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Ksm. Evoluutio #3
Laniado was expected to appear in court in Belgium on March 14 to face tax evasion charges. —Marcy Oster, Billionaire Jewish diamond trader dies during penis enlargement operation, Cleveland Jewish News, (Mar 7, 2019).
Banks like HSBC, as well as the offshore-front industry, are part of an infrastructure that enables the looting of poor countries and the evasion of taxes in rich countries. [...] "You cannot pull off this large scale corruption without involving lawyers, accountants, investment advisers in places like Geneva, London, Amsterdam, New York and Paris." [...] "Diamonds are a great way to launder money, to hide money, to evade taxes, and all the rest," said Ian Smillie, a cofounder of the Kimberley Process, a United Nations effort to stamp out what are often called blood diamonds or conflict diamonds — gems that are exploited to finance wars. [...] The files obtained by ICIJ and Le Monde show the bankers at HSBC were eager to court diamantaires and to help some of them avoid taxes by shielding their assets. [...] With [Erez] Daleyot, the bank looked past his questionable business connections, the most notorious of whom was reportedly Arkadi Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli businessman convicted in absentia by France for his role in the 1990s "Angolagate" arms-trafficking scandal (some of the charges were overturned on appeal). Daleyot also reportedly financed Yakov Arabov, known to hip-hop stars like 50 Cent and the Notorious B.I.G. as Jacob the Jeweler. Arabov later went to prison in 2008 for lying to U.S. federal agents about laundering money for the Black Mafia Family, a Detroit drug ring. Another HSBC client, Emmanuel Shallop, had earned a mention in a 2001 UN report for doing business with the rebels in Sierra Leone’s vicious civil war. [...] Several of HSBC’s diamond clients would indeed soon be leaving Belgium. Among them were Richard Davidovici, Kenneth Lee Akselrod and Mozes Victor Konig, who are fugitives wanted by Interpol for various alleged crimes in Russia, including fraud, smuggling and tax evasion. [...] Konig, with Interpol after him, is still at large. [...] Then there was Omega Diamonds, a major diamond trading outfit owned in 2006 by Sylvain Goldberg, Robert Liling, and Ehud Arye Laniado. [...] Goldberg and Laniado were also partners in Ascorp, the Angolan diamond monopoly controlled by Russian-Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, who is a close friend of Vladimir Putin (Leviev had several numbered accounts at HSBC). Among Ascorp’s shareholders, ICIJ reported in 2002, was the Angolan dictator’s daughter, Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa with nearly $4 billion. Her mother, Tatiana Cergueevna Koukanova Regan, was connected to two numbered accounts at HSBC that contained as much as $4.5 million sometime in 2006/2007. [...] Also in the files is Dan Gertler, an Israeli diamond dealer and close friend of Congolese President Joseph Kabila. He reportedly got his big start trading arms for diamonds in African civil wars during the 1990s in violation of UN embargoes. A 2001 UN Security Council report found "very credible sources" who told of a secret deal that, in exchange for a sweetheart deal giving Gertler a monopoly on diamond rights in the Congo, the Israeli "agreed to arrange, through its connections with high-ranking Israeli military officers the delivery of undisclosed quantities of arms as well as training for the Congolese armed forces." [...] Gertler is listed in the HSBC files as beneficial owner of an account under the name of Concordia Marketing Group Inc., a British Virgin Islands firm. The other beneficial owner of the account was Daniel Steinmetz of the Steinmetz family, one of the biggest HSBC-linked diamond clients of all (Gertler’s lawyers said he is not associated with Daniel Steinmetz). Steinmetz family members appear to have controlled accounts containing nearly half a billion dollars at the bank in 2006/2007. —Ryan Chittum, Diamond Dealers In Deep Trouble As Bank Documents Shine Light On Secret Ways, ICIJ, (FEBRUARY 9, 2015).
