Monthly Archives: December 2009

Madoff -Related Accounting Firm Does Dubai´s Accounts..

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From the Independent:

“Dubai World will start a formal process next week that will see it invite leading banks, including HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyd’s Banking Group and Standard Chartered, to create a steering committee to represent the many lenders. KPMG has been lined up by the lead banks to represent them in negotiations, with a formal appointment expected once the compilation of the five-to-six bank steering committee is finalised.

My Comment:

Now, KPMG is the big four accounting firm that gave Madoff´s representations to Tremont Group Holdings (a US fund that Madoff purportedly hoodwinked) a thumbs up.  The Tomchin Family Charitable Trust, one of numbers of investors who were allegedly scammed by Madoff,  has launched a lawsuit against KPMG and Tremont for negligence in monitoring one of Tremont´s funds that invested with Madoff.

The lawsuit included a list of other Madoff clients that included Victoria de Rothschild of the banking family of the Rothschilds and a Tory party contributor:

“Also on the list of Mr Madoff’s British clients is Lady Victoria de Rothschild, who is related to Nathaniel Rothschild, the co- chairman of Atticus Capital, the hedge fund.

Lady Victoria is a well-known figure on the society circuit and became known more recently as a lender to the Tory party, having set up a special company that gave the party a £1,014,000 loan that is due to be repaid in 2010.”

(Times Online, February 5, 2009)

KPMG has also been hit with a $1b lawsuit for “reckless and negligent” auditing of failed subprime broker, New Century Financial, reportedly the first major case against an auditor arising from the financial crisis.

My Comment

So we have a Madoff-tainted accounting firm KPMG, with multiple legal problems, representing the banks that loaned to Dubai on one side, and  (as I noted before) French banking legend Rothschild on the other side, heading up the restructuring efforts for Dubai….

Wiki has a list of KPMG´s legal infractions that includes this:

“In February 2007 KPMG Germany was investigated for ignoring questionable payments in the Siemens bribery case.[29] (Siemens agreed to pay a record $1.34 billion in fines to settle the case in December, 2008.) In November 2008 the Siemens Supervisory Board recommended changing auditors from KPMG to Ernst & Young.[30]

In 2006, Fannie Mae sued KPMG for malpractice for approving years of erroneous financial statements.[31]

In March 2008 KPMG was accused of enabling “improper and imprudent practices” at New Century Financial, a failed mortgage company[32] and KPMG agreed to pay $80 million to settle suits from Xerox shareholders over manipulated earnings reports.”

Some confidence-builder… a bank that´s been closely connected to the Madoff scam and to the Fannie and Freddie case (and hence, to Goldman Sachs)…

And, how about this:

KPMG and Deloitte were brought in to investigate India´s ¨Madoff¨” – the fraud- riddled IT outsourcing giant Satyam (now Mahindra Satyam, its post-merger avatar – over the objections of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, India´s regulator, which said KPMG was not registered with it and would thus not be subject to its code of conduct or disciplinary proceedings.

Monbiot Suggests Jones ¨Guilty As Charged,” Should Go

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Monbiot in the Guardian::

“When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get……….

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific……

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”.

My Comment

George Monbiot seems to be the only global warming advocate with the integrity to state the obvious. What the emails reveal is reprehensible in the extreme, given the position of the scientists involved. They have to go, no matter where you stand on the issue.

And by the way, I´m no hard-core skeptic about climate change or human influence on the environment at all.  I think the “preventive principle”

(correction: I mean precautionary principle)

is a pretty good rule to go by when considering economic and other options, am a strong advocate of organic and sustainable farming, and think that many forms of development do indeed create havoc with the environment – destroying shorelines and exacerbating natural disasters, if not actually provoking them.

However, hijacking the entire world into an international regime in which scam artists like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, allied hedge funds, speculators, and governments play roulette with “carbon credits” has nothing to do with being a steward of the environment.

Want to help the planet?

Plant a garden. Plant trees. Use meat as a condiment not as a staple. Walk or ride a bike as often as you can. 

Don´t think of yourself solely as a consumer but also as a citizen.

And fight the militarized state.

The single biggest problem (I mean man-made problem) for the climate is war. Nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, fighter jets, weapons testing, bunker-busters – this is where the damage is done, most of all in misdirecting energy and resources into destruction, when they could as easily be directed toward productive uses.

Death Knell of the Carbon Credit Scam

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Dr. Tim Ball, from Canada Free Press (via Lew Rockwell):

“Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”

You can download the climate change fraud documents from the link below:

http://www.filedropper.com/foi2009 or http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94

(Lila: I am linking the hacked emails after all, because no private emails (correction: I meant ´personal´) are included and because I´m convinced the material was gathered for an FOIA request that was being obstructed).