haddad’s request for special assistance to the PLFP. As for concrete questions of supplying aid, it is envisaged that every in-stance will be decided on an individual basis, bearing in mind the interests of the Soviet Union and preventing any detriment to the security of our country.
We request authorization.
Chairman of the Committee
for State Security
AndropovAcross the top of the first page, Comrade Brezhnev wrote in by hand:
Report to
Comrades Suslov, Podgorny,
Kosygin, Grechko, Gromyko (circulate)The signatures of these comrades follow Brezhnev’s in the left-hand margin. At the end of the last page there is a handwritten addition:
Consent reported to the KGB of the USSR April 26, 1974.
Yes indeed. The Cold War is far from over. The only change is that the former Soviet Union is now using various Islamofascists as their proxies. No one should have been surprised that the Russians helped Saddam ship the WMDs out of Iraq prior to the start of the war. Putin has to be a little more careful in his public statements because they still need our capital to rebuild.
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