- Marc Rich has a pardon clearing him to enter the United
States at any time, but don't expect him ever to return.
-
- Washington sources say congressional investigators would
love to slap him with a subpoena upon arrival and haul him before
congressional
hearings and the cameras for interrogation.
-
- Specifics of the Clinton pardon deal may be just one
small part of what Congress would want to find out from Rich.
-
- Perhaps the most serious concern for congressional
investigators
is Rich's alleged ties with Russian intelligence agencies, the Russian
mafia and some of the old communist states of Eastern Europe.
-
- Last week the New York Post's Rod Dreher reported that
Rich made tens of millions of dollars helping Russia's communist bosses
loot their country, leaving it bankrupt.
-
- Rich's role in ruining Russia's economy was detailed
in the book "Godfather of the Kremlin" by Paul Klebnikov, whom
Dreher describes as an expert on Russia and a Forbes magazine senior
editor.
-
- The book alleges Rich and Russian oligarch Boris
Berezovsky
and associates stole untold sums from the Russian people through
international
financial manipulations.
-
- In 1983, the year he fled the United States to avoid
prosecution, Rich took advantage of the grain embargo that the United
States
imposed on the Soviet Union because of its war in Afghanistan. Rich ignored
the embargo and imported grain into the Soviet Union, winning friends in
the Soviet hierarchy with whom he would ally himself when the communist
government collapsed.
-
- According to Washington sources, from then on Rich was
associated in his business dealings with "the Communist Party and
KGB senior figures. Everybody in that carousel, commie and KGB, got
personal
benefits ... commissions in Western accounts."
-
- It is widely believed by intelligence experts that
today's
powerful Russian "mafia" is nothing more than an arm of Russian
intelligence agencies, such as the former KGB.
-
- Other evidence suggests Rich had more than a casual
business
relationship with the Soviet spy agencies.
-
- Appearing on CNN's "Larry King Live" earlier
this month, Howard Safir, the former head of the U.S. Marshals Service,
revealed efforts by East Germany to get Rich off the hook.
-
- Referring to Rich, Safir said, "You are talking
about an individual, when I did a spy exchange in 1986, he had a lawyer
from East Germany offer $225 million for him and (Rich's partner) Pinky
Green if the prosecutions were wiped out."
-
- According to Klebnikov, Rich came into the picture again
as a major wheeler-dealer in Russia around 1990, when the Soviet Union
began to open up to outsiders.
-
- "Governmental authority began to crumble. All these
local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own,"
Klebnikov
told Dreher.
-
- "Working out of Switzerland, which has secretive
banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia's plunderers
carry out their dirty work," Dreher wrote.
-
- According to Klebnikov, Rich dealt in oil, aluminum,
zinc and other raw commodities.
-
- "He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or
the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov told Dreher.
"He'd
say, `OK, you will sell me the (commodity) at 5 to 10 percent of the world
market price. And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by
reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback
in a Swiss bank account.'
-
- "He made a complete mint off of Russia,"
Klebnikov
said.
-
- Rich began buying Russian aluminum, at absurdly cheap
prices, with his hard currency. He then dumped the aluminum onto Western
industrial markets, causing a 30 percent collapse in the price of the
metal,
as Western industry had no way to compete.
-
- There was such an outflow of aluminum from Russia that
there were shortages of aluminum for Russian fish canneries. At the same
time, Rich reportedly moved in to secure export control over the supply
of most West Siberian crude oil to Western markets.
-
- Rich's companies were under investigation for fraud in
Russia, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal of May 13,
1993.
-
- For at least two years, while the Soviet Union was
writhing
in its death throes, Rich was that nation's largest trader of aluminum
and oil on a spot basis.
-
- "Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these
young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment and who made
billions off these schemes themselves," Klebnikov charged.
-
- "Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich,
they bankrupted Russia," Klebnikov alleged. "As a result, you
have a ruined economy, bankrupt government and an impoverished
population."
-
- Rich, headquartered in Switzerland, was well situated
to help the Russian mafia. Switzerland already has been identified by
international
police agencies as a major center of Russian money laundering.
-
- If it is true that Rich and his intermediaries were
willing
to spend more than $200 million for a pardon for U.S. crimes, it raises
questions of whether a lot more money may have changed hands than the few
million suspected as donations to the Democratic National Committee,
Hillary
Clinton's Senate campaign or the Clinton library.
-
- Could money, for example, have been transferred to an
offshore bank account? It's a good question investigators need to ask,
especially since the Clintons may have had their own Switzerland
connection.
-
- Several years ago London's Sunday Telegraph reported
that Vince Foster, one-time White House deputy counsel, had made frequent
trips to Switzerland before the Clintons entered the White House.
-
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