KEK

9 Jul, 2023 13:51

US firms revealed as largest tax contributors to Russia – Ukrainian study

American companies reportedly paid over $700 million into the sanctioned country’s budget in 2022

US companies paid more taxes in Russia last year than firms from any other foreign country, data from a joint study by B4Ukraine and the Kiev School of Economics (KSE) published earlier this week shows.

According to the findings, companies registered in America paid $712 million in taxes to the Russian budget in 2022. Data also shows that 44% of US firms that had a presence in Russia at the start of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine have so far continued to work in the country.

The second-largest tax contribution was made by German companies, at $402 million. Swiss companies came in third, with $275 million, followed by Japan and the UK. Businesses headquartered in the G7 and the EU were the largest taxpayers in Russia and made up 16 of its top 20 contributors, data shows.

Overall, according to the study, foreign corporations, including those that left Russia since last February,made more than $213.9 billion in revenue through their Russian businesses in 2022, including $14.1 billion in profits. They paid a total of $3.5 billion in taxes to the Russian budget.

The study found that companies that received the largest amount of revenue from their businesses in Russia werealcohol and tobacco producers, consumer goods manufacturers and car makers.

Many global firms have been forced to reevaluate their presence in the Russian market under pressure from Ukraine-related Western sanctions over the past year.

However, according to the most recent datafrom KSE, only 254 have so far finalized their exits from Russia –roughly 8% out of around 3,000 foreign companiesthat operated in the country prior to February 2022. Around 56% of those still working in Russia have not announced plans to divest.

https://www.rt.com/business/579426-us-firms-russia-tax/

9 Jul, 2023 17:41

Nearly 1,000 arrested in largest-ever UK organized crime bust

Police in England and Wales have seized over £131 million in drugs, plus guns and cash, in Operation Mille

Police arrested nearly 1,000 people last month and confiscated hundreds of millions of pounds in drugs and cash in the UK’s largest-ever crackdown on organized crime, authorities revealed on Thursday.

Described by the BBC as the “most significant”law enforcement initiative of its kind, Operation Mille netted 180,000 cannabis plants, potentially worth £130 million ($167 million) and 20kg of cocaine worth as much as £1 million in a month of coordinated raids across England and Wales. Police also confiscated 20 guns, 40 other offensive weapons, and £636,000 in cash from targets.

Some 11,000 members of all 43 local and regional police forces in the two countries collaborated with the National Crime Agency and Immigration Enforcement on the raids, serving more than 1,000 warrants at suspected cannabis growing operations.

Of the 967 people arrested during the sweep, over 450 had been charged as of Sunday, Sky News reported.

The strategy was aimed at disrupting organized crime groups by taking out major revenue sources, nabbing the key players, and learning how criminal networks operate, said Steve Jupp, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for Serious and Organized Crime. He told the BBC that Operation Mille’s goal was much more significant than putting a dent in local cannabis production.

While admitting trade in the drug was often considered “low-level,” he argued its cultivation on a large scale was a proven source of income to organized crime networks, with participants “complicit in wider offending which blights our communities.”

“We know that organized networks involved in cannabis production are also directly linked to an array of other serious criminality such as Class A drug importation,modern slavery and wider violence and exploitation,” Jupp said.

Of particular concern is the exploitation of young people in so-called county lines networks, which use kids as young as 12 who have been lured out of school with offers of fast cash and trinkets to deliver drugs to customers in rural areas. Children are used based on the belief they are unlikely to face serious punishment even if caught with illegal substances. More than 2,000 such gangs are believed to exist in the UK, employing 27,000 youths in selling and transporting drugs.

In 2020, UK police arrested more than 700 suspects and seized £54 million in cash and tons of drugs after intelligence agencies in Europe hacked into EncroChat, an encryption format that was at the time ubiquitous among criminal organizations involved in drugs, weapons, andpeople smuggling into the UK. EncroPhones were used by 10,000 people in the UK aloneand 60,000 worldwide who believed their communications to be secure from eavesdropping.

(Meanwhile the UK focus on citizens for petty crimes because it’s easier than transnational criminals.)

https://www.rt.com/news/579442-uk-organized-crime-drugs-mille/

9 Jul, 2023 15:06

Has Hunter Biden’s decadent lifestyle become a metaphor for US society?

When cocaine was found in the White House, observers immediately linked it to the US president’s infamous son

On July 2, just as the nation was preparing to celebrate Independence Day, the Biden White House got far more fireworks than they had bargained for as news spread rapidly that a bag of cocaine had been discovered inside the White House.

Two days later, Hunter Biden, currently America’s most infamous drug abuser, appeared on the White House balcony,looking sweaty and nervous, instantly reminding many viewers of the Hunter Biden we know from the folksy home-made videosand photos found on his “laptop from hell” – a story that the consolidated efforts of social media censorship and mainstream media memory-holing had failed to suppress. Hunter has been caught on camera (or even made the pictures himself) doing all kinds of seedy things, from apparently breaking the ground-speed record while smoking from a crack pipe to having sex with prostitutes. So naturally, it should come as no surprise that many people, primarily of the Fox News variety, took the cocaine evacuation scare to mean that Hunter was wreaking havoc once again, this time right at the heart of the nation.

Say what you will about former President Donald Trump – and much has been said – it is hard to imagine his own privileged children caught behaving in such an unhinged way, either in public or in private. And while America’s most controversial leader of all time may have had sticky fingers when it comes to classified and unclassified documents, at least we can say he was trying to keep abreast of international and domestic issues, while the entire establishment and deep state was working 24/7 to destroy him, as they are stilling doing now.

Hunter Biden’s drug problems are well documented, including by the man himself. He talks about it in his memoir (which some sycophantic reviewers describe as a “story of redemption”) and in one of the most cringe interviews of all time.

“I spent more time on my hands and knees picking through rugs, smoking anything that remotely resembled crack cocaine,” Hunter freely admitted to CBS interviewer Tracy Smith. “I probably smoked more Parmesan cheese than anyone you know, Tracy.” Tracy Smith was so visibly stunned by the remark that she never bothered to ask the obvious question as to why there would be so much cheese on anybody’s carpet. But that’s neither here nor there. Given the above admission, one would be excused for picturing a mental image of Hunter hoovering up traces of cocaine-laced dust from Oval Office carpets with his nose. In fact, plenty of memes to the tune have been posted online since the White House drug scare, taken with various degrees of seriousness.

Yet the fact that one of the most powerful (but certainly not the most popular, as the Democratic Kennedy clan was, for example) American political dynasties could not keep in check Hunter’s deep-seated drug problems speaks volumes about the Biden administration and the fate of the nation at large. In due fairness to the Biden family, they did succeed in raising a successful and morally upstanding man, Hunter’s older brother, Beau, a politician, lawyer, and officer who had a very promising political career ahead of him, until he succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 46.

By comparison, to a large part of the conservative American public, Hunter has become a sinful, sweaty, hyperventilating metaphor for everything wrong with America today: crime, overindulgence, and degradation of the norms of morality in the same vein that sees young children exposed to sexualized drag shows as some sort of “inclusivity.”

One would think that a wayward son such as Hunter and a bag of drugs discovered at the very seat of power (whether the two are linked in reality, or just in the public eye) should prove fatal to the president’s reputation. But in the current decadent-empire state of the US, with drug use less and less frowned upon and the boundaries of sexual depravity being pushed ever farther away,isn’t Hunter simply keeping up with the trends? If anything, all this makes the Bidens more relatable for their ultra-liberal fan base.

https://www.rt.com/news/579404-white-house-cocaine-hunter-biden/

Ukraine uses a less known diplomatic strategy on EU society, “bite the hand that feeds you until you get your wish”. It will be a winning strategy in the next millennium I’m sure. Kek!

9 Jul, 2023 17:06

‘Go to hell,’ Ukraine tells anti-cluster bomb German MP

Critics of the controversial weapons have “no idea” what they’re talking about, Andrey Melnik has declared

Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Melnik has told a German lawmaker to “go to hell” for opposing the delivery of cluster munitions to Kiev’s forces. Melnik formerly served as ambassador to Germany, where he made a name for himself by publicly insulting his hosts.

“The use of ‘cluster munitions’ is rightly outlawed internationally,” German MP Ralf Stenger tweeted on Friday, adding that those who “act in the name of international order and values ​​do not supply such weapons, not even in Ukraine.” Stenger is a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ SPD party.

US President Joe Biden authorized the delivery of cluster munitions to Ukraine on Friday, despite his administration referring to their use as a potential “war crime” last year. Explaining his decision, Biden cited a shortage in conventional ammunition due to Ukraine’s high consumption rate throughout its ongoing counteroffensive.

Biden’s shift in policy was criticized by some of America’s NATO allies, including Canada, Spain, and the UK.

Melnik reacted angrily to Stenger’s tweet. “Go to hell with your advice, Mr. Ralph Stegner and others,” the Ukrainian diplomat tweeted on Saturday. “You have no idea what you're talking about. Have you ever been to war in Ukraine for 500 days? Did you feel the suffering of the people? If not, then stay seated on your Biedermeier sofa.”

Melnik served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany from 2015 until last October, when he was recalled to Kiev after he publicly professed his admiration for Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator considered a hero by Ukrainian nationalists.

Before his dismissal, Melnik repeatedly accused the German government of being too slow to provide military assistance, and referred to Chancellor Scholz as an “offended liver sausage” over his reluctance to visit Kiev. Melnik also sparred with Elon Musk on Twitter, telling the billionaire to “f**k off” over his plan for a peaceful settlement of the conflict with Russia.

Melnik was appointed as Ukraine’s envoy to Brazil last month, but has yet to take up his new post.

Cluster munitions scatter small ‘bomblets’ over a wide area, some of which fail to immediately explode and pose severe risks to civilians for years after fighting ends. More than 110 countries have ratified a 2008 UN convention prohibiting their use and transfer, although the US, Russia, and Ukraine are not parties to the ban.

https://www.rt.com/russia/579440-melnik-cluster-bombs-germany/

>>19151402

Graham should listen. He knows Ukrainian leadership are terrorists and there are very few that see this as good thing. But Graham is blackmailed by his old buddy No name and Ukraine leadership. When the depth of Grahams corruption comes out, it will shock the public.

PS he raised his little sister when his parents died when he was a teenager, and his little sister still lives with him (according to am interview 5 years ago), something drastically wrong with that!

>>19151382

The Vatican shares in the profit!

>>19151456

Probably true. I never knew mikey’s momma lived with them in the WH until weeks ago. I had a bad feeling of putting Obama in charge of the budget and i was right

>>19151371

Thats funny, they investigated themselves!!!

>>19151370

So but Bidan is gonna lose this war

>>19151347

>>19151347

We observe their game

>>19151481

I’m still looking for my post in early 2021 of my theory that Trump was still in charge and told Bidan admin do you worst, hire the most corrupt in the world, put them in your admin and I will not interfere, until its time. You’ll get a lighter sentence if you do what I say.

I’m still convinced that happened because the people had to get to the real precipice. They are close but not yet totally there. Soon in real time!

>>19151736

Hmm confirmation anon