 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A week in the world
Financial secrets of the great leaders
By Peter Snowdon
Need to get your apartment done up, but don't have the cash? Having trouble getting your bank to raise the credit limit on your VISA card? Then why not talk to Borodin and Pacolli! If they're still answering the phone, that is...
Last Thursday, the Swiss government revealed that it had secretly issued a warrant for the arrest of Pavel Borodin, former head of Russia's state property empire, and a close friend of Boris Yeltsin. Borodin is suspected of laundering Russian state funds, including proceeds from the privatisation of oil assets, and using the proceeds for the lavish redecoration of the Kremlin, among other things.
The contracts for tarting up the wall paper and laying down some thick shag were awarded to a firm based in Lugano run by a Kosovan Albanian businessman, Beghjet Pacolli. Questioned by the media last week, Pacolli confirmed allegations that he had personally guaranteed five credit cards for Yeltsin's wife Naina and the couple's two daughters. Pacolli insisted however that such "bribery" merely represented "normal business practice" in the former Soviet Union.
Immediately after being appointed acting president Vladimir Putin sacked Borodin from his job managing the Kremlin's multi-billion dollar property portfolio. On Wednesday last week, Borodin was appointed state secretary of the new union of Russia and Belarus. He denies all the charges against him, and has gone on record as insisting that he has never had a Swiss bank account in his life. The Swiss authorities, however, have frozen many millions of dollars of assets as part of their investigation -- including a number of accounts in the name of one Pavel Borodin. So either Mr Borodin is suffering from unreliable memory syndrome a la general Pinochet, or there has been a truly terrible mistake...
Indeed, sources of ready cash are drying up all around us even as we speak. Reports surfaced at the weekend that a significant part of the slush fund used by Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), then led by Helmut Kohl, to fund its 1994 election campaign may have been donated by the late French president Francois Mitterand. If that is so, then the possibility of future revenue streams from that particular source must be slight, and a new fundraising campaign will be required. Not that the old Socialist renegade was digging into his own pocket to see his liberal-centrist friend alright; the money is said to have originated as "commission" on the sale of an East German oil refinery to the French oil company Elf Aquitaine (currently at the centre of a corruption case involving the former secretary of Mitterand's Socialist Party...).
Kohl, former Chancellor and chief architect of German reunification, later described the allegations as "absurd and a lie", which only makes the source of the money in question even more mysterious. Party officials in Hesse initially recorded the donations as straightforward bequests from German exiles living in Paraguay, even though they had clearly transited through numbered accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The magazine Der Spiegel this week quoted a Paraguayan businessman who said he had falsified more than 200 death certificates, at a cost of $5,000 each, and claimed the CDU even went to the lengths of having the nameplates in a Paraguayan cemetery changed to match their records. Whoever would have thought obtaining illegal funds could be so much bother? But then, perhaps we reckoned without the German taste for method...
Another person I wouldn't recommend trying to touch for a fiver right now is J‘org Haider, leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party. Not that he doesn't know how to be generous. Last Wednesday, Haider celebrated his 50th birthday by hosting a lavish ski party in his home province of Carinthia for 5,000 neo-fascists -- sorry, for 5,000 party activists, friends, and journalists. The Freedom Party has been an ongoing headache for the central European mountain kingdom -- whose heroic resistance to Nazism was forever enshrined in that tragi-comic cinematic masterpiece, The Sound of Music -- ever since it placed second, ahead of the Conservatives, in last October's general election, having campaigned on a violently anti-EU, anti-immigrant platform.
The collapse two weeks ago of the Social Democrat-Conservative coalition which has governed Austria without interruption since the end of the Second World War opened the way for talks between the two runners-up, who now seem certain to agree a programme for government. On Monday the EU, emboldened perhaps by Belgium's decision last week to pass the most liberal nationality law in Europe, made a pre-emptive strike against this outcome, by announcing it would break off diplomatic relations with Austria and bar the appointment of Austrian officials to senior international posts if the Freedom Party were to be included in any future government. Whether such threats will carry much weight with the Austrian parliament, however, remains to be seen.
Dictators around the world who have benefited from European and US support during their halcyon days had further cause to reflect this week on the fickleness of Fate. While the British courts continued to support Home Secretary Jack Straw's decision to decline the extradition request issued by Spain against General Pinochet, a Senegalese judge gave the green light for criminal investigations to commence against Hissein Habre, the former ruler of Chad.
