TURKEY TO GET 40% OF CRETAN FIND
Secret cash flown into gas-rich Cyprus
Troika contractors strip the Greek corpse
How Berlin exaggerated Athens’ problem to win Europe
By John Ward: Senior Athens sources last night confirmed The Slog’s
blogosphere exclusive from last Monday on the subject of 70% of the
income from Cretian energy and rare earth finds off Crete going into
non-Greek coffers. But further evidence of bribery and energy finds in
Cyprus show yet again that Greece’s sphere of Mediterranean influence is
merely an unwilling prize in the ongoing energy, banking and German
hegemony game.
Said a senior Greek Government consultant yesterday:
“All I know is that the Professor [minerologist Antonis Foskolos]
is absolutely correct. I have the technical reports to prove it…..there
is a secret deal whereby Turkey gets 40%, Greece 30%, Cyprus 20% and
Brussels 10%.”
The figure most likely to both alarm and anger Greeks of all class
and age groups is the inexplicable (in justice terms) award of more
income from the Crete find for Turkey than Greece. But this is really
nothing more than those involved in the Cyprus energy heist sharing out
the spoils….and cutting out both the Americans and the Israelis. Quite a
coup for Erdogan.
Hot on the heels of this news comes the announcement of a major oil
find off Cyprus at region 12 – amounting to around 1.2-1.4 billion
barrels….plus, very much under the table, further ECB bribery to keep
the Cypriot élite sweet: some €5 bn euros in cash has been secretly
flown into Nicosia. “Nobody counted or even certified the cash
delivery,” said a source, ” so they don’t know in what form the five
billion of cash went into Cyprus Central Bank accounts”.
While some are clearly on the take in Cyprus, the Cretian deal in
particular is bound to raise questions about what senior Athens
government ministers might have taken as their share of doing a deal
that is, by any standards, ludicrously unfair to Greece.
Why, for instance, have the confirmations of Cretian energy and
mineral finds not been used by Samaras and co as collateral with which
to force the issue of debt relief for Greece? Why indeed have creditors
not been offered an energy futures bond swap in return for unrepayable
debt? Better a futures deal, surely, than winding up with nothing.
A lot of the key to this (apart from the usual standard issue Greek
elite corruption) is the Troika itself, an organisation beyond the
accountability of any elected government body. With such freedom, the
Troikanauts have hired several financial consultancies, who go on to
play a central role in all the eurozone bailouts….especially the Greek
bailouts and the infamous Cypriot bailin.
The usual suspects are always involved: Deloitte, Ernst&Young,
KPMG and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – and the end result is a “golden
circle” of a dozen or so large firms with a monopoly on handling EU
bailouts. They are usually hired without any public tender – sometimes
despite potential conflicts of interest, which arise from links to
investment funds and other financial service providers.
The case of New York-based consultancy Alvarez and Marsal is
particularly intriguing. During their ‘advice’ period for the Cyprus
bailin, A&M screwed up bigtime and overcharged – according to an
internal audit by the Cyprus central bank board seen by the site
EUobserver. But in December 2012, the Cyprus central bank chief Panicos
Demetriades shortlisted Alvarez and Marsal for several new contracts.
He did so despite the fact
the board had “ruled out” the consultancy due to “potential perceived
conflicts of interest” related to its Bank of Cyprus evaluation.
The cash flights, bribes, backstairs deals and energy horse-trades
are being organised and pushed through by further sub-contractors hired
by the Golden Circle. BlackRock Solutions, for instance, stands accused
by some observers of using insider knowledge after the Athens Government
awarded them a contract worth €12.3 million.The Samaras regime did so
because kickbacks were involved, and the Troikanauts had become so
hated in Greece….so BlackRock Solutions used a fake name (“Solar”) and
recruited 18 armed security guards to do its “work”. From what I could
see early in 2013, this mainly involved providing armed guards for the
likes of Venizelos – but Athenians know perfectly well who they were. I
would point them out, and contacts there would shrug and mutter
“Blackrock”.
However, the consultancy’s appointment also included subcontracting
to the Big Four audit firms and having detailed knowledge of
recapitalisation plans. Being the biggest asset manager in the world,
that gave them a competitive advantage if they used the knowledge….for
example, against close competitor Pimco….which had also been hired
earlier.
But other clouds, smoke, mirrors, cloaks and daggers remain to niggle
away at the credibility of the EU, other major powers, national leaders
and the ECB when it comes to how and why Greece and Cyprus wound up
being raped. Cyprus was, for me, an open and shut case: egged on by
Wolfgang Schaüble and Mario Draghi, the EC simply removed the island’s
major income source and then impoverished its major bank
depositors….while Russian and Cypriot crooks and gangsters suspiciously
managed to remove their money ahead of time.
Equally however, there remain inconsistencies and irregularities in
the way solid Greek assets were ‘used’. A good example is its hospital
infrastructure.
On 2nd October 2009, before the October 2009 Elections, the National
Statistical Service of Greece ELSTAT sent to Eurostat the deficit and
debt notification tables for Greek hospitals. These included an estimate
of the outstanding liabilities at €2.3 billion. The new government
inflated the €2.3 billion by €4.3 billion making it equal to €6.6
billion as it is described in their “Technical Report on the Revision of
Hospital Liabilities” of February 2010. (This must also be viewed, by
the way, in the light of Elstat whistleblowers who have since then
confirmed that senior EU officials and politicians encouraged the Athens
government to exaggerate the size of its fiscal problem as a whole.)The
new government then tried to load all this extra €5.4 billion of
hospital liabilities into one year, 2008. At first, Eurostat rejected
this in writing, but later it bowed to government pressure.
This entire exercise is clearly against the European Regulations
ESA95 (see ESA95 par. 3.06, EC No. 2516/2000 article 2, Commission Reg.
EC No. 995/2001) and against the European Statistics Code of Practice,
especially regarding the principles of independence of statistical
measurements, statistical objectivity and reliability. It was also very
clearly to Greece’s disadvantage: but the Papandreou Government did it.
Why?
The Slog posted extensively about this at the time, and was then requoted and reblogged widely
elsewhere. The reason for the overstatement was in fact very simple:
the Franco-German debt exposure desperately needed ALL the eurozone
members to agree to new help for Greece. The situation thus had to look
as bad as possible. As I wrote soon afterwards:
‘Somewhere in the midst of these
talks, Berlin requested a smaller meeting with the Greeks. At this
meeting, three sources (two Greek and one German) allege, the small
German delegation made an astonishing observation: the situation would
“have to look more desperate” in order to justify a bailout to the other
eurozone members. That is to say, only widespread fear of the entire
eurozone being damaged would get the member States to pile in with
bailout monies. What Berlin was really worried about, of course, was
that the Franco-German banking system might collapse if Greece wasn’t
saved. And at that stage, little or nothing had been done to make the
sector better able to withstand a derivatives wave.’
I know that I bash on about this with every post about Greece, but
those of us further West must grasp once for all the reality that
Greco-Cypriot problems are dictated as much if not more by energy
geopolitics and major power bank fears as they were by corrupt Greek
leaders and idiotically greedy Franco-American lenders. Over the years I
have pointed out the obvious sub-plot going on, but each time much of
what The Slog suggested has been ridiculed or dismissed as ‘power
politics paranoia’.
Unfortunately for those who said such things, I have been largely vindicated..or rather, my sources have: there is a battle for energy hegemony going on between Washington, Brussels and Moscow, there is a tug-of-war going on between Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Brussels and Israel about South-East Med mineral and gas finds, Turkey has been rewarded on the sly for toeing the NATO bollocks in relation to Syria, Recep Erdogan is
proving to be an unhinged Islamist who imprisons opposing military and
political leaders, David Cameron’s pro-Erdogan/anti-Israel speech of two
years ago has been shown up as badly judged nonsense, Syrian intervention would have turned into Anglo-American disaster, energy has been found off Crete and Cyprus, American naval influence has scared the EU/EC axis of thuggery into action, and there is a lot going on behind the scenes of so-called Troika debt management to suggest that, as ever, this is a question of industrial scale corruption and munnneee.
It’s easy to tell from both hits and comment threads these days that
Greece has become a forgotten subject for the vast majority of EU and US
citizens. But I promise you, for the oil business, the spooks, the
Russians and the banks, it is anything but. And don’t get me started on
the Chinese.
Wake up: a fundamentally decent and solvent nation is being
meat-cleavered to bits by bank interests and energy mania. For all its
internally irresponsible and venal Establishment hoodlums, the real
Hellenic Republic’s deficit - at 7.8% of gdp in 2009 – was grossly
exaggerated and eventually emerged (in a slavishly reported BBCNews story) of November 15th 2010 – at 15.4%. But as former ELSTAT board member Zoi Georganta testified in 2011:
“….had the 2009 warnings from this Commission been been enacted
even as late as Papandreou’s arrival, ‘the measures would have succeeded
if they had been properly and promptly implemented without any need for a bailout….”
Berlin wanted Franco-German banks protected, but it also wanted a
victim to give Germany the dominant role in eventual FiskalUnion. It has
got pretty much everything it wanted, but Greece is dead in the water.
This is the measure of Merkel’s genius for Weltpolitik.
Yesterday she was confirmed as the Chancellor at the head of a Grand
German political alliance. A month ago, Brussels-am-Berlin told Samaras
to go whistle for his promised Christmas debt relief. The
German-dominated EC now has the same role as Jeremy Hunt does with NHS
Trusts in England: to quietly bankrupt them – as the necessary excuse
for Mammon’s gauleiters to step in.
Athens (and Nicosia) have accepted the following: falsified debt
figures, a repayment schedule that is a permanent trap, endless waves of
destructive austerity, terrible levels of citizen destitution, the
dictatorship of banking and investment interests, German tabloid insults
about the Greek work ethic, German lies about personal Greek wealth
levels, reneging on various promises by the EC and ECB, economic grand
larceny, depositor theft, and now a grubby share-out among its enemies
of the main wealth route the Republic has out of this cynically
inflicted poverty.
That this has been achieved with the active collaboration of its
political élites is brutally obvious. One result of that despicable
Fifth Columnism has been the rise and rise of Golden Dawn. What Greece
needs above all right now is the decline and fall of Antonis Samaras. In
the meantime, the hour has arrived for some real investigations of how
this appalling mess really happened….and some direct action to put the
New Democracy Coalition and its EC paymasters under intolerable
pressure.
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