Part 1 of the Soros articles:-
The Secret Financial Network Behind "Wizard" George Soros - Part 1 of 2
By: William Engdahl
Posted by: stefan lemieszewski, 12 Nov 1996 on Internet
" Corrupt elites prosper at the people's expense with the aid of the IMF,
World Bank and 'shock therapy' policies of Western advisors under the
guise of free-trade or democratic or market-reforms."
EIR Investigation
Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), November 1, 1996
*
The dossier that follows is based upon a report released on Oct. 1 by EIR's
bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany, titled "A Profile of Mega-Speculator George
Soros." Research was contributed by Mark Burdman, Elisabeth Hellenbroich,
Paolo Raimondi, and Scott Thompson.
*
Time magazine has characterized financier George Soros as a "modern-day
Robin Hood," who robs from the rich to give to the poor countries of eastern
Europe and Russia. It claimed that Soros makes huge financial gains by
speculating against western central banks, in order to use his profits to help the
emerging post-communist economies of Eastern Europe and former Soviet
Union, to assist them to create what he calls an "Open Society." The Time
statement is entirely accurate in the first part, and entirely inaccurate in the
second. He robs from rich western countries, and uses his profits to rob even
more savagely from the East, under the cloak of "philanthropy." His goal is to
loot wherever and however he can. Soros has been called the master
manipulator of "hit-and-run capitalism."
As we shall see, what Soros means by "open," is a society that allows him and
his financial predator friends to loot the resources and precious assets of former
Warsaw Pact economies. By bringing people like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden's
Anders Aslund and their economic shock therapy into these economies, Soros
lays the groundwork for buying up the assets of whole regions of the world at
dirt-cheap prices.
The man who broke the Bank of England?
An examination of Soros' secretive financial network is vital to understand the
true dimension of the "Soros problem" in Eastern Europe and other nations.
Following the crisis of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism of September
1992, when the Bank of England was forced to abandon efforts to stabilize the
pound sterling, a little-known financial figure emerged from the shadows, to
boast that he had personally made over $1 billion in speculation against the
British pound. The speculator was the Hungarian-born George Soros, who
spent the war in Hungary under false papers working for the Nazi government,
identifying and expropriating the property of wealthy fellow Jews. Soros left
Hungary after the war, and established American citizenship after some years in
London. Today, Soros is based in New York, but that tells little, if anything, of
who and what he is.
Following his impressive claims to possession of a "Midas touch," Soros has let
his name be publicly used in a blatant attempt to influence world financial
markets---an out-of-character act for most financial investors, who prefer to
take advantage of situations not yet discovered by rivals, and keep them secret.
Soros the financier is as much a political animal, as a financial speculator.
Soros proclaimed in March 1993, with great publicity, that the price of gold
was about to rise sharply; he said that he had just gotten "inside information" that
China was about to buy huge sums of gold for its booming economy. Soros was
able to trigger a rush into buying gold, which caused prices to rise more than
20% over four months, to the highest level since 1991. Typically for Soros,
once the fools rushed in to push prices higher, Soros and his friend Sir James
Goldsmith secretly began selling their gold at a huge profit.
Then, in early June 1993, Soros proclaimed his intent to force a sell-off in
German government bonds in favor of the French, in an open letter to London
Times Financial Editor Anatole Kaletsky, in which Soros proclaimed, "Down
with the D-Mark!" Soros has at various times attacked the currencies of
Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Mexico, coming into newly opened financial
markets which have little experience with foreign investors, let alone ones with
large funds like Soros. Soros begins buying stocks or bonds in the local market,
leading others to naively suppose that he knows something they do not. As with
gold, when the smaller investors begin to follow Soros, driving prices of stocks
or whatever higher, Soros begins to sell to the eager new buyers, cashing in his
40% or 100% profits, then exiting the market, and often, the entire country, to
seek another target for his speculation. This technique gave rise to the term "hit
and run." What Soros always leaves behind, is a collapsed local market and
financial ruin of national investors.
The secret of the Quantum Fund NV
Soros is the visible side of a vast and nasty secret network of private financial
interests, controlled by the leading aristocratic and royal families of Europe,
centered in the British House of Windsor. This network, called by its members
the Club of Isles, was built upon the wreckage of the British Empire after World
War II.
Rather than use the powers of the state to achieve their geopolitical goals, a
secret cross-linked holding of private financial interests, tied to the old
aristocratic oligarchy of western Europe, was developed. It was in many ways
modeled on the 17th-century British and Dutch East India Companies. The
heart of this Club of the Isles is the financial center of the old British Empire, the
City of London. Soros is one of what in medieval days were called Hofjuden,
the "Court Jews," who were deployed by the aristocratic families.
The most important of such "Jews who are not Jews," are the Rothschilds, who
launched Soros's career. They are members of the Club of the Isles and
retainers of the British royal family. This has been true since Amschel Rothschild
sold the British Hessian troops to fight against George Washington during the
American Revolution.
Soros is American only in his passport. He is a global financial operator, who
happens to be in New York, simply because "that's where the money is," as the
bank robber Willy Sutton once quipped, when asked why he always robbed
banks. Soros speculates in world financial markets through his offshore
company, Quantum Fund NV, a private investment fund, or "hedge fund." His
hedge fund reportedly manages some $11-14 billion of funds on behalf of its
clients, or investors---one of the most prominent of whom is, according to
Soros, Britain's Queen Elizabeth, the wealthiest person in Europe.
The Quantum Fund is registered in the tax haven of the Netherlands Antilles, in
the Caribbean. This is to avoid paying taxes, as well as to hide the true nature of
his investors and what he does with their money.
In order to avoid U.S. government supervision of his financial activities,
something normal U.S.-based investment funds must by law agree to in order to
operate, Soros moved his legal headquarters to the Caribbean tax haven of
Curacao. The Netherlands Antilles has repeatedly been cited by the Task Force
on Money Laundering of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) as one of the world's most important centers for
laundering illegal proceeds of the Latin American cocaine and other drug traffic.
It is a possession of the Netherlands.
Soros has taken care that the none of the 99 individual investors who participate
in his various funds is an American national. By U.S. securities law, a hedge
fund is limited to no more than 99 highly wealthy individuals, so-called
"sophisticated investors." By structuring his investment company as an offshore
hedge fund, Soros avoids public scrutiny.
Soros himself is not even on the board of Quantum Fund. Instead, for legal
reasons, he serves the Quantum Fund as official "investment adviser," through
another company, Soros Fund Management, of New York City. If any demand
were to be made of Soros to reveal the details of Quantum Fund's operations,
he is able to claim he is "merely its investment adviser." Any competent police
investigator looking at the complex legal structure of Soros's businesses would
conclude that there is prima facie evidence of either vast money laundering of
illicit funds, or massive illegal tax evasion. Both may be true.
To make it impossible for U.S. tax authorities or other officials to look into the
financial dealings of his web of businesses, the board of directors of Quantum
Fund NV also includes no American citizens. His directors are Swiss, Italian,
and British financiers.
George Soros is part of a tightly knit financial mafia---"mafia," in the sense of a
closed masonic-like fraternity of families pursuing common aims. Anyone who
dares to criticize Soros or any of his associates, is immediately hit with the
charge of being "anti-Semitic"----a criticism which often silences or intimidates
genuine critics of Soros's unscrupulous operations. The Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith considers it a top priority to "protect" Soros from the charges of
"anti-Semites" in Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe, according to ADL
National Director Abraham Foxman. The ADL's record of service to the British
oligarchy has been amply documented by EIR (e.g. The Ugly Truth About the
Anti-Defamation League [Washington, D.C., Executive Intelligence Review:
1992]).
According to knowledgeable U.S. and European investigators, Soros's circle
includes indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive Marc Rich of
Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv; secretive Israeli arms and commodity dealer
Shaul Eisenberg, and "Dirty Rafi" Eytan, both linked to the financial side of the
Israeli Mossad; and, the family of Jacob Lord Rothschild.
Understandably, Soros and the Rothschild interests prefer to keep their
connection hidden far from public view, so as to obscure the well-connected
friends Soros enjoys in the City of London, the British Foreign Office, Israel,
and the U.S. financial establishment. The myth, therefore, has been created, that
Soros is a lone financial investment "genius" who, through his sheer personal
brilliance in detecting shifts in markets, has become one of the world's most
successful speculators. According to those who have done business with him,
Soros never makes a major investment move without sensitive insider
information.
On the board of directors of Soros's Quantum Fund N.V. is Richard Katz, a
Rothschild man who is also on the board of the London N.M. Rothschild and
Sons merchant bank, and the head of Rothschild Italia S.p.A. of Milan. Another
Rothschild family link to Soros's Quantum Fund is Quantum board member Nils
O. Taube, the partner of the London investment group St. James Place Capital,
whose major partner is Lord Rothschild. London Times columnist Lord William
Rees-Mogg is also on the board of Rothschild's St. James Place Capital.
A frequent business partner of Soros in various speculative deals, including in
the 1993 gold manipulation, although not on the Quantum Fund directly, is the
Anglo-French speculator Sir James Goldsmith, a cousin of the Rothschild
family.
From the very first days when Soros created his own investment fund in 1969,
he owed his success to his relation to the Rothschild family banking network.
Soros worked in New York in the 1960s for a small private bank close to the
Rothschilds, Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, Inc., a banking family which
represented Rothschild interests in Germany during Bismarck's time. To this
day, A. & S. Bleichroeder, Inc. remains the Principal Custodian, along with
Citibank, of funds of Soros's Quantum Fund. George C. Karlweiss, of Edmond
de Rothschild's Switzerland-based Banque Privee SA in Lugano, as well as of
the scandal-tainted Rothschild Bank AG of Zurich, gave Soros financial
backing. Karlweiss provided some of the vital initial capital and investors for
Soros's Quantum Fund.
Union Banque Privee and the 'Swiss
connection'
Another member of the board of Soros's Quantum Fund is the head of one of
the most controversial Swiss private banks, Edgar de Picciotto, who has been
called "one of the cleverest bankers in Geneva"---and is one of the most
scandal-tainted. De Picciotto, from an old Portuguese Jewish trading family,
who was born in Lebanon, is head of the Geneva private bank CBI-TDB Union
Bancaire Privee, a major player in the gold and offshore hedge funds business.
Hedge funds have been identified by international police agencies as the
fastest-growing outlet for illegal money laundering today.
De Picciotto is a longtime friend and business associate of banker Edmond
Safra, also born in Lebanon, whose family came from Aleppo, Syria, and who
now controls the Republic Bank of New York. Republic Bank has been
identified in U.S. investigations into Russian organized crime, as the bank
involved in transferring billions of U.S. Federal Reserve notes from New York
to organized crime-controlled Moscow banks, on behalf of Russian organized
crime figures. Safra is under investigation by U.S. and Swiss authorities for
laundering Turkish and Columbian drug money.
In 1990, Safra's Trade Development Bank (TDB) of Geneva was merged with
de Picciotto's CBI to create the CBI-TDB Union Banque Privee. The details of
the merger are shrouded in secrecy to this day. As part of the deal, de Picciotto
became a board member of American Express Bank (Switzerland) SA of
Geneva, and two American Express Bank of New York executives sit on the
board of de Picciotto's Union Banque Privee. Safra had sold his Trade
Development Bank to American Express, Inc. in the 1980s. Henry Kissinger
sits on the board of American Express, Inc., which has repeatedly been
implicated in international money-laundering scandals.
De Picciotto's start as a Geneva banker came from Nicholas Baring of the
London Barings Bank, who tapped de Picciotto to run the bank's secret Swiss
bank business. Barings has for centuries been private banker to the British royal
family, and since the bank's collapse in March 1995, has been overhauled by
the Dutch ING Bank, which is reported to be a major money-laundering
institution.
De Picciotto is also a longtime business partner of Venetian businessman Carlo
De Benedetti, who recently was forced to resign as head of Olivetti Corp. Both
persons sit on the board of the Societe Financiere de Geneve investment holding
company in Geneva. De Benedetti is under investigation in Italy for suspicion of
triggering the collapse of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano in the early 1980s.The head
of that bank, Roberto Calvi, was later found hanging from the London
Blackfriar's Bridge, in what police believe was a masonic ritual murder.
De Picciotto and his Union Banque Privee have been implicated in numerous
drug and illegal money-laundering operations. In November 1994, U.S. federal
agents arrested a senior official of de Picciotto's Geneva bank, Jean-Jacques
Handali, along with two other UBP officials, on charges of leading a
multimillion-dollar drug-money-laundering ring. According to the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Miami, Handali and Union Banque Privee were the "Swiss
connection" in an international drug-money-laundering ring tied to Colombian
and Turkish cocaine and heroin organizations. A close business and political
associate of de Picciotto is a mysterious arm dealer, Helmut Raiser, who is
linked in business dealings with reputed Russian organized crime kingpin Grigori
Luchansky, who controls the Russian and Swiss holding company Nordex
Group.
Another director of Soros's Quantum Fund is Isodoro Albertini, owner of the
Milan stock brokerage firm Albertini and Co. Beat Notz of the Geneva Banque
Worms is another private banker on the board of Soros's Quantum Fund, as is
Alberto Foglia, who is chief of the Lugano, Switzerland Banca del Ceresio.
Lugano, just across the Swiss border from Milan, is notorious as the financial
secret bank haven for Italian organized crime families, including the heroin mafia
behind the 1980s "Pizza Connection" case. The Banca del Ceresio has been
one of the secret Swiss banks identified in the recent Italian political corruption
scandals as the repository of bribe funds of several Italian politicians now in
prison.
The sponsorship of the Rothschilds
Soros's relation to the Rothschild finance circle represents no ordinary or casual
banking connection. It goes a long way to explain the extraordinary success of a
mere private speculator, and Soros's uncanny ability to "gamble right" so many
times in such high-risk markets. Soros has access to the "insider track" in some
of the most important government and private channels in the world.
Since World War II, the Rothschild family, at the heart of the financial apparatus
of the Club of the Isles, has gone to great lengths to create a public myth about
its own insignificance. The family has spent significant sums cultivating a public
image as a family of wealthy, but quiet, "gentlemen," some of whom prefer to
cultivate fine French wines, some of whom are devoted to charity.
Since British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour wrote his famous November
1917 letter to Lord Rothschild, expressing official British government backing
for establishment of a Palestinian national home for the Jewish people, the
Rothschilds were intimately involved in the creation of Israel. But behind their
public facade of a family donating money for projects such as planting trees in
the deserts of Israel, N.M. Rothschild of London is at the center of various
intelligence operations, and more than once has been linked to the more
unsavory elements of international organized crime. The family prefers to keep
such links at arm's length, and away from its London headquarters, via its
lesser-known outposts such as their Zurich Rothschild Bank AG and Rothschild
Italia of Milan, the bank of Soros partner Richard Katz.
N.M. Rothschild is considered by City of London sources to be one of the most
influential parts of the British intelligence establishment, tied to the Thatcher "free
market" wing of the Tory Party. Rothschild and Sons made huge sums managing
for Thatcher the privatization of billions of dollars of British state industry
holdings during the 1980s, and today, for John Major's government. Rothschilds
is also at the very heart of the world gold trade, being the bank at which twice
daily the London Gold Fix is struck by a group of the five most influential gold
trade banks. Gold constitutes a major part of the economy of drug dealings
globally.
N.M. Rothschild and Sons is also implicated in some of the filthiest
drugs-for-weapons secret intelligence operations. Because it is connected to the
highest levels of the British intelligence establishment, Rothschilds managed to
evade any prominent mention of its complicity in one of the more sordid black
covert intelligence networks, that of the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International (BCCI). Rothschilds was at the center of the international web of
money-laundering banks used during the 1970s and 1980s by Britain's MI-6
and the networks of Col. Oliver North and George Bush, to finance such
projects as the Nicaraguan Contras.
On June 8, 1993 the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives'
Committee on Banking, Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.), made a speech
charging that the U.S. government, under the previous Bush and Reagan
administrations, had systematically refused to prosecute the BCCI, and that the
Department of Justice had repeatedly refused to cooperate with Congressional
investigations of both the BCCI scandal and what Gonzalez claims is the closely
related scandal of the Atlanta, Georgia Banca Nationale del Lavoro, which was
alleged to have secured billions in loans from the Bush administration to Saddam
Hussein, just prior to the Gulf War of 1990-91.
Gonzalez charged that the Bush administration had "a Justice Department that I
say, and I repeat, has been the most corrupt, most unbelievably corrupt justice
system that I have seen in the 32 years I have been in the Congress."
The BCCI violated countless laws, including laundering drug money, financing
illegal arms traffic, and falsifying bank records. In July 1991, New York District
Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced a grand jury indictment against BCCI,
charging it with having committed "the largest bank fraud in world financial
history. BCCI operated as a corrupt criminal organization throughout its entire
19-year history."
The BCCI had links directly into the Bush White House. Saudi Sheik Kamal
Adham, a BCCI director and former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence when
George Bush was head of the CIA, was one of the BCCI shareholders indicted
in the United States. Days after his indictment, former top Bush White House
aide Edward Rogers went to Saudi Arabia as a private citizen to sign a contract
to represent Sheikh Adham in the United States.
--- continued in part 2 --- |
