Outside Expert Did Business With Dictator Riggs Bank

[seemslikeadream]

By Kathleen Day
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 7, 2004; Page E04

When Riggs Bank president and chief executive Lawrence I. Hebert learned of State Department reports and newspaper stories 18 months ago describing widespread corruption and human rights abuses by Equatorial Guinea's dictator, Hebert knew he needed "independent verification of what was going on in the country," he said at a Senate hearing last month.

The oil-rich West African country was Riggs's biggest depositor, with $700 million on deposit by 2003, some of it hauled $1 million at a time into Riggs's DuPont Circle branch in shrink-wrapped, 20-pound bundles. The published reports raised troubling claims that Teodoro Obiang Nguema and his family might be skimming money illegally from the country's oil-revenue accounts at Riggs.

Federal law and internal bank policy require Riggs to verify that customers' money doesn't come from or pay for illicit activities, such as bribery, drug sales or terrorist acts. So, Hebert told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he arranged for himself and other top Riggs executives to hear a presentation on Equatorial Guinea by an Alexandria, Va.-based expert, Bruce McColm.

McColm, in a 45-minute talk at Riggs's executive downtown offices in Washington, painted a favorable picture of Obiang and his regime, McColm said in interviews. Riggs executives told Senate staff members during a year-long subcommittee investigation of Riggs that they relied on McColm's portrait to justify doing business with Equatorial Guinea.
more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1196-2004Sep6.html

[Snazzy]

1. McColm = Freedom House = Natl. Edowment for Democracy

(old info, '90, which is hard to sum up, but if you know NED, you know McColm--exec. dir of this pseudo think-tank. Overthrowing regimes everywhere under the cover of encouraging democracy and human rights.)


Group Watch:
Freedom House

Freedom House has received substantial funding from the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This financial assistance is passed through Freedom House to private organizations in foreign countries and is generally used for cultural and media projects. Its NED-funded grantees are located in various countries, including South Africa, the Soviet Union, Paraguay, Poland, and Hungary. Projects supported by Freedom House tend to reflect its neoconservative viewpoint and to bolster U.S. foreign policy positions--at least that was the case under President Reagan. One such project, supported by Freedom House with NED funding, is the anti-Sandinista publications house, Libro Libre, in Costa Rica. Another is the multiregional Exchange project, which collects and distributes articles written primarily by neoconservative supporters of U.S. foreign policy worldwide. (3,18)

...

Bruce McColm was the only North American on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. (16) He served as consultant to the U.S. Senate's Central American Monitoring Group and has taken congressional representatives on fact-finding tours in Central America. (16) He has also participated on presidential election observer teams in Haiti and Suriname. (16)

....

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/freehous.php

R. Bruce McColm served as the director of the organization’s Center for Caribbean and Central American Studies. In 1987, he was named deputy director and then elected executive director by the board in 1988. McColm increased Freedom House’s visibility in Washington, D.C. and developed the Freedom Fund, which assisted democratic revolutions and provided civic education materials for the election campaigns in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. To further facilitate the growth of civil society in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the organization sponsored public policy institutes in those countries.

McColm left Freedom House in 1993 and was replaced by Adrian Karatnycky, a trade union and human rights activist. In 1997, Freedom House merged with the National Forum Foundation. Karatnycky became president, and the former president of the NFF, Jim Denton, was named the new executive director. Few records of the Karatnycky and Denton administration are found in the collection.

http://infoshare1.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/FH/

R. Bruce McColm
Director, Institute for Democratic Strategies; Former Director, International Republican Institute; Former Director, Freedom House

Also wrote for Omni....


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The other guy:

Joseph S. Balcer
Project Manager Americas' Accountability/Anti-Corruption Project.
[e-mail]

Joseph Balcer is an international expert in Anti-Corruption programming in both the public and private sectors. He also has extensive experience in political party building, campaign management, election processes and administration and human rights programming.

He has worked in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Russia and China. As Executive Vice President of the International Republican Institute, he designed democratic development programming worldwide. Mr. Balcer served as Chief of Staff to the Mayor of St. Louis for four years and was a senior executive with a Midwest real estate development firm. He is familiar with governance issues at local levels, especially as they impact business development. He is also a principal in International Decision Strategies, Inc., a firm that advises corporations in designing, implementing and monitoring community relations programs in developing countries.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dajd3ZXx8bMJ:www.respondanet.com/english/project_team.htm+%22Joseph+S.+Balcer%22&hl=en

[ck4829]

2. Augusto Pinochet also has some money in this bank

I saw it on another DU post