"It's A Dirty Job..."

Ken Silverstein at Harper's blog, Washingtonbabylon, has this interesting tidbit this morning

Citigroup does business abroad

By Ken Silverstein

London-based Global Witness has just put out a good report on how some major international banks, including Citibank, “have been dealing with some of the world’s most corrupt regimes.” Gavin Hayman, the group’s Campaigns Director, said, “The same lax regulation that created the credit crunch has let some of the world’s biggest banks facilitate the looting of natural resource wealth from poor countries.”

Among the findings:

Barclays kept open an account for the son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea long after clear evidence emerged that his family were heavily involved in substantial looting of state oil revenues.

A British tax haven and a Hong Kong bank helped the son of the president of Republic of Congo, another oil-rich African country, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of his country’s oil revenues on designer shopping sprees.

Citigroup facilitated the funding of two vicious civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia by enabling the warlord Charles Taylor, now on trial for war crimes in the Hague, to loot timber revenues.

Perhaps you heard yesterday that Citi-bank's chairman had announced two consecutive months of 'profitability'? One wonders which murderous thugs they've empowered lately to show a 'profit.'

But, of course, the banks have a perfectly rational explanation: If they hadn't supplied the means and opportunity, somebody ELSE would have, and Citi (or which ever one was implicated in the current 'arrangements') wouldn't have had those profits for their stockholders.

Such arrangements, of course, now implicate the US Govt, because the investment/bail-outs from the State has poured into these crooked fuckers' bought us into the scam.

(Iirc, Margaret Thatcher's son was busted trying to start a coup in Equatorial Guinea, nest paw? Dots to connect?)