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Mercenaries, Crooks, Arms dealers and Politicians

Dr. Alexander von Paleske | 16.04.2006 15:49 | Anti-militarism | Globalisation

A spiderweb featuring Tim Spicer, Tony Buckingham, Simon Mann, Adnan Khashoggi, Rakesh Saxena, Viktor Bout (Butt), Sanjivan Ruprah, Amador Pastrana and many more plus the companies Aegis, Executive Outcomes, Sandline, Deutsche Bank, Heritage Oil and Ranger Oil

Tim Spicer, boss of the mercenary company AEGIS, busy in Iraq on a 293 million US Dollar Pentagon contract is in the news again, this time his mercenaries allegedly killing civilians. Time to look at the wider spider web, of which he is part of.

First to mention is a veteran of arms and shady deals, a close friend of the bin Laden family for decades, an uncle of the late Dodi Fayed, the last partner of Diana Princess of Wales and brother-in-law of the owner of Harrod’s Supermarket in London, Al Fayed, his name: Adnan Khashoggi, once called the richest man on earth.

His origin is Saudi Arabia, his favorite place to live is Marbella in Spain and his favorite business are arms deals and the stock market, especially in Vancouver/Canada.

At present, however, he likes more the sand of the beaches of the United Arab Emirates, a better, because safer place to be, when arrest warrants and extradition requests are piling up.

He was involved in the Iran Contra-Affair in the 80s, in which the Pentagon sold weapons to Iran and the profits were used to buy weapons for a CIA sponsored terror group in Nicaragua, the Contra Rebels. Everything illegal of course, but an army man by the name of Oliver North was day and night putting documents into the shredder, when the scandal was about to be made public. It is good to have such trustworthy people in your house.



Khashoggi was also involved in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a massive washing machine for dirty money from the Medellin drug cartel, Manuel Noriega, and other druglords.

The bank was forcibly closed in 1992

However Khashoggi, likeable as he is, had and has friends all over the world, so lets forget about the BCCI-Affair and move on to Thailand, to the Bangkok Bank of Commerce.

The CEO of that bank was in the 90s Krirkkiat Jalichandra. A promsing young man of Indian origin, by the name of Rakesh Saxena was introduced to him.

Saxena was wanted in India for culpable homicide, who cares, was a communist before, while studying in India and according to the slogan, who is not a communist at age 20 hasn’t got a heart, and who is still a communist age 40 hasn’t got a brain, and Saxena had brains, he forgot Marx and Engels and concentrated on fraud and corruption the big way and advised his “brother in fraud” Jalichandra accordingly both together a “duo infernale”, so to speak.

Money was pumped into a labyrinth of fake companies and “small gifts” in cash and kind were handed out to politicians and friends, a non repayable loan was given to Saxenas friend Adnan Khashoggi, amounting to only 134 million US Dollars, peanuts, so to speak.

However such big fraud, that triggered eventually the Asian Banking Crisis in 1997 cannot go on forever one time the bubble has to burst and in 1996 the scheme collapsed, however Saxena, clever as he was, left in time the sinking ship and fled to a much cooler place, Canada.

Not forgetting, allegedly to take some pocket money with him, only the laughable sum of 88 million US Dollars laughable, because the damage he and Jalichandra allegedly caused amounted to more than three billion US Dollars.

Jalichandra was not so lucky, he got arrested and has been sentenced to 30 years in prison one year ago.

Thailand wanted Saxena extradited, but Saxena did not want, had money enough to hire the best of the best of lawyers and he convinced the Government of Canada, a banker is a banker, that it would be cheaper to put him in self paid house arrest, than into a prison.

So he is still in Canada but not resting, to the contrary. He is as busy as ever until a few weeks ago, when he was put back into prison..

First came Tim Spicer, the mercenary, Ex-Lieutenant Colonel, OBE, hated by the Irish people because soldiers of his unit, when he was stationed in Northern Ireland, killed an innocent young Irishman by the name of McBride. These soldiers were later convicted for murder.

However Spicer campaigned and lied for them, so that they were early released and then reinstated in the British Army, they are now on patrol in Iraq, where the killing of innocent civilians is rather a day to day event.

Spicer needed money, Saxena had money for his adventure in Sierra Leone.

Tony Buckingham's company Sandline, of which Spicer was the chief executive until 2000, offered their service, in exchange for diamond mining rights, to ousted President Kabbah with old apartheid soldiers of the infamous Buffalo Battalion, and Koevoet, well known killer units, their motto: shoot to kill, and their battleground in those days were the newly independent state of Angola with the refugee camps of SWAPO and the illegally occupied Namibia.

The unit, named Executive Outcomes, was founded and headed by Eeben Barlow, former member of the Buffalo Battalion and then of the Civil Cooperation Buraeu (CCB) the latter an South African apartheid death squad, which can take credit for countless extrajudicial killings inside and outside South Africa including hundreds of SWAPO freedom fighters allegedly killed with poison delivered by a Dr. Wouter Basson and the bodies thrown out of a plane over the Atlantic Ocean.

Saxena offered 10 million US Dollar, he had mining interests there as well, bought with money from the Bangkok Bank of Commerce, and with Saxena's/Bangkok Bank of Commerce money Spicer bought tons of weapons in Bulgaria and elsewhere.

This was the start, of what was later called the Arms to Africa Affair. Active in this scheme there were also Simon Mann and Nick du Toit, both in prison now, one in Zimbabwe, the other one in Equatorial Guinea after the failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea last year.

This military intervention was in flagrant violation of an UN arms embargo, who cares, and with the approval of the resident British High Commissioner, Penfold. When the things came out, it nearly brought down the Blair Government.

Already before their Sierra Leone job , Spicer, Mann and Buckingham had gone global in 1997, this time to the other end of the globe, Papua New Guinea for a lump sum of 36 million US Dollars to be paid by one of the poorest states on earth.

The Government there fought unsuccessfully against a rebel group on the Island of Bougainville

to get hold of a copper mine, owned by the British company Rio Tinto. The fight erupted because of the environmental disaster, caused by the mine, that threatened to destroy the livelihood of the people there.

Buckingham, Spicer and Simon Mann offered “help”, the mercenary way via Sandline and Sandline subcontracting the dreck of the Ex Out mercenaries. Also with them Lafras Luitingh, another former member of the Apartheid-CCB, who can take credit for having been involved in the murder of ANC activist Dr. David Webster on 1st May 1989 in Johannesburg and SWAPO Advocate Anton Lubowski in Windhoek on 12 October 1989.

This time round, however, things did not work out, the army under General Singorok rebelled, the Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan had to resign and Spicer was arrested and later left the country only with the help of the discrete diplomatic pressure by the British government.

Still they made their fortune, as a lot of money had been prepaid .

Meanwhile mercenary godfather and mining baron Tony Buckingham was also active in many African countries, apart from Sierra Leone and Angola, namely Congo Brazzaville, DR Congo, Uganda, Kenya Namibia to name a few.

He was specifically welcomed in Namibia, where the government made him a director of the state owned Offshore Development Company (ODC) and he used his contacts to introduce Ranger Oil Canada to the Government, successfully, Ranger got huge exploration rights. Ranger and Buckingham were close business partners for quite some time.

As a Thank You Buckingham made government officials shareholders in his company Oceanica Fisheries, and the government granted him mining rights in a Tourmaline mine near Karibib, Indigo Sky Gem and Camelthorn Mining, and allowed him to dislodge 1000 small scale miners there and to throw them onto the roadside.

Who greases well, drives well.

And South Africa's then Mine Minister Mrs. Mlambo-Ngcuka gave a prospecting license with much fanfare in 2001 to Ranger Oil, despite the well known connection to Buckingham and his mercenaries

In Kenya he appointed Sanjivan Ruprah, a well known arms dealer, head of his mining company Branch Energy.

Sanjivan Ruprah became also a close confidant of Charles Taylor in Liberia and of Victor Bout, with whom he worked closely together. Sanjivan Ruprah helped arming the child soldiers in Sierra Leone on behalf of Charles Taylor, those, who committed horrific mayhem amongst the civilian population, including mass killings, hacking of limbs, rape, torture.

Victor Bout, called “Africa’s Merchant of Death” is a Russian, who runs a fleet of 50 russian made transport planes. He delivered weapons to the Taleban and Al Qaeda before 2001 and organized chartered flights to Afghanistan, , certainly not for tourists. Bout was fuelling virtually each and every armed conflict in Africa for the last 15 years with his weapons transport and Diamonds as payment, especially in Liberia, Sierra Leone Angola, DR Congo.

After the invasion of Iraq he was hired by American companies. Money talks and a plane is a plane. He was also busy transporting goods to Afghanistan after 2002, who cares.

Ruprah knows Khashoggi, because they shared an office address in London. Kashoggi is a friend of Saxena, Saxena is a friend of Spicer and so forth.

And Khashoggi and Saxena were not just watching, what was happening in Africa, they had also had serious business to do, Khashoggi in America and Saxena in Canada, before both joint forces and went to Vienna Austria.

In 2001 Khashoggi, via his company Ultimate Holdings, based on the Bahamas with a complicated lending scam allegedly pumped up the stock of a Nasdaq bubble company by the name of Genesis Intermedia, in which Ultimate Holdings was the majority shareholder.

The company was built around a book by a John Gray, “Women are from Venus and Men are from Mars”.He forgot to add that arms dealers and mercenaries are from hell.

Involved in that scam were allegedly Deutsche Bank in Toronto and a slew of criminal stockbrokers and after the scam collapsed in 2001, Khashoggi and his friend El Batrawi were 130 million US Dollar richer, broker houses filed for bankruptcy , the damage amounting to more than 300 million US Dollars. 200 employees lost their jobs in Minneapolis.

Deutsche Bank has now settled out of court and is paying,
270 million US Dollars, peanuts in Deutsche Bank's language, still denying any responsibility, of course.

Meanwhile Saxena in Canada was busy as well. He appointed the leading opposition MP in the Canadian Parliament, John Reynolds as board member in a flimsy company called WaveTech while fighting at the same time an extradition request from Thailand in the courts of Canada. A simple word for that is most likely corruption. A friend, even when bought, in need is a friend indeed.

And he was involved in a scandal around a company in South Africa in 2004 , called Platinum Asset Management. PAM, that later on moved to Botswana and was exposed in August 2005 here by me and the local Sunday Standard.

However shared success is doubled success, so he went to good old Europe in 2000 with his friend Khashoggi. Khashoggi in person, and him being under house arrest via the phone. They linked up with a Filipino by the name of Amador Pastrana.

Pastrana had already earned himself the reputation as being a king of the boiler rooms earning him more than a billion Dollar.

Boiler rooms are cramped small offices, from where selling of shares to unsuspecting clients is organized. They apply high pressure sales pitches on their victims.

Those clients have money but no banking experience, they are neither banker nor broker

The shares they sell to pensioners, and medium income earners are worthless, artificially pumped up Penny stocks and the clients never see their money again.

The most effective and sophisticated fraud scheme to date.

Saxena, Khashoggi and Pastrana allegedly bought together the WMP Bank AG in Vienna, Austria renamed it General Commerce Bank and turned it into a boiler room, the fraud organized there amounts, according to press reports, to roughly one billion US Dollar. With them the convicted criminals Regis Possino, Raoul Berthaumieu and Sherman Mazur.

In 2001 the Bank was closed.

1 billion in one year.

Meanwhile Spicer did not rest either. He opened a new mercenary company after he left Sandline by the name of Aegis and the Invasion of Iraq brought him a fat contract by the Pentagon to the tune of 293 million US Dollar.

He is now overall in charge of all the mercenaries in Iraq, totaling more than 20.000, quite a few former Executive Outcome dreck.

And Tony Buckingham is busy in Iraq as well.

In 1995 he paid a courtesy call to Iraq, walking in the Hotel lobby of the Al Rasheed Hotel over a distorted picture of former US president Bush and exploring with former Iraq’s Oil minister possible oil ventures.

After he Invasion he is back, go with the flow, having good contacts with Iraqi Oil ministry officials and getting a prospecting license in Kurdistan for his company Heritage Oil.

And he quickly closed Sandline on 16th April 2004 after the failed coup in Equatorial Guinea.

The list would be incomplete, without mentioning a group of dealers of weapons of mass destruction.

Gerhard Merz, German, alleged transport officer in the failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, who was arrested in Malabo and died a few days later amidst allegations of torture, transported from 1992 to 1994 nerve gas components for Mustard and Sarin and "know how" for their production from China to Iran with an Israeli international criminal by the name of Regenstreich alias Regev and the support of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet.

Parallel to this group another group headed by an Israeli Nahum Manbar and a British Mi6 agent by the name of Richard Tomlinson also transported nerve gas components and KnowHow from China to Iran with the active support of the Shin Bet and the Mi6.

At the same time the UN weapons inspectors were searching for these weapons in neighboring Iraq

Simon Mann meanwhile is in Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Harare, Buckingham and Spicer in Iraq, Sandline closed down and Aegis opened, hiring mercenaries and doing what they did in Sierra Leone, Angola and now in Iraq: Killing with impunity

Dr. Alexander von Paleske
Head, Department of Oncology
Princess Marina Hospital
Gaborone/Botswana/Africa
Ex-Barrister-at-Law, High Court Frankfurt (M)

Dr. Alexander von Paleske
- e-mail: avpaleske@botsnet.bw

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