Soros Supports Ron Paul. Expects to Be His Running Mate

Posted by Gerry in Billionaire News on Jan 3rd, 2012 | 10 comments

So Ron Paul’s in bed with George Soros? That’s the take away from Daniel Greenfield in a column he wrote yesterday for frontpagemag.com titled “Ron Paul’s Soros Defense Plan”. Another blog, MarkAmerica.com quoting, Daniel Greenfield’s piece, ratchets up the rhetoric a whole “nother” notch, with this headline “Ron Paul: Soros Puppet?

The basis for Greenfield’s claim is this. Paul co-authored (with Barney Frank!) a Huffington Post editorial in July of 2010, that called for reduced military spending. In the Huffington piece, Paul and Frank introduced (and provide a link to) the Sustainable Defense Task Force.

The task force recommended a $trillion in defense cuts. Greenfield takes exception to Paul and Frank’s claim that the task force consisted of “experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum”. Greenfield wrote, “The experts, however, didn’t quite “span the ideological spectrum” — more like float under it.”

I’m getting to the “Soros connection, keep reading!

Greenfield goes on to describe the task force as “The panel of experts who would decide how to best gut national defense”. He points to Lawrence J. Kolb who is affiliated with the Center for American Progress, and Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Greenfield writes:
If you want to know what the Center, the Foundation and the Institute all have in common, it’s Hungarian and smells like stale cabbage and the death of nations.

We all presumably know that George Soros is Hungarian.

Greentfield cites several other task force members with connections to Soros funded groups including: Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project (NPP). The mission of NPP, according to its website, is to make “complex federal budget information transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent.” Miriam Pemberton is also connected to the NPP. acording to Greenfield, “The man behind the curtain at NPP? (is) none other than our favorite Hungarian James Bond villain.” (Oh that’s right, Oddjob wasn’t Hungarian.)

Greenfield connects nine other members of The Sustainable Defense Task Force to groups linked to Soros. He then offers three suggestions as to “why Ron Paul would allow George Soros that much power and influence over America’s defense policy.”

1. Paul just didn’t do his homework
2. He knew and didn’t care, “that he had no objection to being part of a left-right alliance against the American Empire”.
3. Paul “put his (Soros’s) experts in charge of America’s defense policy”, because Soros (through a web of front organizations of course) paid for an ad during the 2008 primaries, which praised Paul’s opposition to the Iraq War.

Greenfield concludes with this

I’m not one to dabble in conspiracy theories, (Oh really?!) but when Soros pays for an ad praising you during the Republican primaries and then you put his experts in charge of America’s defense policy, then maybe some questions should be asked.

Greenfield’s report might not be as viral as The Dancing Baby, but considering the subject matter, it’s getting pretty good play. Most of it is supportive of Greenfield’s anti Paul, anti Soros views.
A post went up today on Ulsterman Report titled “Ron Paul Endorsed by George Soros “Blue Republican” Organization”. Here’s how the Blue Republicans identify themselves on their website

We are people who have never before thought of joining the Republican party, but are going to do so for one year to ensure that Ron Paul wins the Republican nomination for President in 2012.
Most of us identify as Democrats or Independents and/or supported Obama in 2008. We believe that on issues that matter most – war vs. peace (Iraq, Yemen etc.), civil liberties (Patriot Act etc.), and crony corporatism (bailouts etc.) – Obama has pursued a course similar to George Bush.

So how do we know that the Blue Republicans are another Soros front? Ulsterman.com explains

The term Blue Republican was coined by leftist Robin Koerner, who runs an organization called WatchingAmerica.com. The current cover story on the front page of that website is an article detailing how Barack Obama’s victory in 2012 is essential to saving the “American model” and draws heavily from a George Soros-sponsored Center forAmerican Progress study as proof. A WatchingAmerica linked article SAID THE FOLLOWING regarding Mr. Soros:
Hedge fund financier George Soros is actively advocating for freedom of the press and thespread of democracy through the Open Society Foundations.
Advertisers on the website include MSNBC and the Al Waref Institute – a pro-Muslim anti-Israel think tank based in Washington D.C. whose founder, Marah Bukai takes meetings with such figures as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
It seems interesting then that an organization that appears quite hopeful to see Barack Obama re-elected in 2012, and is clearly linked to progressive anti-American globalist George Soros is simultaneously calling for Democrats to register as Republicans and support Ron Paul in the Republican primaries does it not?

Did you follow that? Robin Koerner runs an organization called WatchingAmerica.com. Watchingamerica.com posts a pro Obama piece that quotes a George Soros-sponsored Center forAmerican Progress study. (That’s true.) Therefore, Soros has endorsed Ron Paul, via “his” Blue Republican Organization.

It’s got to be true. I read it on the internet. And you know what else? If Ron Paul gets the nomination, Soros is going to be his running mate.

Billionaire Roman Abramowich £5million New Years Bash

Posted by Gerry in Conspicuous Consumption on Jan 2nd, 2012 | 0 comments

Among other things, Russian Billionaire Abramowich

• Made $billons on allegedly sleazy oil deals in “the old country”
• Is being sued for $billions by his mentor, former partner, accused murderer, and fellow Russian Billionaire Boris Berezovsky
• Owns the Chelsea Football Club (known by rival clubs as “Chelski”)
• Oversees a vast web of investments

And yet somehow he found the time to host a New Years Eve “event” that dinged his petty cash drawer to the tune of £5million. The party was held at Abramowich’s “place” in St. Barts. Guests were entertained by
the musical stylings of The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Daily Mail noted a preponderance of rich old guys escorting much younger (some even attractive) women.

Among them was media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, 80, and wife Wendi, 43; music mogul Russell Simmons, 54, and actress girlfriend Melissa George, 35; film producer Harvey Weinstein, 59, and fashion designer wife Georgina Champman,35; and George Lucas, 67, and his partner Mellody Hobson, 42.

Billionaire Winners and Billionaire Losers 2011

Posted by Gerry in Who are the Billionaires? on Jan 2nd, 2012 | 0 comments

BusinessInsiders.com released their list of The Biggest Billionaire Losers of 2011. Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad won the contest on a technicality. He saw his net worth drop from $23B to $6B. However, there’s no need to worry about Kamprad. He’s still okay.

Earlier this year, Swedish journalists revealed that a Liechtenstein-based foundation called Interogo, controlled Ikea. Kamprad, it should be noted, controls Interogo. By using the foundation based in “tax haven” Liechtenstein, Ikea has been able to avoid paying $billlions in taxes. It was reported that Interogo had cash reserves of close to $17B, money which theoretically, is not owned by Ikea.

Kamprad defended the use of the tax dodge. FT.com noted that

the 84-year-old Swede argued that “tax efficiency” was a ¬natural part of the company’s low-cost culture.

Number 2 on the list, Nobutada Saji might have a felt a bit less sanguine about his 2011 losses of $6.6 billion. He’s followed by Anil Ambani whose fortune dropped by $4.9 billion. Anil Ambani has been estranged from his billionaire brother Mukesh Ambani, but there was speculaton of a reconciliation when the Ambani “boys” both attended a family reunion last week.
Click here to see Businessinsider.com’s full list of biggest billionaire losers of 2011.

Bloomberg’s Matthew G. Miller has identified some additional high profile billionaire losers. He points to Oracle’s Larry Ellison whose 1.1 billion shares of Oracle declined by $6.6 billon. In one day, the value of Ellison’s shares fell by almost $3.8 billion. Miller reports that Canadian Paul Desmarais lost $2.9 billion on his shares of Power Financial Corp., while Bill Gates Microsoft shares declined by $3.2 billion.

Miller also cited a few billionaire winners including: William Lei (China). His online gambling, er gaming company NetEase, increased his wealth by $442 million. Leslie Wexner notched a gain of just over a half billion dollars, on his shares of Limitedbrands; and Intel’s Gordon Moore tacked on $600 million with the stock gains that his company posted in 2011.

Click here to see Matthew G. Miller discuss 2011 Billionaire winners and Billionaire Losers

Ecclestone Says $44K Payment Was a Shakedown, Not a Bribe

Posted by Gerry in Billionaire Bad Boys on Dec 27th, 2011 | 0 comments

Billionaire Bernie Ecclestone isn’t denying that he paid $44,000 to Gerhard Gribkowsky, a German investment banker. Ecclestone prefers to call the payment a “shakedown. The UK judge didn’t buy it he. The Telegraph reports that he said, “Isn’t that a bribe”?

Photosource The Telegraph

Click Here to read more about Ecclestone’s shakedown payment, or bribe

Russian Billionaires, Russian Mob, You Can’t Make This Up!

Posted by Gerry in Billionaire Bad Boys on Dec 24th, 2011 | 0 comments

What’s up with these Russian Billionaires!? Remember Mikhail Prokhorov, the Moscow tycoon, owner of the New Jersey Nets (NBA basketball) who threw his, ushanka into the ring to oppose Vladimir Putin for the presidency of Russia? No, you don’t remember him? It’s not your fault; his big announcement was two weeks ago. Who can remember that far back?

This week all the band width is going to a new pair of Russian Billionaires.Their names would be household words, if we could pronounce them.

Let’s welcome to the front page of the blogosphere, and to Central Park West, The Rybolovlevs!

The Rybolovlevs bought a piece of real estate this week, the penthouse at 15 Central Park West, to be precise. Actually, they bought the most expensive apartment in New York. Here’s their “official” announcement, via Forbes. (Billionairechonicles is still sulking because they didn’t the break the news with us.)

A company associated with Ekaterina Rybolovleva, daughter of a well-known businessman Dmitriy Rybolovlev, has signed a contract to purchase an apartment at 15 Central Park West, New York. The apartment is a condominium currently owned by the Sanford Weill Family.
Ms. Rybolovleva is currently studying at a US university. She plans to stay in the apartment when visiting New York. Ms. Rybolovleva was born in Russia, is a resident of Monaco and has resided in Monaco and Switzerland for the past 15 years.”

Weill is the infamous, former Chairman of Citibank. He and his wife, Joan, bought the apartment for $43.68 million in 2007 and “flipped” it to The Rybolovlevs for the asking price of $88 million.

Click here to see Observer’s Slide show of New York’s Most Expensive Apartment

On Friday, Laurie Bennett had piece, also in Forbes, in which she described a new TV show that sounds like it could be “a little bit inspired” by the sixties series, “Green Acres”. It’s about a Russian Billionaire and his college-aged daughter. (No mention of the mom, but those of us in the know, know that she’s not around because Mr. and Mrs. Russian billionaire are working their way through a contentious, $billions-in-dispute, divorce.) The Forbes piece even suggests that Mr. Russian Billionaire might become BFF’s with another Russky Billy, “who loves basketball and wants to run for president of Russia.”

In reality, well at least in “show business reality”, it’s just a question of time before we see a Martin Scorsese or David Chase directed, HBO series, based on the lives of these characters. Seriously, these Russian bad boys all make Tony Soprano, and Nucky Thompson, and even Don Corleone, seem like a bunch of penny-ante pussies.

“Well-known businessman Dmitriy Rybolovlev”, is not just some dull Russian guy who studied to become a doctor and decided to specialize in finance. He was only four years out of medical school (1994), when he joined the board of directors of Russia’s largest potash producer, Uralkali. In 1996 he became chairman of the company. In that same year he was arrested for the 1995 murder of his business colleague, Evgeny Panteleymonov.

According to Rumafia.com

Panteleymonov tried to convince Rybolovlev to stop cooperating with commercial structures controlled by criminals. In September 1995, Panteleymonov was shot, and six months later the murder organizer Oleg Lomakin (Prokop) was arrested. In exchange for the promise of investigators to classify the charge to a lighter article, he said that Rybolovlev “ordered” Panteleymonov. There was no other evidence linking Rybolovlev with the murder apart from the testimony by Prokop. After a year of arrest, Rybolovlev was released on bail; later the court acquitted him.

Last month, Russian Billionaire Alexander Lebedev punched former Russian Billionaire Sergei Polonsky, during the taping of a Russian TV talk show. Lebedev later defended his two clean shots to Polonsky’s head. Prior to being sucker punched by Lebedev, Polonsky had said he felt like “punching someone in the face”. After “the bout” Lebedev said, “I’m not a fan of such behaviour, but sometimes if you are threatened verbally and physically you have to neutralise the threat to the best of your ability, without harming the other person.” Lebvedev is the owner of the English Newspaper, The Independent. According to Forbes 2008 List, Polonsky had a net work of $1,2 billion, however, in March of 2011 Bloomberg reported
Polonsky said he’s quitting business after his property developer went bankrupt.
Polonsky’s Mirax Group, which started building what was planned to be Europe’s tallest skyscraper before the global financial crisis in 2008, was dissolved by its board of directors yesterday, the company said on its website.
The extent of Polonsky’s remainig wealth, or lack thereof, is undermined.

Click Here to See the Action

In other more sinister Russian Billionaire news; Exiled Boris Berezovsky, who now lives in London, is suing fellow Russian Billionaire, Roman Abramovich for $6.8 billion. Bloomberg reports that “Berezovsky is claiming that “Abramovich intimidated him into selling shares in two Russian companies for less than they were worth. Abramovich argues Berezovsky never had stakes in Sibneft or in aluminum assets which eventually became part of United Co. Rusal, rather that he was paid for providing protection in the dangerous environment of Russia after the collapse of communism.”
The case is one of the biggest trials in Brittish legal history.

RT.com wrote

Abramovich admits that cash payments were made to his former mentor, but says this was just protection money, a necessary business expense at the time to benefit from Berezovsky’s political capital.
Both men have disclosed damaging details of their own during the hearings, as a way of trying to humiliate each rival even more. Abramovich even passed off one payment to Berezovsky as an artificial transaction, freely admitting it was a way around the money laundering regulations. As for Berezovsky, he claims his stake in Sibneft – their company – was 25 per cent, but has been forced to come clean about how for several years he took much more than that, sometimes even more than the company’s own profits.
It is this sense of lawlessness that Abramovich’s lawyer will emphasize in the closing statement of his defense, reports RT’s Ivor Bennett. He has already likened 1990s Russia to medieval England and it is that get-out clause both are using for their previous misdeeds. The difference is Abramovich is using it also to show that legitimate business simply did not exist at that time.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has recently acknowledged that fact in his recent televised Q&A, in which he said that this trial should be held in Russia, because that is where the money was stolen from, and that is where it should be divided.

The Independent reported

The Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich, has unleashed his most withering personal attack yet on his former business associate Boris Berezovsky, almost three months into the £3.5bn trial between the two men.
At the beginning of two days of closing submissions at London’s Commercial Court, Mr Abramovich’s barrister, Jonathan Sumption QC, called Mr Berezovsky an “angry and embittered man” with “truly prodigious powers of self-deception”.
Berezovsky is not the only one who has “issues” with Abramowitz. The London Times reported that
Alexander Korzhakov has told the court that Mr Abramovich’s acquisition of the oil group Sibneft in a state auction in 1995 was corrupt and unlawful. “With this money was bought Chelsea Football Club, palaces and the biggest private yachts,” he says.
Mr Korzhakov is a former KGB general who ran Russia’s security services in the early 1990s and has accused Mr Abramovich and Mr Berezovsky of conspiring to cause “huge economic and political damage” to the Russian state. He wants the $13 billion that Mr Abramovich made from selling Sibneft in 2005 to be returned to Russia.

Korzhakov is currently a member of the Russian Parliament. He was a close aid to Boris Yeltsin, and was seen standing next to him when Yeltsin made his historic speech on top of a tank, after a coup attempt against him failed in 1991.

The London Times also noted that

Mr Abramovich’s solicitors, denied that there had been any breach of Russian law in acquiring Sibneft. They dismissed Mr Korzhakov’s letter as containing several inaccuracies and said that it was irrelevant to the proceedings.

According to The Independent

The Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich, has unleashed his most withering personal attack yet on his former business associate Boris Berezovsky, almost three months into the £3.5bn trial between the two men.
At the beginning of two days of closing submissions at London’s Commercial Court, Mr Abramovich’s barrister, Jonathan Sumption QC, called Mr Berezovsky an “angry and embittered man” with “truly prodigious powers of self-deception”.
Meanwhile, two other former Russian billionaires, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, are serving long sentences for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Amnesty International has declared them to be “prisoners of conscience”
Brittish authorities want to extradite Andrei Lugovoy from Russia. They believe that he is responsible for killing Litvinenko. Last month, according to the Times,
A court in London was told that for almost a decade, the former KGB officer was entrusted by Mr Berezovsky and his right-hand man, Badri Patarkatsishvili, to “carry out many covert surveillance and other sensitive tasks relating to Mr Berezovsky’s personal and romantic life, and even his medical affairs — liasing for him with doctors and the like”. The tasks included recording, at Mr Patarkatsishvili’s orders, a meeting between Mr Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich at Le Bourget airport in Paris in December 2000.

It gets better. Last month Miaminewstimes.com reported that Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili’s widow, Inna Gudavadze, were defendants in a wrongful death lawsuit, brought by Patarkatsishvili’s New York lawyer, Emanuel Zeltser. Zeltser’s suit has been compared to the civil suit brought by the Goldman family against O.J. Simpson.

Miaminewstimes.com details a dinner meeting between Berezovsky and Zeltser that took place in London in March of 2008, shortly after Patarkatsishvili mysterious death. (Patarkatsishvili was 52 at the time.) According to Miaminewstimes.com,

Zeltser stood up and suddenly felt a bit dizzy. Berezovsky offered the services of his chauffeur and Rolls Royce Phantom for Zeltser’s trip to the hotel. After sliding into the back seat, which was separated from the front by tinted glass, the lawyer slipped into a state of semiconsciousness. He would later believe he had been drugged. Soon the car pulled up beside a private jet at a small suburban airport.

A few hours later, the jet landed in Minsk, Belarus. Zeltser was seized by men and driven to a former KGB prison where he would spend the next 16 months. He was finally released after Hilary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin intervened on his behalf.

In 2003 The PBS series Frontline did a segment called “Rich in Russia”. It profiled the new Russian Billionaires. For “Rich in Russia” Frontline filmed an interview with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Five days before the program aired, Khodorkovsky was thrown into prison, and has been there ever since.

Berezovsky, already exiled to London, was also interviewed for the same documentary. He offered some candid remarks as to how one went about becoming a billionaire, after the fall of the Soviet Union. As Berezovsky explained, “The Soviet bureaucrats didn’t believe that capitalism would prevail. You would give an official $10,000, and he would give you the property title. Not for one second did he expect the property to stay private. He was convinced that The Reds would return and take it back.” He justified the behavior that enabled him to become one of the richest men in the world. As he put it, “we didn’t break any laws, but if you considering giving bribes a crime, then all oligarchs were criminals.”

Click here to see “Rich in Russia”

Sources
Forbes
Rumafia
Miaminewstimes.com