Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/bikini-atoll-nuclear-fund-interior-department

Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered

Former staff have criticized the interior department for ignoring the risk of fraud after the Trump administration ceased scrutiny of a $59m fund for nuclear survivors, which is now depleted

Pete McKenzie
@PeterTMcKenzie
Mon 5 Jun 2023 06.00 EDT

Former staff have lashed the US Department of the Interior for failing to predict that a 2017 decision to lift oversight from a $59m trust fund for Pacific Islanders displaced by American nuclear testing would lead to the fund’s exhaustion through mismanagement and alleged fraud.

…

In 2016, however, Anderson Jibas was elected mayor of the Bikinian council and began pushing the interior department to hand over control of the fund. In 2017, Douglas Domenech, who Donald Trump had appointed as assistant interior secretary, announced that the department would hand over control of the fund, which by then held $59m, to “restore trust and ensure that sovereignty means something”.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the fund had been whittled down to about $100,000, largely through extravagant spending by Jibas on projects including land development in Hawaii, new ships and planes, and an apartment complex in the Marshall Islands.

Annual bank statements reviewed by the Guardian show that some of the money was disbursed directly from the trust fund to the vendors with whom Jibas and other local officials were negotiating. Because those disbursements were direct, they allowed the fund’s trustees to exercise a measure of oversight. But the statements also show that Jibas and the council’s American lawyer, Gordon Benjamin, instructed trustees to disburse large sums of money to a Bank of Guam checking account that they said was being used for “council operations” but which the trustees could not scrutinise. In 2019, for example, Jibas and Benjamin instructed trustees to disburse $15.36m to the Bank of Guam account. When asked about the Bank of Guam account, Jibas said in a written statement that he had “no idea what you are talking about”.

Also in 2019, Benjamin instructed the trustees to send $50,000 directly to Jibas’s Bank of Hawaii personal savings account. Benjamin explained that the money was part of a council-approved “representation package” to pay for “meetings with contractors, consultants, U.S. Government and Marshall Islands’ Government and Local Government representatives”. Benjamin did not respond to questions about the spending.

…

Jibas told the Guardian that he had also directed between $200,000 and $250,000 from the fund towards the construction of a two-story house for his personal use. He claimed this project had been approved by the Bikinian council.

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American spending in the Marshall Islands is largely overseen by the Senate committee on energy kand natural resources. Spokespeople for Senators Lisa Murkowski, Catherine Cortez-Mastro and Maria Cantwell, all members of the committee who expressed concern in 2018 about relinquishing oversight of the fund, did not respond to requests for comment about whether they would investigate the department’s management of the fund.

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[Fullduplexxx]

1. Another theft

[sarcasmo]

2. ABC always be criming.

[TheRealNorth]

3. The question is will anyone go to jail....