An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale of Corruption
Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.
What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.
In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked “Confidential” Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, “A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,” the memo from Soros calls for steps to “restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.” To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that “General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”
Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.
Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does business in Poland.
Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.
Naked asset grab
In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist in: “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement.”
He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU’s “AAA” top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.
Whose risk would the EU insure?
Soros details, “I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment destination.” Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, “The investments will be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of personal gain. “
For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s “shock therapy” messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a “free market” at once, rather than gradually.
The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to “protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.”
Naftogaz the target
The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, “The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…”
In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy: “I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, ‘big bang’ type of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden subsidies…”
Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization “big bang.”
The Puppet-Master?
The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.
Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.
Soros shapes ‘New Ukraine’
Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros’ IRF money is behind creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature. Soros writes, “The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged. The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…”
Soros’ NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate to push through “reforms,” with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can hardly afford.
In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a “big bank” privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, “You are fortunate to have appointed three ‘new Ukrainian’ ministers and several natives (sic) who are committed to this approach.”
Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015 paper says that, “It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country.” That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee investment fund.
While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine’s constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he complains, “The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency.”
Soros suggests that he intends to create this “visible demonstration” through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature.
George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle role.
George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”
This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d’etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of “public-private-partnership.” Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, “George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015.”
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© 2015 New Eastern Outlook
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
30 Comments
See how casual Fascism* has taken root in the United State of Oligarchy. Hedge funders are making their own foreign policy while PeacePrize hits the links
*Corporatism if Fascism gets your panties in a bunch
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” – Sinclair Lewis
Yes and it is already, sad
A long time ago I thought GS was a person of compassion then I woke up, the man is is just another neo-conn of death
http://global3.memecdn.com/Anatomy-of-a-Forum-Troll_o_27027.jpg
I knew he was scum when he crashed Asian money markets in the mid 90s
What is with all these Jews, Soros, Kolomoisky,,Nuland, in cahoots with the great grandkids of Ukrainiams who murdered tens of thousands of Jews amd Poles during WW II
“merely because Engdahl is sorta a lunatic an asshole is no reason to completely disregard his writings.”
This one is about George Soros…
— Is there a red key up your arse as well, or just on your favorite color pained wheels?
So?
Why don’t you submit your writing for publication, or point us to your very own site where we can be entertained by your gallery of pictographs and uninspired authoritarian regurgitation of run of the mill status quo positions and narratives?
You come off as far more of an asshole payazzo than most of those whom you so label.
How about a link to your own site, then?
I’m not complaining, or criticizing Tut’s choice of articles, or making demands for original posts.
Before criticizing others you might gain some legitimacy – doubtful – by showing us your own great stuff. Link up!
“CyberBerkut (Russian: КиберБеркут, Ukrainian: КіберБеркут)—is a modern organized group of pro-Russian hacktivists.[citation needed] The group became locally known for a series of publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Ukrainian government, and western or Ukrainian corporate websites.[”
From the wiki on cyberberkut.
E-samizdat
Your predictably clownish and authoritarian submissive parroting of MSM opinions of other people’s soundness of mind is irrelevant to anyone other than yourself.
If you have something to add on the subject of another corrupt oligarch’s sociopathic and self aggrandizing callousness, then just make it! Getting hung up on Tut for not being up to exchanging views with a run of the mill fluffer of the status quo, who communicates through childish pictures, doesn’t surprise anyone but yourself.
That you would think otherwise is a reflection on your navel gazing self.
How is this “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” crap getting past the editors?
You dress up in claims of a patently lying, lunatic and full of shit US government and Washington’s lackey state’s MSM propagandists, each and every day, prick.
The issue is not whether on some topics Engdahl may or may not be full of shit, the issue is Soros. What is your view on his view of this Dem party’s own version of the Koch’s? That’s all…
Wouldn’t Soros have been 14 at the end of WW2? Young for a collaborator isn’t it?
Here’s Sorosz’s “collaboration” – http://www.georgesoros.com/faqs/entry/howgeorgesorossurvivednazis/
Pretty ugly stuff to go smearing a Jewish kid who was lucky enough to survive the Nazis,
whatever your bullshit prognosis about the Ukrainian situation.
Of course the Russians did plenty to rape, kill and plunder in East Europe as well, but some on the left have decided we’ve always been allies with Eurasia… I mean Russia.
“The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.”
Lots of think tanks these dayz… When you have more money than god one needs to find ways to reduce tax liabilities. One way to advance your interests is to set up “think tanks,” espousing positions which enhance your self interest, while using a “Tax Exempt corporate shell.”
Tobacco Institute?
Amazing how we “reduce the burdens of government,” by allowing tax exempt “think tanks,” to educate us, rather than Panzers or Abrams Tanks rolling through Poland’s flats or a desert in Al-Anbar?
When money is deemed speech, the picking of gold from teeth soon follows. We have learned nothing.
Hasbara alert!
What about-ery alert!
dubinsky is correct that Engdahl is a bigtime conspiracy theorist (and nutcase) who, per his wiki, denies peak oil and its biological origins, and thinks climate change is exaggerated (It is all apparently about the Rockefellers.)
Ukraine is a place where competing kleptocracies collide and conflicting imperial spheres of influence overlap. I see many black hats and no white ones.
Soros is definitely worth a takedown, just not by Engdahl. Soros made his billions in currency manipulations and bets, in other words in completely unproductive and socially damaging ways. For years, he has been portrayed by liberals as one of the sane capitalists. Being a cagey investor, however, does not equate to knowing shit about economics. Soros is very much a supporter of the Establishment. His brand of liberalism is Wilsonian in nature: pro-corporate, interventionist, and paternalistic, and fits in well with the neoliberalism of the Clintons. He is pushing 85, a ripe old age for a financial pirate and economic terrorist. Don’t know how active he is anymore. I thought he pushed his ideas through his foundations, like the Institute for New Economic Thinking, where traditional capitalist theory was given a shiny, and superficial, progressive veneer.
Down goes Dubinsy. Down goes Dubinsky. Ctuttle, winner by a knockout in the 12th round.
A well-reasoned rebuttal, haw haw haw.
Stormfront alert!
Sure, Tuttle labels 14-year-old Jewish kid surviving the Hungarian holocaust a “collaborator”. If this is how you win prize fights, I’m happy to stay out of the ring/clown car.
By the way, who was it who was funding democratic institutions in post-wall East Europe while the US was going stingy looking for its peace dividend? Oh, that Soros – such evil in the heart of that man.
As Dylan wrote,
“Go to him now, the Clown calls you, you can’t refuse,
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose,
You’re invisible now, now that you’re wearing the Clown’s shoes!!!
How does it feel…”
So how does it feel to be on your own, a complete unknown?
I don’t now a lot about Soros, Made a bunch of money on currency futures, conservatives blame him for everything, not much else. If the story is true about him and the Ukraine, he’s a bad guy and it makes me wonder how much of the good stuff is cover for double-dealing.
Regarding Dubinsky, Ctuttle nailed him for being a troll. I comment at a few conservative sites, make my comment, maybe one reply, then move on. Staying around to argue is what makes you a troll. and Dubinsky did that.
Please compare the “bad stuff” Soros is supposedly doing with the bad stuff the Russians are doing with the bad stuff that goes on inside Ukraine’s political system. There’s a lack of balance in almost every discussion about Ukraine.
Re: stick around to argue – if what you say makes sense, why is it being a troll? I see people hang around the site week after week spitting nonsense or lies about the Ukrainian situation. Are they trolls too, or just Disinformation Central?
Whether somebody else is doing bad stuff or not doesn’t affect that Soros is or is not. Although his actions don’t exist in a vacuum, they can certainly be judged on their own merits.This is a version of the old playground excuse “But Johnny did it too.” If you are biblical in viewpoint, the parable about the farmer hiring laborers at various times during the day seems on point.
The endpoint of a quest for balance would have us catalog and prioritize every action in the history of the world. Only then could we not be accused of a lack of balance.
Regarding sticking around to argue, I offer this thought. If my first and strongest argument didn’t do the job, why should I expect to win by repeating it? If it wasn’t my best effort, then why did I lead with it. Answering specific questions is a different matter.
Disinformation Central and Trollishness are not mutually exclusive. (I see the computer doesn’t like “trollishness”, I’ll have to educate it.)
First, Engdahl is a nasty piece of work, making accusations against a 14-year-old Soros without noting he was 14 & fluffing up the collaboration with Nazis” bit. Then he launches into his “Jews who aren’t Jews” Rothschild-related crap – classic anti-Semitic, and I don’t use this term loosely – http://balder.org/judea/George-Soros-The-Secret-Financial-Network-Behind-The-Wizard–By-William-Engdahl.php
Now, so what exactly is the problem with what Soros is doing?
1) Ukraine needs a protective military without violating the Minsk Agreement. Train in Romania so NATO’s not sitting in Ukraine. What do you object to? Presumably Putin doesn’t want NATO in Ukraine, so this preserves the peace and the status quo.
2) Get control of the financial markets. Duh. What do you object to? Oh, Soros will put in a billion euros if it’s insured – sounds pretty good as part of the package – after all, to encourage investment, someone (besides governments) needs to put money in. Soros will lead the pack. Self-interest? Sure, but not unreasonable, and he’s been doing this 20 years, leading investment in uncertain zones. I guess Engdahl thinks money outside of Soros will just flow by itself into crappy dangerous unattractive zones. Wrong.
Minor divergence re: AFRICOM – the US is putting troops in every country of Africa. Claiming that US troops in Liberia will be especially to protect Soros & Rothschilds’ (and other Jews’, oh my!) interests is like saying the 405 Freeway was put in to get me from my apartment to the shopping center.
3) No time at the moment to parse all the rest, but it goes without saying that Engdahl believes every advisor is out to private Ukrainian gas and everything else and are simply evil, evil, evil, and Yats and Poroshenko are our personal treasonous proxies in the country. Sure, it could be true, just as all the people outside my door are part of a Zombie Apocalypse.
Anyway, anyone who starts with such an obnoxious piece of anti-semitism should be ignored. There are better sources of news.
Not a nice guy this Mr Soros, but then again most guys like him did not get to be billionaires without breaking a few eggs. And thanks for the info on the confrontation between General Mike Davis and Wesley Clark.
Around DC Clark is considered something of a moderate, considering what we have had running loose the last few years.