The companies and individuals linked to the owners of now-defunct Bonza Airlines are part of a complex global web used to whitewash billions of dollars.
by Matt Prescott | Aug 3, 2024
Show us the Money!! Turn the lights on!!
The referendum showed how vulnerable our electorate is to all the games emerging out of the American Right. It is imperative that we urge the Albanese government to speed up the integrity platform reforms it promised, and to do them with precision. No government lasts indefinitely: Labor needs to protect itself from a post-democratic Right as much as the nation needs them to do it. If the major parties plan to prevent future challenges to their control of government we need to protest before they embed it in legislation.
The connections are rarely straightforward: money and influence have worked in labyrinthine ways over decades to distort the playing field for the interests of the wealthy, in particular for tobacco and fossil fuels.
Over the weekend, investigative reporter Anthony Klan revealed the shadowy status of Advance and its promoters. Precisely in the Atlas model, it has a network of fake “grass roots” seeming bodies – a strategy called astroturfing – that include entities dedicated to attacks on climate action.
After 16 years governments dithering, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is moving to introduce Tranche 2 of Australia’s money-laundering laws, finally tackling the powerful lawyer, accounting and property lobbyists. Nathan Lynch reports.
Public Trustees Institutional Pirates in the modern era take care of the money in their own interest and not the interest of their clients. Steven Colley is not the exception but rather the rule.(ODT)
Penny-pinching, raking in huge fees: public trustees under scrutiny
and
The current system of guardianship is “butchering a number of human rights” and it’s taking too long to reform the system, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner says.
Alastair McEwin, the Disability Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, said Australia was falling behind in its international obligations on the rights of people with disabilities, with the United Nations due to report on the nation’s progress this year.
Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign raised and spent an unprecedented sum of money during the midterm elections. But much of that cash wasn’t used to help endangered Republicans in Congress—it was used to help Donald Trump.
Source: Trump Campaign Paid Millions to Trump Businesses During Midterms – Mother Jones
Securing the funding is a win for President Donald Trump, who has complained about how much the United States spends abroad and has tried to get allies to foot more of the bill. But the timing of the money’s arrival raised eyebrows even among some of the bureaucrats whose programs will benefit from the influx of cash.
“The timing of this is no coincidence,” said an American official involved in Syria policy who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official confirmed that the money arrived on Tuesday.
via Jamal Khashoggi: Saudi Arabia delivers $US100m to US after Trump’s ‘rogue killers’ comment
But the invention of offshore finance by bankers in London and Switzerland in the 1950s changed that, he says.
“You didn’t need to put money in a hole in the ground any more, you could steal it, stash it, and then miraculously they liberated it, they set it free — and then you could spend it,” Bullough says.
Now, the super-rich grow nest eggs and siphon funds into offshore tax havens, and corruption inflicts damage on political and democratic institutions across the world.
And the politicians insist the money comes with no strings attached: it does not buy access or influence or favours or votes. But it does save taxpayers the cost of financing those election campaigns themselves.
Now the facade is slipping.
Like the government’s new independent parliamentary expenses authority – or a potential federal anti-corruption body – publicly funded campaigns would be another burden on long-suffering taxpayers.
But if we care about the integrity of our democracy we need to invest in it.
Simply put did Turnbull buy his primeministership? and who is he beholden to?
via Now everyone admits it: political donations buy access and influence
Here in Australia, the “No” case in the same-sex marriage debacle is spending five times as much as the “Yes” campaign.Prominent reactionaries like Senator Eric Abetz and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott are leading the “No” defence of the indefensible with lies and nonsense.
Source: Can Australia’s socially democratic Left defeat neoliberalism?
The members of the investor class are programmed to destroy.
Source: Why the rich can’t be trusted with money – Al Jazeera English
The wife of a suspected Chinese-Australian money launderer who allegedly turned over more than $850 million at Crown Casino has failed in her bid to access a Californian luxury home held under proceeds of crime laws.
Source: Suspected Chinese-Australian money launderer gambled ‘astronomical’ $850m at Crown Casino
This is how I know I’m an idiot. This week I bought a Popcorn Maker. You can also find them in the “Pointless Appliances You Don’t Need” section of any department store.
Anyone closely following the Panama Papers story, is familiar with the role that Rothschild plays in providing similar services right inside the US.
Source: Here’s the Rothschild Guide to Laundering Money in America
A massive leak of documents has blown open a window on the vast, murky world of shell companies, providing an extraordinary look at how the wealthy and powerful conceal their money.
Source: Panama Papers leak exposes how Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping’s friends hide money
“As difficult as it was for me, I’ve come to an inescapable and profoundly disturbing conclusion. I believe that an elite group of people and the corporations they run have gained control over not just our energy, food supply, education, and healthcare, but over virtually every aspect of our lives; and they do it by controlling the world of finance. […]
Source: Following The Money: Who’s Really In Control ? | Collective-Evolution
Australia’s missing $100 bills could be being stockpiled by criminals or those seeking to avoid taxes, an expert says.
Rupert Murdoch’s family fortune is valued at about $15 billion, but he plans to increase that substantially before his time comes to an end, writes Rodney E. Lever.
AN AMERICAN LAWYER once made an astute observation:
“Rupert Murdoch is very good at what he does. The question is: is what he does any good?”
I tend to think rather of Rupert’s smile when he knows he is in trouble. He seems like a crocodile barely suppressing a savage snarl.
The smiling crocodile will be celebrating his 85th birthday on March 11 and must be giving some thought to the inevitable march of time.
Those who like to measure monetary wealth have put Rupert Murdoch’s family fortune at about $15 billion. That sum is about three-quarters of what it takes today to appear in Forbes magazine as among the world’s super rich.
Rupert is clearly planning to increase his wealth and soon.
The early polls for this year’s British election has the Labour Party in a strong position. If the Tories lose in 2015, Murdoch will surely have to reconsider the future of his operations in Britain.
Times Newspapers Ltd has been losing money from the day he acquired them. There is no sign of them ever being profitable, despite some dubious accounting techniques to pretend they are making money. The Sun remains profitable, but is losing ground, no longer with the total freedom to wreck the lives of famous people who sometimes fall into human error.
Rupert has never been popular with British Labour since his wooing of Margaret Thatcher, his crushing of the printing unions, and the time when he coddled Tony Blair and John Howard, and helped to start the Iraq war for George W Bush.
Given the hacking scandal that continues to haunt him and exposes more suspicious activity as time passes, he might be politely asked by a new British Labour government to shut the door on the way out.
Rich people like to “Think Big”. That’s what carried families like the Rothschilds, the Oppenheimers and the Rockefeller’s through most of the 20th century.
The latest Forbes magazine list of the richest families are not British or Americans. The top ten last year carried names like Fontbana, in Chile; Bailleres, in Mexico; Albrecht, in Germany; and Kwok, in Hong Kong.
With their wealth measured at more than USD $20 billion each, none has made their money from flogging newspapers. Common to them are either family inheritance or enterprising ideas and hard work.
News Corporation (which is Rupert by another name) has bought an internet investment in India, BigDecisions.com, without so far revealing the cost.
He has also bought a 25% share in another Indian internet company named PropTiger, for $30 million. PropTiger provides online real estate advertising, contiguous with his online U.S. real estate Move and his online Australian REA Group.
He flies stacks of daily issues of The Australian and the Wall Street Journal to India every day and spreads them around. It pushes up their circulation figures even when they are given away free.
News Corp investors have been told that BigDecisions.com
‘… will help Indian consumers make smarter financial decisions through interactive, decision-making tools powered by sophisticated algorithms and data.’
Advanced technology will provide
“… reliable and independent data to help investors in India make important decisions using accurate information tailored to their independent needs.”
BigDecisions.com was launched in 2013 by two Indian investors, Manish Shah and Gaurav Roy. With News Corp money in the bank they will go on to start new ventures that they might be able to sell Rupert too.
Rupert’s interest in India may have been stimulated by the 2008 financial crisis, blamed on the George W. Bush administration in the US for creating a fresher climate for illegal activity that greatly harmed innocent investors.
Bush and the Republican Congress lifted restrictions on share trading after the debacle of the Iraq war. Some of the erased regulations dated back to the World War I depression of 1929, and set conditions that led to World War 2, leaving Britain broke and the U.S. as the richest country on the planet.
When Barack Obama became president in 2009, he appointed a new head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White, now 68 years old, but a notoriously tough lady, who has reconstructed a new set of protective measures for investors.
She proved to be a guardian angel of the U.S. economy, re-instituting and strengthening rules and regulations that set boundaries for the major banks, stockbrokers and share traders.
Rupert Murdoch is attracted to India, now one of the world’s larger economies. Its economic growth increased from 4.7% in 2013 to 5.5% in 2014 and expects a further increase in 2015. America is still the world’s leader, with its GDP three times larger than India.
The U.S. suffered considerable damage in the crash of 2008, much of it due to gung-ho management of Wall Street after the Securities and Exchange Commission’s deregulated.
The development of faster electronic share trading represents about 85% of all stockmarket trading.
Systems have grown to a point where vast amounts of money can be shifted around the world at an incredible speed: one million dollars can be transferred anywhere one single second.
Electronic machines are only as fallible as the human beings who touch the keyboard. Some investors wonder if financial transfers at the speed of light could cause unimaginable consequences. Time will tell.
One way or another the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. That’s still the way of the world. Rupert Murdoch surely plans to continue this trend.
olddogthoughts 
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