Free Republic

U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) sent a letter to Bank of the West President and Chief Executive Officer Nandita Bakhshi pushing back on the bank’s decision to no longer conduct business with companies engaged in the exploration and production of coal, oil and natural gas. Bank of the West, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, has 23 branches with dedicated employees who work hard to serve communities and families across Wyoming. In his letter, Barrasso condemned the San Francisco headquarter’s attack on Wyoming’s communities and businesses that depend on fossil fuels for energy security, jobs and economic growth. “This misguided and...

TARP Recipient BNP Paribas got $4.9bn of bailouts from the U.S. Taxpayer - Today, as the WSJ reports we learn BNP Paribas has been funding transactions in Iran, Syria and other countries subject to U.S. Sanctions since 2002. The bank set aside $1.1 billion to settle investigations by the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve but as the NY Times reports, investigations are playing out on multiple fronts - centering on whether the firm did "a significant amount" of business in "blacklisted" countires (and routed the deals through the US financial system). Via WSJ, “...an internal probe conducted over...

May 29, 2008 By Andrew Walden (Hawai'i Free Press) Nadhmi Auchi, seen here with the Governor of Illinois, Rob Blagojevich (middle) at a 2004 Chicago dinner in Auchi's honor arranged by Antonin Rezko (potentially, right)[1]. All three men have been convicted of corruption related charges (Auchi 2003, Rezko 2008, Blagojevich 2009).[2] “A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser (dual US-Syrian citizen Tony Rezko) just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses. The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi,...

While Microsoft giant Bill Gates hobnobs with the likes of Earth Charter architects Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, IBM has jumped into bed with Saddam’s favourite bank, BNP Paribas. Since December 2003, IBM and French bank BNP Paribas have been in a 50-50 partnership in a massive IT operation. IBM provided the technological expertise to create BNP Paribas out of the merger of three banks and now has a subsidiary that it runs with BNP. The giant multinationals have signed up on a giant venture to manage BNP Paribas’s information and technology operations. The deal covers a kind of computing...

Difficult enough to believe that BNP Paribas, Saddam’s favourite bank, would be the major sponsor of world tennis, including the French Open at Roland Garros in Paris. BNP, which backed a regime that tortured athletes, is now the proud partner of the International Tennis Federation (ITF). Saddam’s psychopathic son, Uday, in charge of Olympic sporting in Iraq, had an obsession with tennis. But that BNP Paribas would sponsor the prestigious Davis Cup match in South Carolina is something that must cause the souls of all the athletes that died under Saddam & Son to turn in their graves. To sponsor...

BNP Paribas, the bank associated with the Oil-for-Food scandal, is doing brisk business in Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s golden state. According to its website, "BNP Paribas acts as the sole agent for the State of California’s economic recovery bonds, the largest municipal bond sale in the United States." Active in the municipal bond market for over 10 years, BNP is providing credit enhancement and liquidity support for the State of California’s sale of $2.97 billion of variable-rate Economic Recovery Bonds ("ERB’s"). The bank also boasts that it will be a proud partner of San Francisco in financing the rebuilding of the...

Most Canadian companies look forward to the day they earn themselves a mention on the prime-time news. They hire PR firms and spend thousands to harass news editors with press releases to tout their latest acquisition, invention or foreign venture in hopes of convincing someone to give them even a passing mention on the national news–never mind the nearly unimaginable publicity of being plugged on a U.S. newscast. But when Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada found itself, in late January, the topic of a news story on America’s top-rated Fox News Channel, which draws millions of U.S. and international viewers,...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - An eagerly awaited first report by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker into alleged corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq will be sharply critical of U.N. management in key areas and will target Benon Sevan, who ran the program, a source close to the investigation told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The Volcker report, to be released Thursday afternoon, will focus on the administration, financial transactions, and internal auditing of the $60 billion program, all of which were "tainted badly," said the person with knowledge of the report. The interim report will not...

A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein's secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaeda. More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources....