BUSTED - Police Officials Crack Down On Major Human Trafficking Gang

Greek authorities proudly announced that they successfully busted a notorious human trafficking gang that smuggled people to the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. The police operation, which took place in various areas across the Greek capital, including the Athens International Airport, resulted in six arrests. According to press reports four Greek men aged 41, 28, 25 and 38 and two foreign nationals aged 26 and 31 were arrested while four more members of the gang are still at large.

Quite interestingly, the head of the gang was a 41-year-old Greek man based in Larissa, and as shocking as this sounds the 38-year-old is a police sergeant at the Agios Panteleimonas department in Athens. Also important to note, is that before the arrests were made the 26-year-old Albanian man was ready to travel illegally to the UK.

(It is believed that the arrested police sergeant advised the slave traders on issues regarding identity card theft, and for this service he apparently received 2,000 to 3,000 euros for each ID card he issued.)

While investigating the case, authorities discovered multiple original and counterfeit documents and certificates (including identity cards), as well as other items such as stamps, computers, printers, automobiles, a motorcycle, two pistols (one of which had a suppressor), a pen gun and quite a few rounds of ammunition.

It appears that these human traffickers have been in operation since 2010 and it is suspected that they are responsible for trafficking 96 migrants abroad (in 53 cases).

Analyzing how the gang worked, the same reports in Athens claim that initially the gang adulterated original travel documents and identity cards, which they would often buy from Greeks, who would later report them as lost or stolen to avoid suspicion.

(In fact the investigation revealed quite a few cases of family members who regularly declared that their passports were stolen).

Did they make any money?

Obviously they did. According to the police report the gang managed to generate over 3,000,000 Euros, which was gradually saved and exported to the USA.

BUSTED Another New York Times :Sort of" Retraction on Case of Ukraine

By Robert Parry (Consortiumnews via Global Research)  - The mainstream U.S. media likes to talk about Ukraine as an “information war,” meaning that the Russians are making stuff up. But the false narratives are actually being hatched more on the U.S. side, as a new New York Times story acknowledges, writes.

The New York Times, which has asserted for weeks that the Russian government is behind the unrest in Ukraine’s east, finally sent some reporters to the region to dig up the proof, but all they found were eastern Ukrainians upset by the coup regime in Kiev that replaced President Viktor Yanukovych.

The Times, which has been an unapologetic promoter of the “pro-democracy” uprising that ousted the democratically elected president through violent extra-constitutional means, has recently been promoting the “theme” that Ukrainians would be happy with their new unelected government if only the Russians weren’t “destabilizing eastern Ukraine.”

Times’ editors thought they had the goods two weeks ago with a front-page scoop featuring photographs supposedly proving the presence of Russian special forces troops. According to the Times, the photos “clearly” showed Russian special forces in Russia and then the same soldiers in eastern Ukraine. However, only two days later, the scoop unraveled when it turned out that a key photo – supposedly showing a group of soldiers in Russia who later appeared in eastern Ukraine – was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the premise of the entire story.

So, the Times belatedly dispatched reporters C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider to Slovyansk in eastern Ukraine to talk with the militants who are opposing the coup regime in Kiev. To their credit, the two reporters actually seem to have recounted what they found, albeit with some of the anti-Russian bias that is now deeply embedded in the Western media narrative.

Noting that Moscow says the Ukrainian militants are not part of the Russian armed forces while “Western officials and the Ukrainian government insist that Russians have led, organized and equipped the fighters,” the reporters write:

     “A deeper look at the 12th Company [of the People’s Militia] — during more than a week of visiting its checkpoints, interviewing its fighters and observing them in action against a Ukrainian military advance here on Friday — shows that in its case neither portrayal captures the full story.
     “The rebels of the 12th Company appear to be Ukrainians but, like many in the region, have deep ties to and affinity for Russia. They are veterans of the Soviet, Ukrainian or Russian Armies, and some have families on the other side of the border. Theirs is a tangled mix of identities and loyalties.

      “Further complicating the picture, while the fighters share a passionate distrust of Ukraine’s government and the Western powers that support it, they disagree among themselves about their ultimate goals. They argue about whether Ukraine should redistribute power via greater federalization or whether the region should be annexed by Russia, and they harbor different views about which side might claim Kiev, the capital, and even about where the border of a divided Ukraine might lie.”

Chuckling at Kiev

The Times reporters cited one unit leader named Yuri as chuckling “at the claims by officials in Kiev and the West that his operations had been guided by Russian military intelligence officers. There is no Russian master, he said. ‘We have no Muscovites here,’ he said. ‘I have experience enough.’ That experience, he and his fighters say, includes four years as a Soviet small-unit commander in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1980s.

      “The 119 fighters he said he leads, who appear to range in age from their 20s to their 50s, all speak of prior service in Soviet or Ukrainian infantry, airborne, special forces or air-defense units.”

The reporters also discovered mostly well-worn and dated weaponry, not the newer and more sophisticated equipment that is available to Russian forces.

      “During the fighting on Friday, two of the fighters carried hunting shotguns, and the heaviest visible weapon was a sole rocket-propelled grenade,” Chivers and Sneider wrote. “Much of their stock was identical to the weapons seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers and Interior Ministry special forces troops at government positions outside the city. These included 9-millimeter Makarov pistols, Kalashnikov assault rifles and a few Dragunov sniper rifles, RPK light machine guns and portable antitank rockets, including some with production stamps from the 1980s and early 1990s.”

Other Western journalists, who have bothered to report from eastern Ukraine rather than just accept handouts from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev or the State Department in Washington, discovered a similar reality.

For instance, on April 17, Washington Post correspondent Anthony Faiola reported from Donetsk that many of the eastern Ukrainians whom he interviewed said the unrest in their region was driven by fear over “economic hardship” and the IMF austerity plan that will make their lives even harder.

     “At a most dangerous and delicate time, just as it battles Moscow for hearts and minds across the east, the pro-Western government is set to initiate a shock therapy of economic measures to meet the demands of an emergency bailout from the International Monetary Fund,” Faiola reported.

But this on-the-ground reality of legitimate and understandable concerns among the eastern Ukrainians has been missing from the U.S. propaganda barrage, which has overwhelmed the mainstream press as thoroughly as a similar P.R. campaign did during the run-up to the Iraq War, if not more so. Official Washington’s “group think” now is all about blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine crisis.

One of the more preposterous theories that I have heard from Washington punditry and officialdom is that Putin arranged the Ukraine chaos as part of a scheme to reclaim land lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Though this notion of Putin as the aggressor plotting to reassert Russian imperialism has become something of a “conventional wisdom,” it is fully unsupported by the facts.

To believe that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis, you would have to believe that he organized the Maidan protests, that he built up the neo-Nazi militias that spearheaded the Feb. 22 coup, and that he intentionally overthrew his ally, Yanukovych, whom Putin seemed to be trying to save. Though this conspiracy theory is ludicrous, it is now widespread in Official Washington.

Caught Off-Guard

The reality was that Putin was caught off-guard by the events in Ukraine, in part, because he was preoccupied with the Sochi Winter Olympics and the threat that the games would be marred by a major terrorist attack. He spent a great deal of time in Sochi personally overseeing the security.

Meanwhile, the Maidan uprising was unfolding in Kiev, cheered on by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and partly financed by American entities, such as the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, whose longtime president Carl Gershmandeemed Ukraine “the biggest prize” in a Washington Post op-ed published in late September, months before the current crisis erupted.

Though many of the protesters from western Ukraine had legitimate grievances over the pervasive corruption in Ukrainian politics and the inordinate power of a handful of wealthy oligarchs, the final violent coup was carried out by well-trained neo-Nazi militias organized in 100-man brigades, known as “the hundreds.”

After the Feb. 22 putsch when Yanukovych and many of his officials were forced to flee for their lives, Putin began reacting to this deteriorating situation on Russia’s border. What he was doing was “crisis management,” not implementing some Machiavellian scheme that had long been contemplated.

But the demonization of Putin in the Western media has been so total that anyone who dares question the most extreme interpretations of his behavior is denounced as a “Putin apologist.” Indeed, any attempt to present a nuanced narrative of what has happened in Ukraine is dismissed as somehow promoting Russian imperialism or spreading Russian propaganda.

This oppressive “group think” has, in turn, made formulating any rational policy toward Russia and Ukraine politically impossible in Official Washington.

In this context of asking who’s the real propagandist, it’s worth looking back on another New York Times front-page story from mid-April by David M. Herszenhorn, who accused the Russian government of engaging in a propaganda war.

In the article entitled “Russia Is Quick To Bend Truth About Ukraine,” Herszenhorn mocked Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev for making a Facebook posting that “was bleak and full of dread,” including noting that “blood has been spilled in Ukraine again” and adding that “the threat of civil war looms.”

The Times article continued, “He [Medvedev] pleaded with Ukrainians to decide their own future ‘without usurpers, nationalists and bandits, without tanks or armored vehicles – and without secret visits by the C.I.A. director.’ And so began another day of bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine that have emanated from the highest echelons of the Kremlin and reverberated on state-controlled Russian television, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.”

This argumentative “news” story spilled from the front page to the top half of an inside page, but Herszenhorn never managed to mention that there was nothing false in what Medvedev wrote. Indeed, as the bloodshed has grown worse and a civil war has become more apparent, you might say Medvedev was tragically prescient.

It was also the much-maligned Russian press that first reported the secret visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Kiev. Though the White House later confirmed that report, Herszenhorn cited Medvedev’s reference to it in the context of “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” Nowhere in the long article did the Times inform its readers that, yes, the CIA director did make a secret visit to Ukraine.

Perhaps, the Chivers-Sneider story about the backgrounds of the fighters in the People’s Militia of eastern Ukraine – what looks like another New York Times’ “sort of” retraction of its earlier claims – will give some pause to the U.S. propaganda stampede into another unnecessary war.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print or as an e-book (from Amazon andbarnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives

BUSTED - Ex-TV journalist Says Planeloads of Cash Flown into Greece in 2012, But Press Buried Story

Questions over the role of the media in Greece's crisis have been re-raised by the admission of a former TV reporter (and current candidate with the governing New Democracy party) that journalists knew that a bank run was underway with emergency cash being flown into the country, yet withheld the information even after the danger had passed.

In June 2012, things were not looking good for Greece. The country was in between elections after a round of parliamentary elections in May failed to result in a government. Meanwhile amid the political instability, with a hard public line emanating from the troika over the country’s emergency bail-out program, the prospect of a disorderly default and exit from the eurozone was looking increasingly likely.

Nervous Greeks began to empty their bank accounts, fearful that their euros may be converted to drachmas overnight. Effectively a bank run was underway. As has since been revealed in the book The Default Line excerpted in this August 2013 article in the Daily Mail - the only reason why Greek banks did not run out of cash during that period is because, under secret orders from the authorities in Brussels and Berlin, billions of euros in hard cash were trucked and flown into the country.

Most Greeks had no idea that such an operation was underway – most but not all. Among those in the know was journalist Maria Spyraki. The reporter turned politician for New Democracy (she recently resigned her position as political correspondent at Mega channel in order to run for a European parliament seat in the upcoming elections) revealed in an interview this weekend that she knew of the operation and related banking crisis at the time but chose not to report it:

      “Greece had a bank run between the elections in May and June of 2012. In reality, people went to the banks and withdrew their money. That is something that no one in my position could say… There was a very painful process. And there was the process of supplying Greece with cash. The plane would leave from Elefsina, go to Italy and return with cash which went to the Bank of Greece where it was shared out to the banks. We never reported that. We never had the right to report it. And obviously I can’t tell you who gave me that information but I got it from people who knew all of the details.”

To not report on an incipient bank run while it is underway can be considered justifiable.

Journalists have a duty to inform, but also to be judicious with the information they obtain when releasing it may cause more harm than good - as in the case of a bank run. However it appears that the decision by Ms Spyraki - and by extension Mega TV itself (it is incredibly unlikely that the editors at the station did not have the same information as Ms Spyraki) may have been less motivated by a desire to act in the public interest and more by a desire to fit the facts to supporting a hard pro-Memorandum line.

Why, after the banking crisis had passed, did the station not report the story about the secret flights?

Why did more than a year have to pass before the story was reported first in the British press?

Was it not in the public interest to know the lengths the eurozone leaders were willing to go to in order to prevent Greece from exiting the euro?

Perhaps even more revealing than Ms Spyrakis’s revelation was another admission by Mega TV’s news anchor Yiannis Pretenderis. In a January 2013 interview regarding a book written by the anchor about the crisis with iefimerida.gr, Pretenderis said the following when asked about errors the press had made during the crisis:

      “The restructuring of the debt: we all knew from the first moment that it wasn’t sustainable, but they told us, don’t say it now, it’s not right. The result was that until 2012 everyone maintained that the debt was sustainable and we didn’t respond, ‘not it isn’t!’ We didn’t tell them that this is nonsense. That was self-restraint.”

Can anyone really blame Greeks for feeling misled by the press as well as the political class when one of the top news anchors in the country effectively admits that he failed to challenge outright lies for months?

Who did that benefit?

Mainstream media in Greece, and particularly Mega Channel, have been criticized because of their ‘incestuous’ (as the State Department qualified the relationship in a now infamous Wikileaks cable) link to the country’s political and business establishment.

According to a 2012 Reuters special report, a nexus of media, business and politics lies behind the country's crisis.

Both Spyraki and Pretenderis worked (and still work) for Mega Channel, a TV station controlled in part by the Bobolas family which has extensive business interests spanning the sectors of construction, highway concessions, waste management, and mining. The family also holds important stakes in newspapers that have been loyal in their support for all governments since the 2009 fiscal crisis.

But while channels like Mega are often more than happy to slam the country’s politicians when it suits them (politicians that they often helped elect), they have been far less willing to turn their criticism on themselves.

The Greek media needs to look long and hard at itself and to make changes if it is to regain the public’s trust.

For democracies to function properly they require a well-informed citizenry. And that can only happen if those responsible for providing information do so objectively in the interest of the public, and not in the service of specific policies, concealing inconvenient facts. Abusing information is what got Greece into its current mess (through concealing the height of its deficits) and once in a hole, one should stop digging.

PressProject

BUSTED - New York Times Admits It Pushed Fabricated Evidence about Iraq, Syria & Ukraine

By Washington's Blog via Global Research -  The New York Times pushed fabricated evidence in the run up to the Iraq war.   A year later, the newspaper apologized for its inaccurate, one-sided coverage.

The U.S. and the New York Times pretended that Syria’s government was responsible for the chemical weapons attack … but that claim was debunked, and even the New York Times was forced to retract itseveral months later.

(The alternative media, including Pulitzer prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh, has also pointed out that it was the Syrians rebels – with the help of the Turkish government – did it).

Then the U.S. and the New York Times pretended that they had proof that Russian soldiers were the mysterious “masked men” seizing government buildings in Russia.  But a couple of days later, they were forced reporting from the alternative media – especially Robert Parry, winner of the George Polk Award for National Reporting – into retracting that claim, and admitting that their “proof” was almost as flimsy as proof of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”.

It seems like the alternative media is forcing the New York Times to retract half-baked, pro-war, propaganda claims more and more quickly.

BUSTED - Anonymous: Hacked Emails Prove The Staging Of A False Flag For WW3 Kickoff With Russia (VIDEO)

credit pakalertpress.com

A series of hacked emails that were received by “Anonymous Ukraine” seem to indicate that the West is working with extremist elements in the Ukraine and planning to carry out more attacks in this country that go beyond simple riots. These new attacks, say alternative news sources which featured these emaisl, are then to be blamed on Russia including the blowing up of airplanes at airports, and even attacks that will include mass civilian casualties.

What is also clear is that these attacks are to be blamed on Russia including blowing up planes at an airport.  Other attacks may well include mass civilian casualties.

The long series of emails, according to pakalertpress.com  include several that are very shockingly incriminating. The following email is the most frightening and the “worst,” three “smoking gun” false flag planning documents:

    Ihor,
    Events are moving rapidly in Crimea. Our friends in Washington expect more decisive actions from your network.
    I think it’s time to implement the plan we discussed lately. Your job is to cause some problems to the transport hubs in the south-east in order to frame-up the neighbor.
    It will create favorable conditions for Pentagon and the Company to act.
    Do not waste time, my friend.
    Respectfully,
    JP
    Jason P. Gresh
    Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army
    Assistant Army Attaché
    U.S. Embassy, Kyiv
    Tankova 4, Kyiv, Ukraine 04112
    (380-44) 521 – 5444 | Fax (380-44) 521 – 5636

“Framing up the neighbor” as Lt. Col. Gresh states so inelegantly, says the website, defines false flag terrorism.  Other documents including a White Paper done by the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kiev dated March 4, 2014 which warns of Russian “conspiracy theories.”

This definately does not look like a conspiracy now does it? Anyway if you want to read the letters then please click HERE.

This false flag plan against Ukraine, was exposed by Anonymous on YouTube. In the following video Anonymous says that it was planned to blame Russia and to be publicly hailed as an attack by Russia against Ukraine so that the West could use it as an excuse for Military intervention -which undoubtedly would lead to World War III-.

Hello
We are Anonymous Ukraine
We have hacked e-mail correspondence of US Army Attache Assistant in Kiev Jason Gresh and a high ranking official from Ukrainian General Staff Igor Protsyk.
It appears that they are planning to conduct a series of attacks on Ukrainian military bases in order to destabilize the situation in Ukraine.
Particularly, Jason Gresh writes to Igor Protsyk that it's time to implement a plan that implies "causing problems to the transport hubs in the south-east of Ukraine in order to frame-up the neighbor. It will create favorable conditions for Pentagon to act", says Jason Gresh.
In his turn, Protsyk writes to some Vasil and tells him to arrange an attack on an airbase of 25 aviation brigade of Ukrainian air force stationed in Melitopol.
This Vasil is responsible for arranging the details of the attack, gathering of the gunmen and providing them with a map of sites that are chosen to be attacked.
We strongly recommend everyone to look through these documents. There you will find all the details.
https://shared.com/pj5ayc9im8?s=l
http://depositfiles.com/files/nsj5poqlb
We will protect Ukraine from Western hirelings and fascists that are trying to hurl Ukraine into chaos! We do not want them to start a war! Expect us
We are Anonymous Ukraine.
We are the Patriots of our country.
We Do Not Forgive.
We Do Not Forget.
Expect Us.

NEW NGO SCANDAL - PASOK NGO now obligated to return foreign aid - 200,000 missing!

State grant to Pasok think tank Istame for the "restructuring" of Georgian parliament was signed off by the director of Hellenic Aid, Alex Rondos, a close associate of onetime advisor to then foreign minister George Papandreou. The grants were approved while Papandreou was foreign minister.

Auditors in 2013 recommended the return of 200,000 Euros in grants which the Greek state provided, via PASOK's party research foundation, for a “restructuring” of the Georgian parliament that may have never taken place, Eleftherotypia revealed at the weekend.

In 2002, the foreign ministry's developmental agency, Hellenic Aid, agreed to fund 75% of a 413,399-program Euros to assist in the revamping of the legal, the organisational and operational framework of the parliament and to contribute to computerising the body's work.

The grant was approved by the new director of Hellenic Aid, Alex Rondos, a close associate of onetime advisor to then foreign minister George Papandreou, who appointed him to the position.

Last week it emerged that Rondos, who served as the European Union’s special representative for the Horn of Africa from 2012 to 2013, is also suspected by police of involvement in a 8.9 million Euros fraud at another NGO, International Mining Initiative, from 2000 to 2004.

The Greek NGO which would oversee the program was the PASOK-affiliated think tank, the Andreas Papandreou Institute of Strategic and Development Studies (Istame).

The 18-month program had a total budget of 413,399 Euros three-quarters of which came from Hellenic Aid. It was to run March 2004, the year in which, according to reports, Rondos he became advisor to the then Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

Following reports in 2012 about corruption in NGOs affiliated with Hellenic Aid, the ministry ordered an audit of all 600 organisations in receipt of funding.

According to the audit into the Georgian parliament "restructuting" program, Istame was unable to account for 340,400 Euros in grants. In addition, the audit was unable to ascertain from the files whether the project was ever completed. Its conclusion was that Istame must return 199,445 Euros to Hellenic Aid.

As the report was completed in 2013, it raises the question as to why it is now only coming to light, given that the current foreign minister, Evangelos Venizelos, is now the PASOK leader.

What the audit found

• According to the documentation seen by the auditors, the ministerial decision authorising the first tranche of the grant (amounting to 155,000 Euros) was signed on 12 July 2002, six weeks before the contract was signed between Hellenic Aid and Istame, on August 30th, 2002.
• The file also contains a letter from the Georgian parliament saying that the works had not been completed by December 6, 2007. The same letter also said that he had received an official invitation to visit from the Georgian parliament, the director of the NGO [Istame], never paid a visit to Georgia, as was foreseen by the program.
• The audit found that much of the documentation submitted to support the grant were photocopies of certified documents, not originals. Other documents were not certified at all.
• The file also showed that Istame did not seek official translations of foreign documents.
• According to the file, Istame also signed a contract with an NGO called Iason, but the documentation does not make it clear where this organisation was based.
• When it came to the program’s accounts, it listed five different categories of expenses which were all broadly similar, such as printing and stationary. Thus, the budget provided for 12,500 Euros for "Accessories and supplies", 12,000 Euros for “Routine costs”, about 9,000 Euros for “Other costs”, 17,893 Euros for “Unexpected costs” and 37,575 Euros for the “NGO’s operating and administrative expenses".
• A further 8,713 Euros was budgeted for “Services”, such as legal advice, drafting costs, IT and accounting work. For the latter two services, there are no contracts to show where that money went.
• A Georgian invoice for 2,250 Euros for catering services was not signed by the person who received the money.
• Although 259,000 Euros was purportedly to be spent on labour costs, the file contains no evidence that staff contracts were signed. Payslips were mostly unsigned by their recipients.

New building

If any Hellenic Aid money was spent on Georgia's parliament, it's no longer used for that purpose. In 2009, construction began on a new building to house the Georgian parliament. The huge glass domed structure, located in the second city of Kutaisi, was inaugurated in 2012. Some reports said the bill for the controversial building and associated costs came to around USD 200 million.

Eleftherotypia, EnetEnglish

Related articles

• BUSTED - Papandreou gave the order!
• Papandreou Says He Is Not To Blame For Corrupt NGO - Yeah Right...
• SPECIAL REPORT - A.Rondos - Now Wanted For Involvement In PASOK Crony NGO

BUSTED - Papandreou gave the order!

An incendiary testimony given by a foreign ministry employee to the RealNews newspaper (photo above) at the weekend directly implicates former prime minister George Papandreou in the latest NGO scandal. More precisely, a Foreign Affairs Ministry employee of the Directorate General of the International Development Office, has all but pointed the finger at George Papandreou as the main person behind the NGO de-mining scandal that ‘collected’ more than 8.9 million Euros.

The trouble with the former prime minister, Mr. George Papandreou, is that he has never taken any responsibility for all the mistakes he has made. According to him, every decision he made -whether this was during the period he was a Minister, or even when he finally became prime minister- was for the good of the nation and its people. Of course, the numbers, the evidence and the news continually prove otherwise, but then again to understand George you have to either be a healthy alcoholic, or have a potent prescription for sedatives.

Last Monday HellasFrappe featured a SPECIAL REPORT about a shady NGO that was formed under his run at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the period 2000-2004. Following a 20 month investigation, authorities discovered that this particular NGO - the International Mine Initiative (IMI) - that was formed to remove land mines from war-stricken countries was involved in fraud and money laundering. And what is worse, this organization has apparently gobbled up more than 8.9 million Euros in public funds! The head of the NGO -a well known journalist- has already been arrested, while three diplomats as well as several other retired foreign ministry officials have also been implicated in the case.

The scandal also surfaced the name of Mr. Alex Rondos, who many may recall is -and always has been- one of George Papandreou's closest associates. Rondos is the former general director of the foreign ministry's general directorate that oversaw Hellenic Aid, which distributed funds to NGOs.

This "mystery man" was also questioned in the case that has been investigating the assassination attempt against the former Prime Minister of Greece Costas Karamanlis. Rondos, who some suspect is the right hand of Soros himself, always shows up in nations that are considered global hotspots, or have energy potential. The trouble is that once he leaves these countries, chaos, riots, protests, etc. suddenly erupt. Read more about this by clicking HERE.

Looks like George did not get a lot of sleep on Monday night, or after the story broke, because early on Tuesday his office released an announcement warning that all of those who are attempting to implicate Papandreou in this case "will be exposed".

Papandreou, who more or less brought the idea of NGOs to Greece, said that he was the one who actually "put the NGOs in order."

(HELPPPPPPP. Pes mas ti pineis paidi mou kai den mas dineis!)

Without naming the IMI, Papandreou's office said that "on his own initiative, he (Papandreou) not only put an end to a regime that evaluated the NGO without any defined criteria and transparency, but he also launched specific institutional framework governing them."

Under Papandreou's run at the Foreign Ministry:

• The concept of NGOs Was defined for the first time
• He established a compliance Special Registry of NGOs and the evaluation process and to sign up.
• He established conditions for the funding of NGOs.
• A Certification and Evaluation committee was established for NGOs.
• Also he formed a National Advisory Committee for NGOs. The results of this committee's meetings would then be documented in a report which was then sent to the Greek Parliament's permanent committee on Foreign and Defence policies.

Sounds like he set the foundation for NGOs to us, and not organized them as he states. Even Rondos more or less left it to be understood on Tuesday that before Papandreou took office NGOs were more or less non-existent in this country. And even if we give George the benefit of the doubt it still does not prove that there wasn't any monkey business going on with state funds. All it proves is that Papandreou more or less organized the NGOs or applied cosmetic touches to them so that they can look more credible.

There are plenty of reasons why we are suspicious of what George Papandreou says and does. One of which is from the countless reports in the Greek press, which clearly state that the party of gobbling up state funds continued even when the crisis began, and when George once again took over the Foreign Ministry in 2009. (He was both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Greece).

Millions and millions of euros were apparently handed out by the Greek foreign ministry in 2010 while former prime minister George Papandreou was suffocating the Greek people by slashing pensions and salaries with bloody austerity measures as a cause of the memorandums he signed with the Troika. According to an article that was featured on HellasFrappe in mid December 2011, and based on the Sunday edition of “To Paron Tis Kyriakis” the number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) under George's run at the Foreign Ministry climbed to a whopping 431 by 2010. And what is worse, the reports at the time said that in a decade alone -meaning from 2000 when he first took the reigns at the Ministry- more than 115,388,814 Euros (or about four billion drachmas) of state funds were handed out.

You see boys and girls... George had a plan and it was called “NGOs”.

La colpo grosso, a la Greek "NGO” is the brainchild of George Papandreou and the report in To Paron Tis Kyriakis had said that the NGOs began when Papandreou became foreign minister and started to fund various organizations, associates and relatives exorbitant and without any transparency. The same report was also featured on the Makeleio news site at the time claiming that over the last decade our ambassadors abroad were asked to report on the activities of all these foreign NGOs and how they have used the money the state funded them but they somehow always replied that they had no ability to check their credibility.

In other words... The state was handing out millions of Euros to NGOs, and noone cared to check on where this money was going.

The next shocking factor in that specific report in To Paron had also said that most of the NGOs that were funded at the time included personalities that were very close to Papandreou. This includes his very own mother who was operating an NGO for women's rights (the organization of which went by the title of KEDE or the Centre for Research and Action for Peace).

Legal? Yes. But is all this morally and ethically right?

Most of the money, claimed the article on Makeleio, was handed out in 2003, or a total amount of approximately 18,095,076 dollars when Papandreou was acting Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Simitis government.

Other close friends or acquaintances include his adviser while he has been President of PASOK, Julia Dimitriadis, as well as his former adviser Gregory Valianatos (who admitted that the George Soros foundation funded one of his organizations). Valianatos is also currently running as a candidate against Ilias Kassidiaris for the Mayor of Athens.

Other names include former PASOK minister Haris Pamboukis and his friend Spyros Flogaitis, a former journalist for the “Tsevelelou” publication by the name of Costas Tzevelekou, Papandreou’s friend and former chairman of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece Mr. Nikos Efthimiadis, the present Mayor of Thessaloniki for PASOK Mr. John Boutaris, and PASOK Eurodeputy Maria Damanaki …. as well as many, many others adds the article in “Makeleio“.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that most of the names are from Papandreou’s close environment, or part of his political strategy group of friends and one can easily conclude that the NGOs represented by these people seem to have played an important role in his rise to the premiership of the country.

When Margret Papandreou said twelve years ago that her son was going to become Prime Minister of Greece, some smiled and said that every mother always wants the best for her children. Several years later she apparently said that the dynasty or name of Papandreou should be used to make money, but again some brushed it off, but from what it seems the family had a plan.

Zoom to 2014, the statement that was released by Papandreou's office also said that the former PM ordered the initial investigation into the case and that any attempts to link him to it had nothing to do with "truth and reality".

We don't know how much truth there is in that statement because some press reports are claiming that after PASOK lost the elections to the New Democracy party of Costas Karamanlis in 2004 a tonne of documents were removed from the Foreign Ministry and taken to the Greek parliament to be investigated.

Obviously the recent revelations about the NGO in question, must be the result of this investigation.

Also, if things were on the up and up so much then why doesn't Papandreou dare to say anything about the salaries that some of his associates were receiving at the ministry -basically the people who are now implicated of fraud and money laundering in this crony NGO-.

Papandreou's office even had the audacity to say that all of "those who are trying to implicate his name will be exposed."

That is a laugh. Who is trying to implicate Papandreou? He has already implicated himself! According to a report in Eleftherotypia (photo ABOVE) on Tuesday we discovered this:

Between 2001 and until 2003, George Papandreou's photograph appeared immediately below the logo of the International Mine Initiative, which is the NGO accused by police authorities today of defrauding the state of more than 8.9 million Euros.

The website does not exist anymore because it was shut down, but Eleftherotypia claimed that numerous versions of the IMI website are archived on the Wayback Machine.

And what is even more hillarious is that following a website redesign in 2003, Papandreou's image was joined by that of Andreas Loverdos, who was his acting deputy of foreign affairs at the time.

But this particular case is indeed unique, and that is because this NGO had received funding from the foreign ministry to clear land mines in countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and Iraq, without ever following the proper procedures for obtaining NGO funding. Did they use scams to do this? Probably so, but we will allow judicial authorities to iron all that out. All we know is that the staff involved in this company -as press reports stated - handed over 20-30% of their salaries as "donations", enabling this particular NGO to apply for more funding. They were indeed greedy!

(Under Greek law, a quarter of the funds for development projects should be met by charities to enable the government to cover the remaining sum.)

This unprecedented scandal should not really come as a surprise to anyone. All the scandals that have erupted in this country over the last two decades and that involve money somehow always have someone from the PASOK party who is involved. We are not claiming that the conservatives are angels, but it does not compare in any which way to how corrupt the PASOK party was (and all who supported it. Incidentally... all these people have now moved over to the SYRIZA party). This type of behavior is a symptom of a much wider problem in Greece, where hundreds of similar organisations existed for decades, without proper oversight on their activities and, more importantly, their finances. Until recently, more than 600 NGOs were registered with Hellenic Aid, which is run by the finance ministry's directorate general of international development cooperation. It took authorities 20 months to investigate this case, imagine how long it is going to take to investigate all these organizations!

As an Eleftherotypia article pointed out, countries with similar populations to Greece, such as Holland and Denmark, have only 200 or so international developmental organisations, but in Greece this number is triple. We may be a small nation but we are LARGE when it comes to sucking out money from the state. Or at least some groups were. Thankfully, the fog is finally clearing.

All of this is a result of the onset of the crisis in Greece. The Greek Parliament, through its committee on institutions and transparency, actually had the b**lls to cast a light on the funding of these NGOs and they should be applauded for this. In a report, two MPs noted that there was an absence of a clear institutional framework governing the NGOs and a lack of coordination when it came to funding them. The MPs were apparently unable to determine the actual number of NGOs nor the amounts of subsidies that they have received, nonetheless they estimated that it ran to several hundred million Euros. 

Whatever the case, the issue is now being investigated. The evidence that will surface will surely be interesting.

So is Papandreou to blame? ABSOLUTELY.

He is politically responsible for this whole mess.

He not only destroyed this nation's economy, and set us back 30 years but he also destroyed every chance this nation ever had of keeping its head out of water. And let us not even comment on how he handled some of our national issues because we would be here all night. All we know is that as a result of PASOK's "socialism" and George Papandreou's infamous line "money exists" more than 5,000 people have committed suicide as a result of this crisis,  hundreds of thousands of people live without electricity, tens of thousands became homeless, over 150,000 businesses shut down, one third of the population is unemployed and almost half of the people in this country are either looking through rubbish bins or standing in a soup kitchen to get something to eat. We also know, that George never cared about this nation and its people,but rather worked hard to endorse other interests.

The Omertà against Papandreou has to end.

He should be held accountable for all his mistakes, and if he still has an ounce of decency he should finally acknowledge this.

References in Greek

• http://www.protothema.gr/politics/article/354374/papandreou-ego-evala-taxi-stis-mko-/
• http://www.enikos.gr/politics/215012,H_apanthsh_toy_Papandreoy_gia_th_MKO.html
• http://www.newsbomb.gr/politikh/story/406056/papandreoy-ego-evala-taxi-stis-mko
• http://lithosfotos.blogspot.gr/2014/02/blog-post_573.html
• http://www.paron.gr/v3/new.php?id=72733&colid=37&catid=34&dt=2011-12-18%200:0:0
• https://strategyreports.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/mko/
• http://olympia.gr/2011/06/30/mamaka_mou/
• http://www.makeleio.gr/?p=61381
• http://kartesios.com/?p=23913
• http://www.newsit.gr/default.php?pname=Article&art_id=112198&catid=3
• http://exomatiakaivlepo.blogspot.gr/2011/02/blog-post_2766.html
• http://kostasxan.blogspot.gr/2011/12/blog-post_2240.html

Related articles

• Papandreou Says He Is Not To Blame For Corrupt NGO - Yeah Right...
• SPECIAL REPORT - A.Rondos - Now Wanted For Involvement In PASOK Crony NGO
• OPINION - Does The Papandreou +Rondos +Lazzard +Sorros Alliance = The Rothchilds? You Bet It Does!

Soccer Team Owner From Fuel Smuggling Scandal Given Extension to Testify

The 15 people arrested over charges of participating in a fuel smuggling ring were given extensions starting this weekend to testify in groups; they are scheduled to appear before prosecutors on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

According to a dispatch from the state news agency, the suspects are to be detained at the Greek Police headquarters in Athens until their testimony.

Officials claim that the leader of the criminal organisation is the president of the ETEKA petroleum company and president of the Atromitos Athens soccer team George Spanos, together with an employee and an associate of the company who have also been arrested. The arrests were made earlier this week.

Press reports note that about 24 people are involved in this case, 9 of which are still at large.

The same reports claim that the ring was illegally selling fuel on the market, for the past two years, (and estimated that this could be as much as 4.5 million litres of contraband oil). The loss in duties and taxes from this exchange apparently exceeds more than 3.5 million Euros.

The members of the ring, through the company involved in the smuggling, stole marine fuel that was destined for the supplying of ships. With the cooperation of fuel truck drivers. They would withhold a quantity of marine fuel after supplying the ships and then channel this to cooperating fuel stations where they would then mix it with diesel oil and sell it on the market. In many cases they even resold it to the shipowners from whom they had withheld it.

Investigations were carried out at the company's installations as well as at a gas station and this apparently allowed authorities to collect the evidence needed in order to bust the ring. They discovered and confiscated more than 8,000 litres of illegally withheld marine diesel, five fuel trucks and 18,400 Euros in cash.

The suspects are charged with the creation and participation in a criminal organisation, fuel smuggling, fraud, money laundering, bribery and abuse of authority.

Responding to the charges, Mr. Spanos said that the charges against him are stale and groundless and do not even touch him, nor the company that he represents.

In a statement that was published by many online media news outlets, he said that his company contributes greatly to the national economy by more than 300,000,000 Euros paying in taxes, duties and contributions every year to the state, while he employs a staff of well over 150 people.

The Secretary General for Transparency and Human Rights George Sourlas had a difference of opinion. In an interview to the state owned ANA-MPA agency he said that "these are rings that looted public money for decades", stressing that former prime minister Lucas Papademos had also mentioned in Parliament in January 2012 that the Greek state suffered annual losses of one billion euros in revenues, and at least 25 billion over the past 25 years, from fuel smuggling.

     "Over the past 15 years three reports had been prepared on how the smuggling is carried out and how it can be handled; however, they were never utilised, Sourlas said.

He added that although the issue was not under his jurisdiction now, he had dealt with it for 10 years, since a chemical analysis of the General Chemistry office on fuel at the Fire Brigade came to my knowledge...

     "I have submitted 49 files on proven fuel adulteration to both regular Justice and the military and I have never received a reply, for over a year now."

Related articles

• BUSTED - Police Make 16 Arrests In Fuel Smuggling Ring - Head Of ETEKA Group Charged!

BUSTED - Police Make 16 Arrests In Fuel Smuggling Ring - Head Of ETEKA Group Charged!

The Greek government is determined to put an end to the corruption that has plagued this country for decades. Earlier this week about 16 people were arrested in what some reports claim was because of their involvement in fuel smuggling ring.

Among those arrested is an oil company and a football team president as well as two state employees, one working in customs and the other at the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. In all, about 30 people have been taken in for questioning while the police operation continues.

A report in To Vima went a step further and said that among those arrested is the President of the ETEKA group and Atromitos F.C. George Spanos.

The report added that authorities are focused on busting this fuel smuggling ring which apparently involves fuel station owners, executive officers of petroleum companies and even ... ministers!

The charges brought against the suspects include fuel smuggling, fraud, money laundering, bribery and abuse of authority.

Papandreou Says He Is Not To Blame For Corrupt NGO - Yeah Right...

credit newsbomb

The trouble with the former prime minister, Mr. George Papandreou, is that he has never taken any responsibility for all the mistakes he has made. According to him, every decision he made -whether this was during the period he was a Minister, or even when he finally became prime minister- was for the good of the nation and its people. Of course, the numbers, the evidence and the news continually prove otherwise, but then again to understand George you have to either be a healthy alcoholic, or have a potent prescription for sedatives.

On Monday HellasFrappe featured a SPECIAL REPORT about a shady NGO that was formed under his run at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the period 2000-2004. Following a 20 month investigation, authorities discovered that this particular NGO - the International Mine Initiative (IMI) - that was formed to remove land mines from war-stricken countries was involved in fraud and money laundering. And what is worse, this organization has apparently gobbled up more than 8.9 million Euros in public funds! The head of the NGO -a well known journalist- has already been arrested, while three diplomats as well as several other retired foreign ministry officials have also been implicated in the case.

The scandal also surfaced the name of Mr. Alex Rondos, who many may recall is -and always has been- one of George Papandreou's closest associates. Rondos is the former general director of the foreign ministry's general directorate that oversaw Hellenic Aid, which distributed funds to NGOs.

This "mystery man" was also questioned in the case that has been investigating the assassination attempt against the former Prime Minister of Greece Costas Karamanlis. Rondos, who some suspect is the right hand of Soros himself, always shows up in nations that are considered global hotspots, or have energy potential. The trouble is that once he leaves these countries, chaos, riots, protests, etc. suddenly erupt. Read more about this by clicking HERE.

Looks like George did not get a lot of sleep on Monday night, or after the story broke, because early on Tuesday his office released an announcement warning that all of those who are attempting to implicate Papandreou in this case "will be exposed".

Papandreou, who more or less brought the idea of NGOs to Greece, said that he was the one who actually "put the NGOs in order."

(HELPPPPPPP. Pes mas ti pineis paidi mou kai den mas dineis!)

Without naming the IMI, Papandreou's office said that "on his own initiative, he (Papandreou) not only put an end to a regime that evaluated the NGO without any defined criteria and transparency, but he also launched specific institutional framework governing them."

Under Papandreou's run at the Foreign Ministry:

• The concept of NGOs Was defined for the first time
• He established a compliance Special Registry of NGOs and the evaluation process and to sign up.
• He established conditions for the funding of NGOs.
• A Certification and Evaluation committee was established for NGOs.
• Also he formed a National Advisory Committee for NGOs. The results of this committee's meetings would then be documented in a report which was then sent to the Greek Parliament's permanent committee on Foreign and Defence policies.

Sounds like he set the foundation for NGOs to us, and not organized them as he states. Even Rondos more or less left it to be understood on Tuesday that before Papandreou took office NGOs were more or less non-existent in this country. And even if we give George the benefit of the doubt it still does not prove that there wasn't any monkey business going on with state funds. All it proves is that Papandreou more or less organized the NGOs or applied cosmetic touches to them so that they can look more credible.

There are plenty of reasons why we are suspicious of what George Papandreou says and does. One of which is from the countless reports in the Greek press, which clearly state that the party of gobbling up state funds continued even when the crisis began, and when George once again took over the Foreign Ministry in 2009. (He was both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Greece).

Millions and millions of euros were apparently handed out by the Greek foreign ministry in 2010 while former prime minister George Papandreou was suffocating the Greek people by slashing pensions and salaries with bloody austerity measures as a cause of the memorandums he signed with the Troika. According to an article that was featured on HellasFrappe in mid December 2011, and based on the Sunday edition of “To Paron Tis Kyriakis” the number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) under George's run at the Foreign Ministry climbed to a whopping 431 by 2010. And what is worse, the reports at the time said that in a decade alone -meaning from 2000 when he first took the reigns at the Ministry- more than 115,388,814 Euros (or about four billion drachmas) of state funds were handed out.

You see boys and girls... George had a plan and it was called “NGOs”.

La colpo grosso, a la Greek "NGO” is the brainchild of George Papandreou and the report in To Paron Tis Kyriakis had said that the NGOs began when Papandreou became foreign minister and started to fund various organizations, associates and relatives exorbitant and without any transparency. The same report was also featured on the Makeleio news site at the time claiming that over the last decade our ambassadors abroad were asked to report on the activities of all these foreign NGOs and how they have used the money the state funded them but they somehow always replied that they had no ability to check their credibility.

In other words... The state was handing out millions of Euros to NGOs, and noone cared to check on where this money was going.

The next shocking factor in that specific report in To Paron had also said that most of the NGOs that were funded at the time included personalities that were very close to Papandreou. This includes his very own mother who was operating an NGO for women's rights (the organization of which went by the title of KEDE or the Centre for Research and Action for Peace).

Legal? Yes. But is all this morally and ethically right?

Most of the money, claimed the article on Makeleio, was handed out in 2003, or a total amount of approximately 18,095,076 dollars when Papandreou was acting Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Simitis government.

Other close friends or acquaintances include his adviser while he has been President of PASOK, Julia Dimitriadis, as well as his former adviser Gregory Valianatos (who admitted that the George Soros foundation funded one of his organizations). Valianatos is also currently running as a candidate against Ilias Kassidiaris for the Mayor of Athens.

Other names include former PASOK minister Haris Pamboukis and his friend Spyros Flogaitis, a former journalist for the “Tsevelelou” publication by the name of Costas Tzevelekou, Papandreou’s friend and former chairman of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece Mr. Nikos Efthimiadis, the present Mayor of Thessaloniki for PASOK Mr. John Boutaris, and PASOK Eurodeputy Maria Damanaki …. as well as many, many others adds the article in “Makeleio“.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that most of the names are from Papandreou’s close environment, or part of his political strategy group of friends and one can easily conclude that the NGOs represented by these people seem to have played an important role in his rise to the premiership of the country.

When Margret Papandreou said twelve years ago that her son was going to become Prime Minister of Greece, some smiled and said that every mother always wants the best for her children. Several years later she apparently said that the dynasty or name of Papandreou should be used to make money, but again some brushed it off, but from what it seems the family had a plan.

Zoom to 2014, the statement that was released by Papandreou's office also said that the former PM ordered the initial investigation into the case and that any attempts to link him to it had nothing to do with "truth and reality".

We don't know how much truth there is in that statement because some press reports are claiming that after PASOK lost the elections to the New Democracy party of Costas Karamanlis in 2004 a tonne of documents were removed from the Foreign Ministry and taken to the Greek parliament to be investigated.

Obviously the recent revelations about the NGO in question, must be the result of this investigation.

Also, if things were on the up and up so much then why doesn't Papandreou dare to say anything about the salaries that some of his associates were receiving at the ministry -basically the people who are now implicated of fraud and money laundering in this crony NGO-.

Papandreou's office even had the audacity to say that all of "those who are trying to implicate his name will be exposed."

That is a laugh. Who is trying to implicate Papandreou? He has already implicated himself! According to a report in Eleftherotypia (photo ABOVE) on Tuesday we discovered this:

Between 2001 and until 2003, George Papandreou's photograph appeared immediately below the logo of the International Mine Initiative, which is the NGO accused by police authorities today of defrauding the state of more than 8.9 million Euros.

The website does not exist anymore because it was shut down, but Eleftherotypia claimed that numerous versions of the IMI website are archived on the Wayback Machine.

And what is even more hillarious is that following a website redesign in 2003, Papandreou's image was joined by that of Andreas Loverdos, who was his acting deputy of foreign affairs at the time.

But this particular case is indeed unique, and that is because this NGO had received funding from the foreign ministry to clear land mines in countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and Iraq, without ever following the proper procedures for obtaining NGO funding. Did they use scams to do this? Probably so, but we will allow judicial authorities to iron all that out. All we know is that the staff involved in this company -as press reports stated - handed over 20-30% of their salaries as "donations", enabling this particular NGO to apply for more funding. They were indeed greedy!

(Under Greek law, a quarter of the funds for development projects should be met by charities to enable the government to cover the remaining sum.)

This unprecedented scandal should not really come as a surprise to anyone. All the scandals that have erupted in this country over the last two decades and that involve money somehow always have someone from the PASOK party who is involved. We are not claiming that the conservatives are angels, but it does not compare in any which way to how corrupt the PASOK party was (and all who supported it. Incidentally... all these people have now moved over to the SYRIZA party). This type of behavior is a symptom of a much wider problem in Greece, where hundreds of similar organisations existed for decades, without proper oversight on their activities and, more importantly, their finances. Until recently, more than 600 NGOs were registered with Hellenic Aid, which is run by the finance ministry's directorate general of international development cooperation. It took authorities 20 months to investigate this case, imagine how long it is going to take to investigate all these organizations!

As an Eleftherotypia article pointed out, countries with similar populations to Greece, such as Holland and Denmark, have only 200 or so international developmental organisations, but in Greece this number is triple. We may be a small nation but we are LARGE when it comes to sucking out money from the state. Or at least some groups were. Thankfully, the fog is finally clearing.

All of this is a result of the onset of the crisis in Greece. The Greek Parliament, through its committee on institutions and transparency, actually had the b**lls to cast a light on the funding of these NGOs and they should be applauded for this. In a report, two MPs noted that there was an absence of a clear institutional framework governing the NGOs and a lack of coordination when it came to funding them. The MPs were apparently unable to determine the actual number of NGOs nor the amounts of subsidies that they have received, nonetheless they estimated that it ran to several hundred million Euros. 

Whatever the case, the issue is now being investigated. The evidence that will surface will surely be interesting.

So is Papandreou to blame? ABSOLUTELY.

He is politically responsible for this whole mess.

He not only destroyed this nation's economy, and set us back 30 years but he also destroyed every chance this nation ever had of keeping its head out of water. And let us not even comment on how he handled some of our national issues because we would be here all night. All we know is that as a result of PASOK's "socialism" and George Papandreou's infamous line "money exists" more than 5,000 people have committed suicide as a result of this crisis,  hundreds of thousands of people live without electricity, tens of thousands became homeless, over 150,000 businesses shut down, one third of the population is unemployed and almost half of the people in this country are either looking through rubbish bins or standing in a soup kitchen to get something to eat. We also know, that George never cared about this nation and its people,but rather worked hard to endorse other interests.

The Omertà against Papandreou has to end.

He should be held accountable for all his mistakes, and if he still has an ounce of decency he should finally acknowledge this.

References in Greek

• http://www.protothema.gr/politics/article/354374/papandreou-ego-evala-taxi-stis-mko-/
• http://www.enikos.gr/politics/215012,H_apanthsh_toy_Papandreoy_gia_th_MKO.html
• http://www.newsbomb.gr/politikh/story/406056/papandreoy-ego-evala-taxi-stis-mko
• http://lithosfotos.blogspot.gr/2014/02/blog-post_573.html
• http://www.paron.gr/v3/new.php?id=72733&colid=37&catid=34&dt=2011-12-18%200:0:0
• https://strategyreports.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/mko/
• http://olympia.gr/2011/06/30/mamaka_mou/
• http://www.makeleio.gr/?p=61381
• http://kartesios.com/?p=23913
• http://www.newsit.gr/default.php?pname=Article&art_id=112198&catid=3
• http://exomatiakaivlepo.blogspot.gr/2011/02/blog-post_2766.html
• http://kostasxan.blogspot.gr/2011/12/blog-post_2240.html

Related articles

• SPECIAL REPORT - A.Rondos - Now Wanted For Involvement In PASOK Crony NGO
• OPINION - Does The Papandreou +Rondos +Lazzard +Sorros Alliance = The Rothchilds? You Bet It Does!
• Cuckoo Land - Papandreou Sour Over Claims of Primary Surplus
• SCANDAL - Behold the Millions Handed Out by Papandreou's To His NGOs
• MERCY - Papandreou Defends His Policies, Blames Everyone Else for the Crisis
• Papandreou & Angelopoulos To Form New Party With The Blessings of the Clintons!
• PASOK MP Implicated In Karamanlis Wire-Tapping Case - Breached State Secrets
• BUSTED - When Former PASOK Advisers Expose The Real PASOK! - VIDEO REPORT
• Papandreou Ashamed of Being Greek - Says Harvard Is More Prestigious For Him
• Michael Ignatiu Sends Papandreou Straight To The Special Court

BUSTED - Erdogan’s Son Caught with Al-Qaeda Financier – TURMOIL IN TURKEY

Turkey’s political crisis took a dark turn. Photos of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s son meeting a suspected al-Qaeda financier in an Istanbul hotel were leaked to the press.

The photos allegedly show Bilal Erdoğan meeting Saudi Arabian businessman Yasin al-Qadi, whom the US blacklisted in April 2013 as an al-Qaeda funder. According to media reports, Qadi, who visits Turkey frequently and was escorted by the Prime Minister’s security men, met Bilal to discuss a deal for a juicy piece of real estate worth $1 billion in Istanbul’s Etiler neighborhood. The land was to be sold to investors, without public bidding, for half that price. If these reports hold any water, Erdoğan could be in serious trouble.

Qadi’s relationship with Turkey and the Erdoğan family goes back a few years. In 2004 the Wall Street Journal uncovered transactions worth more than $1 million between Qadi and Maram, a Turkish front company that funded terrorists in Yemen. Associates of Qadi’s, including managers at Maram, are known funders and founders of al-Qaeda. Qadi has frequently and vehemently denied the accusations and spent a lot of money trying to clear his name. But at the very least, his dealings in Turkey are suspicious. According to opposition lawmakers, his presence in the country is illegal.

To Prime Minister Erdoğan and his family, however, a meeting with Qadi is nothing out of the ordinary. Erdoğan told Turkish media that Qadi is a family friend, as Ilhan Tanir, a Turkish journalist for Vatan, wrote on Twitter. Prosecutors in Istanbul were following Qadi during the investigation into the Etiler property, which has not been sold and still belongs to the public. TheNational reports:

    Mr Al Qadi was on a list of names due to be arrested in a second wave of arrests as part of investigations into several corruption cases.

The Prime Minister’s son was also under investigation:

    Bilal was included in a group of people that were to be questioned as “suspects”, said reports, quoting sources in the judiciary.

Erdoğan still maintains that the investigations—which target shady business dealings between officials in his administration, their family members, and construction tycoons, including men like Qadi—amount to an international conspiracy against him. He has blamed the “deep state” in Turkey, followers of a prominent Islamist living in exile in the United States, the US ambassador, an international “interest rate lobby,” and other diabolical actors. He has also retaliated by firing scores of police officers involved in the investigations. Today, he reassigned about 350 officers, including “at least 80 directors and other senior officers in the intelligence, organized crime, fiscal crime and cybercrime units of Ankara’s police force,” to menial positions.

The ongoing corruption investigation has held the country riveted, yielding several juicy reports, such as the one with the minister with millions of dollars stashed in shoeboxes in his house. The revelations, and government attempts to stop them, are threatening to bring down the administration of Turkey’s most popular politician since Atatürk. They’re also having a negative effect on Turkey’s economy, by delaying, perhaps for months, efforts to stem inflation. Under Turkey’s parliamentary rules, Erdoğan is obliged to respond to the official investigation into Bilal’s meeting with Qadi within a month. Whether he does so and what happens to his administration and the economy in the meantime are anyone’s guess, but right now those guesses aren’t pointing anywhere good.

Reported by The American Interest via the Syrian Free Press