Category Archives: Corruption

‘ACLED CEO Prof. Clionadh Raleigh’s take on the public effects of corruption on conflict, and other observations on the state of the world.’

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Source: Raleigh Report – May 2026

“…We must grapple with the public effects of corruption on conflict. By corruption, I mean the practices and perception of it, in small and large ways, across politics, the economy, and society. The daily corruptions that make people think that they are bearing the costs for decisions and benefits made and enjoyed by a small group, or that there are no consequences for those who can wield their power. And by conflict, I mean the violence that surrounds us here — not in far-off places. Massive changes in violence are coming, and these will require support for security and state violence, recruitment into security services, commitment to short and long-term political goals, and shared agreement about which conflict is valid and which isn’t.

The public’s attitude and position on violence and conflict is hardly the primary consequence of corruption — but it is one outcome, and since you are here to think about conflict, join in.

My central thesis is this: People will accept conflict and its costs when they believe their sacrifice matters — when they can see that their support is essential, and that the benefits, now or in the future, are real. They accept it when they know national security is a shared goal worthy of a person’s effort and support. But when citizens can no longer connect the decisions of their leaders to any tangible benefit for their country, and the costs keep rising, that resolve collapses. Faith in political leadership erodes. And when people believe their society or political system is in desperate need of change — yet nothing changes — apathy and anger grow, rather than action. That is when the social fabric begins to fray.

The corruptions that people are forced to live with have now stripped away their agency. And people who have lost their agency go looking for it. Extreme politics offers that promise. But extreme politics never restores cooperation; it replaces it with power plays — internal and external — and, increasingly, with violence.

My broader worry is that something fundamental has shifted in how our societies function, and that shift has left us dangerously unprepared for what is coming. As global power realigns, our living standards will decline, and we will discover that our security institutions cannot restore order where it breaks down. The quality of our political ideas — and those who represent them and us — will continue to deteriorate. No one is coming to fix it. Those who said they would have failed, and will fail again…”

“Corruption, abuse of power, fraud, trading of influence … are defined as crimes in Greek law,” she said. “So no one in the world will convince me that these categories are part of the job description of politicians here in Greece or anywhere in the EU.”

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Kövesi ‘shocked’ at past Greek fraud rules – Suspects ‘paid back and were free to go’

“…Speaking on a panel titled “The Shock of the New”, Kövesi said the EPPO had initially been taken aback by how fraud cases were handled. She added that legal reforms followed exchanges with Greek authorities, describing them as aligned with European standards for addressing fraud and financial crime.

“We were a little bit shocked at the beginning because what we saw in Greece was that if you commit fraud, you steal money, you are caught, you pay back the money, and you are free to go. How come? It was a shock for us, and we discussed this. This is not possible […] But the Greek authorities changed this law… very good. This is the European way to do things, and once you enter the EPPO, you have to accept this.”

Kövesi also reflected more broadly on challenges, saying: “There is nothing more difficult than to fight with mentality. You can have the perfect laws, but if the mentality is wrong […] I am tired of hearing that this is how things are in Greece. I don’t believe that the Greek people accept corruption as a way of life, and I admire all the people who dare to take a stand and be different.”

Speaking about the ongoing investigation into OPEKEPE, she said: “The main topic here is what really happened in OPEKEPE,” describing the now-defunct agency as “an acronym for corruption, nepotism and clientelism.” Her remarks came in response to the recent lifting of the immunity of 13 MPs allegedly involved in the farm subsidies scandal…”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS of Gangster Planet: A TALE OF TWO DANNYS–HOPSICKER AND CASOLARO (Part One)

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“…“Scandal in contemporary U.S. life is an institutionalized sociological phenomenon. It is not due primarily to psychopathological variables, but it is due to the institutionalization of elite wrongdoing which has occurred since 1963. Many of the scandals that have occurred in the U.S. since 1963 are fundamentally interrelated: that is, the same people and institutions have been involved.”

—Prof. David Simon, Elite Deviance (6th edition)

(…)

Twenty years later journalist Danny Casolaro, shortly before his bled-out body with slashed wrists was found in a bathtub in West Virginia in 1991, had placed Meese at the center of a plot involving a secret operation dubbed “the Enterprise,” overseen by retired Air Force major general Richard Secord, who cut his teeth on covert operations in Laos in the ‘60s. Working for the CIA-owned Air America, Secord learned how to launder opium drug profits into private enterprise, as described in a variety of Iran-Contra documents that came out of Reagan’s time in offie.

Casolaro had taken his research a step beyond official reports by zeroing in on then-current activities of private individuals with connections to former Reagan officials still making money by supplying products secretly to George Bush’s Defense Department. Danny’s death occurred in the final days of Bush’s term, but the activities would continue with President Bill Clinton, who had been complicit with the Reagan and Bush administrations engaged in covert drug drops and money-laundering in Mena, Arkansas in the ‘80s. Clinton used the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority to launder the drug money proceeds after setting up a re-insurance company (Coral Reinsurance) in Barbados, according to the Staff of the Ozark Gazette’s research project called “Gray Money.” See Mark H. Gaffney’s book, Black 9/11 for the full story.

Casolaro had taken his research a step beyond official reports by zeroing in on then-current activities of private individuals with connections to former Reagan officials still making money by supplying products secretly to George Bush’s Defense Department. Danny’s death occurred in the final days of Bush’s term, but the activities would continue with President Bill Clinton, who had been complicit with the Reagan and Bush administrations engaged in covert drug drops and money-laundering in Mena, Arkansas in the ‘80s. Clinton used the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority to launder the drug money proceeds after setting up a re-insurance company (Coral Reinsurance) in Barbados, according to the Staff of the Ozark Gazette’s research project called “Gray Money.” See Mark H. Gaffney’s book, Black 9/11 for the full story.
Edwin Meese III was the third generation of his name to run political affairs in Alameda County, and he was a natural in overseeing Reagan’s political affairs in Sacramento after the new governor’s inauguration in early 1967, the same year, incidentally, that the Hopsicker family left Chicago Heights for their move to California.

During the 1970’s–while the primary author of Gangster Planet, was studying at UCLA–a ban was issued by California’s Air Resources Board (ARB) on sulphur dioxide emissions from industrial facilities. The ban was followed by a complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief filed by Daniel’s dad’s employer, Stauffer, joined in by other plaintiffs, including Chevron U.S.A., Inc., and Allied Chemical, as well as the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The fact that Harry’s company was “under attack” by California while he was paying his son’s California tuition may help explain the generational conflict that arose between father and son at the time.
Harry Hopsicker officially retired from the company in 1980, three years before Stauffer’s executives and accountants got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a “multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme to overstate its 1982 and 1983 earnings.” Stauffer entered into a consent decree—settling the case without admitting wrong-doing. By this time, of course, Harry and Rita were making plans to move from Stauffer’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut to Venice, Florida.

Stauffer and Phosphorous Trichloride
Harry may not have known that Stauffer had sold the design for a phosphorous trichloride chemical plant it owned in Pennsylvania to a Swiss company, Krebs A.G. Sale documents acknowledged the design would be used by El Nasr Pharmaceutical Company of Egypt, a fact that alarmed even the Bush administration in 1989. Besides pesticides, phosphorous trichloride was also a key ingredient for “Sarin, a deadly nerve gas and is on the Western core list of precursor chemicals.”

Sarin gas was used during the Iran-Iraq war begun in 1980. This use resulted in a ceasefire and an agreement designed to prevent Egypt from manufacturing the gas in another plant. Consequently, Krebs was forced to sell out to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of the UK.

ICI’s interest in toxic chemicals first rose in 1948, according to a book by Dan Kaszeta (Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, From Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia. Oxford University Press 2021, p. 89), while doing research on pesticides. A long-winded article in the Harvard Business Review in 1995 analyzed why ICI had, in 1987, “demerged” its businesses. ICI kept the part of the company that made industrial polymers, paints, and explosives, but it sold the part that made drugs, pesticides, and specialty chemicals to Zeneca—now merged into AstraZeneca….”

~ Full article…

‘Elite capture’: How Pakistan is losing 6 percent of its GDP to corruption

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At the heart of the IMF’s findings is the concept of “state capture”, where, according to the fund, corruption becomes the norm and, in fact, the primary means of governance. The report argues that the Pakistani state apparatus is frequently used to enrich specific groups at the expense of the broader public.

The report estimates that “elite privilege” – defined as access to subsidies, tax relief and lucrative state contracts for a select few – drains billions of dollars from the economy annually, while tax evasion and regulatory capture crowd out genuine private sector investment.

These findings echo a 2021 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, which said economic privileges granted to Pakistan’s elite groups, including politicians and the powerful military, amount to roughly 6 percent of the country’s economy.

Ali Hasanain, an associate professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, said the IMF’s description of elite capture is accurate but added that it was “hardly a revelation”.

He pointed to the 2021 UNDP report and other domestic studies that describe how Pakistan’s economic system has long served politically connected actors who secure “preferential access to land, credit, tariffs and regulatory exemptions.”

“The IMF diagnostic repeats what many domestic studies, including those by the World Bank and Pakistan’s own institutions, have already emphasised: Powerful interests shape rules to maintain their advantage,” he told Al Jazeera.

~ Full article…

Catherine Austin Fitts: Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & The Aristocracy of Stock Profits — I. Brady, Bush, Bechtel & “the Boys”

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“…Bush climbed through Republican politics to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Ford Administration. After spending four years displaced by the Carter Administration, Bush was now Reagan’s Vice President with Executive Order authority for the National Security Council (NSC) and U.S. intelligence and enforcement agencies. Bush’s new authority was married with expanded powers to outsource sensitive work to private contractors. Such work could be funded through the non-transparent financial mechanisms available through the National Security Act of 1947, and the CIA Act of 1949.

This was a secret source of money for funding powerful new weaponry and surveillance technology and operations owned, operated or controlled by private corporations.3 Carter’s massive layoffs at the CIA had created plenty of private contractor capacity looking for work.4 An assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life two months after the inauguration meant that Vice President Bush and his team were called on to play an expanded role. Meantime, Nicholas Brady continued as an intimate friend and collaborator from his position as Chairman of Dillon Read.5

In April of 1981, Bechtel, working through the Bechtel private venture arm Sequoia, bought the controlling interest in Dillon Read from the Dillon family, led by C. Douglas Dillon, former U.S. Treasury Secretary6 and son of the firm’s namesake, Clarence Dillon. This was a time when Bechtel was facing increased competition globally while experiencing a decline in the nuclear power business that they had pioneered.7

We found ourselves with new owners whose operations were an integral part of the military and intelligence communities and who had demonstrated a rapacious thirst for drinking from the federal money spigot.[8] George Schultz, former Secretary of the Treasury during the Nixon Administration, and now Bechtel executive, joined our board…”

https://dillonreadandco.com/brady-bush-bechtel-the-boys/

First Friends: How the First Couple’s Consigliere Went From Modeling Mogul to Special Envoy

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Paolo Zampolli –– the administration’s current Special Envoy for Global Partnerships –– is the subject of this investigation.

In Part I of this series, we met one of Trump’s closest friends from Italy: Flavio Briatore, a P2 lodge and Italian mafia-linked businessman with ties to prominent Victoria’s Secret Angels, at least one of whom he introduced to Epstein. In this second installment, the connections of Zampolli, another Italian close to both Trump and Briatore, are the focus. Zampolli has been in the news recently, not for the backdoor wheeling-and-dealing of his new, official U.S. government post, but because Trump and his wife Melania claim to have been first introduced by Zampolli amid assertions to the contrary that claim it had been Epstein.

As this investigation will show, Zampolli is deeply corrupt. From his beginnings as a protégé for the controversial modeling mogul John Casablancas, a man known for his appetite for what he called “child women,” Zampolli grew his modeling empire with money from Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt Italian Prime Minister (and close friend of Flavio Briatore) who was forced to resign for his sexual escapades with minors while in office. Zampolli would later follow Casablanca’s example and marry his wife when she was 19, having met her not long after she had flown as an under-age teen on Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”

After leaving the world of modeling to work for Donald Trump in the early 2000s, Zampolli would become closely affiliated with the Clintons as well as the United Nations, where he worked on their climate change initiatives and on the development of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. In particular, Zampolli was part of the team that developed SDG 14 “Life Under Water” alongside Stuart Beck, a figure closely tied to CIA regime change operations in Palau, as well as none other than Ghislaine Maxwell and her TerraMar project.

Yet, that is not all Zampolli would accomplish at the UN, as he would figure prominently in a major UN financing scandal and also boasted close ties to suspect citizenship-by-investment schemes that would later see one of his close colleagues arrested and another dead under exceedingly bizarre circumstances. Those colleagues had been taking bribes from an organized crime and CCP-linked Chinese billionaire who was once at the center of the scandal that directly intersects with most of Jeffrey Epstein’s seventeen visits to the Clinton White House.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2025/08/investigative-series/first-friendspt2/

Ukraine — Operation Midas: Criminal scheme involved kickbacks of up to 15% from contracts

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“The main focus of the criminal organization’s activities was the systematic receipt of illegal benefits from Energoatom’s counterparties in the amount of 10% to 15% of the value of contracts. In particular, Energoatom’s counterparties were imposed conditions for paying kickbacks for avoiding blocking payments for services provided/products delivered or deprivation of supplier status. This practice was called ‘slagbaum’ (a Dutch word meaning cement barrier,” the message on the Telegram channel said on Monday.

The head of the criminal organization involved the former deputy head of the State Property Fund, who later became an advisor to the Minister of Energy, as well as a former law enforcement officer who held the position of executive director for physical protection and security of the company, in the implementation of the scheme.

Using official connections in the ministry and the state-owned company, they ensured control over personnel decisions, procurement processes, and the movement of financial flows.

In fact, the management of a strategic enterprise with an annual income of over UAH 200 billion was carried out not by official officials, but by outsiders who did not have any formal powers, but took on the role of “watchers.”

https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/1119310.html