Did the Clinton Foundation Have a Storefront Accountant Like Madoff?

[Octafish]

15. Phil UBS Gramm's wife built bridge$ from ENRON to BCCI...

Wendy Gramm! Yes, the wonderful wife of that smooth-talking ex-Senator and fun-loving deregulator, Phil Gramm.

Holy smokes! Praise the Loot and Pass the Bank-to-Bank passwords!

After helping deregulate the New Deal protections that had prevented predatory capital backed by the US taxpayer, Phil Gramm hired Bill Clinton and George W Bush for their "Wealth Management" skills at UBS. Small world.

Here's the citation and source from the Federation of American Scientists website. If we've already gone over this, I've gotta go take an aspirin.

CAPCOM

Introduction

In the entire BCCI affair, perhaps no entity is more mysterious and yet more central to BCCI's collapse and criminality than Capcom, a London and Chicago based commodities futures firm which operated between 1984 and 1988. Capcom is vital to understanding BCCI because BCCI's top management and most important Saudi shareholders were involved with the firm. Moreover, Capcom moved huge amounts of money -- billions of dollars -- which passed through the future's markets in a largely anonymous fashion.

Capcom was created by the former head of BCCI's Treasury Department, Ziauddin Ali Akbar, who capitalized it with funds from BCCI and BCCI customers. The company was staffed, primarily, by former BCCI bankers, many of whom had worked with Akbar in Oman and few of whom had any experience in the commodities markets. The major investors in the company were almost exclusively Saudi and were largely controlled by Sheik AR Khalil, the chief of Saudi intelligence. Additionally, the company employed many of the same practices as BCCI, especially the use of nominees and front companies to disguise ownership and the movement of money. Four Americans, Larry Romrell, Robert Magness, Kerry Fox and Robert Powell -- none of whom had any experience or expertise in the commodities markets -- played important and varied roles as frontmen.

While the Subcommittee has been able to piece together the history of Capcom and can point to many unusual and even criminal acts committed by the firm, it still has not been able to determine satisfactorily the reason Capcom was created and the purposes it served for the various parties connected to the BCCI scandal. It appears from the available evidence that Akbar, BCCI, and the Saudis all may have pursued different goals through Capcom, including:

-- misappropriation of BCCI assets for personal enrichment.

-- laundering billions of dollars from the Middle East to the US and other parts of the world.

-- siphoning off assets from BCCI to create a safe haven for them outside of the official BCCI empire.

SNIP...

Despite suspicions about highly unusual transactions, CFTC Chairperson Wendy Gramm told the Subcommittee:

In terms of finding trading violations or Commodity Exchange Act violations that perhaps could support money laundering, we did not find any discernible pattern...o one has ben able to --at least other law enforcement officials have not been able to find money laundering in Capcom US, to our knowledge, as of now.(133)

Money laundering, as Chairperson Gramm testified, is not even a violation of the Commodities Futures Trading Act. Incredibly, it appears that the CFTC and the self-regulatory organizations have never even made a criminal referral for possible money laundering:

Senator Kerry. ave you ever specifically referred, or have any of the exchanges ever made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. We have raised concerns.

Senator Kerry. Have you made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. No. Not-- not specifically in that regard...

Continued...

http://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/21capcom.htm

Original Thread, way back on Old DU (BUSTED LINK):

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=7548&forum=DCForumID70&archive=
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3441445&mesg_id=3450080