Greece Fined €200MM Over Chinese Tax Fraud Network

While president Trump is cracking down on Chinese technology theft "transfer" in the US, with Canada somehow caught in the middle of the ongoing crossfire (as random Canadians are now getting arrested on the mainland in retaliation for Trump's aggressive practices), it has emerged that China's Belt and Road initiative may be nothing more than one giant, global tax fraud/trade laundering operation.

Take Greece for example, where the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) just issued a fine of more than 200 million euros to Greece for failing to stop a wide-scale tax fraud by Chinese criminal gangs importing ultra-cheap goods through the country’s largest port of Piraeus, Politico reported on Monday.

The Chinese criminal network, which took advantage of Greece's arguably most valuable asset, the port of Piraeus which has been dubbed "China's Gateway into Europe", dodged import duties and value-added tax on imported footwear and clothing items, and represents merely the latest "loophole" that Chinese criminals utilize to bypass China's draconian firewall.

"OLAF can confirm that it has concluded an investigation concerning the fraudulent import of undervalued textiles and shoes into Greece in the period 1 January 2015 to 31 May 2018," OLAF was quoted as telling Politico in a statement when asked on the investigation it had conducted.

"Based on its findings, OLAF has issued a financial recommendation to Greek Customs to recover the sum of 202.3 million euros in lost customs duties related to the fraudulently under-declared values for such products,” it added.

Piraeus is part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project; it was acquired by China’s COSCO Shipping, the largest shipping company in the world, in 2016 when the Chinese shipping giant acquired a 51% stake. This cemented the entrepôt’s significance to the future of Sino-European trade and its critical position on China’s Maritime Silk Road as China's critical hub into the Mediterranean Sea and from there, into the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.

As Altay Alti, associate professor at Turkey’s Koç University affirmed: ‘Piraeus has become a gate of entry into the European market for the Chinese.’ Indeed, this is no secret and is highlighted as a main priority in the port authority’s strategic plan.

The Port of Piraeus and the surrounding regions have long functioned as a Mediterranean gateway for peoples, goods, ideas and beliefs. And now Greece's historic gateway is nothing more than an easy way for Chinese "criminal gangs" to avoid paying taxes. And with countless other such "Belt and Road" gateways…

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-15/greece-fined-eu200mm-over-chinese-tax-fraud-network

>>4774955

One Belt One Road – Israel’s role in China’s flagship policy

September 2017

America is no longer the Golden Calf Bibi Netanyahu spoke about. It is has been sucked dried, chopped up and is being sold off piece by piece. But the parasite always needs a host…

JERUSALEM POST – This week, China announced plans for a “Four-Point Peace Plan” between Israel and the Palestinians. China’s recent interest in the conflict has raised many eyebrows, and begs the question of what the real reason is behind the eastern behemoth’s desire to throw its hat in the ring.

China’s main concern with the region relates to its flagship “One Belt, One Road” plan. The initiative seeks to establish trade routes based on the Silk Road route and Maritime Silk Road, and thus allow more efficient export for Chinese production while increasing the country’s involvement in global affairs. It has invested billions in infrastructure, including a massive new train route reaching from Beijing to London.

This initiative offers many challenges and opportunities to both Israel and China, as well as possible rewards to Israel if the country takes the right courses of action.

Firstly, the One Belt, One Road policy’s main goal is to export from China westward, mostly toward European markets. Israel’s position between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean allows China to bypass the unstable Middle East, as well as Iran and Afghanistan. Ashdod Port, soon to be expanded by a second port operated by the Chinese firm China Harbor, must be connected to Eilat Port by freight rail as a matter of urgency.

Only 252 kilometers separate Ashdod and Eilat, and now is the time to bridge that gap through massive investment in infrastructure. This will allow a safe, swift connection between the Indian Ocean (through the Red Sea) and the Mediterranean, while at the same time serving as an alternative to the Suez Canal.

Second, compared to its neighbors Israel is uniquely poised to connect East and West as part of the Silk Road policy. As the only stable democracy in the region, Israel suffers none of the troubles afflicting the Middle East since the “Arab Spring,” and also enjoys a technologically advanced society and plenty of unused land in the Negev. The government must use these gifts to establish logistics centers for firms moving goods along the Silk Road, which together with the improved infrastructure will create new opportunities for the residents of southern Israel.

With impeccable timing, the newfound gas reserves off the Israeli coast offer an opportunity for something Israel has not seen in years, at least in significant amounts – production. Proximity to both energy reserves and European markets as well as access to both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean will allow production and transport at much lower cost than previously thought possible in the region.

https://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/one-belt-one-road-israels-role-in-chinas-flagship-policy/

>>4774964

Yet baker didn't note it???!!!

Outrage as Norwegian Pensioner Jailed for Ordering Live Rape of Filipino Girls

Over a period of two years, the man, who is in his 70s, has been found to have ordered the online abuse of at least 65 Filipino girls, the youngest of whom were merely babies. To satisfy his demands, the man transferred nearly $60,000 to middlemen in the Philippines.

An elderly resident of Sunnmøre has been sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, one of the harshest penalties reserved in Norwegian criminal law, for ordering sexual assaults to be carried out online against dozens of Filipino children, Norwegian broadcaster NRK reported.

The court established that at least 65 girls under the age of 14, the youngest of whom were merely babies, were victimised by the man's orders between 2012 and 2013. One of the assaults featured a three-year-old girl and lasted over 40 minutes, which the man watched live from his home in Norway while giving instructions. The man admitted to having sent a total of about NOK 500,000 (close to $60,000) to "mediators" in the Philippines.

"With his actions, the accused contributed to a sex industry that brutally exploits vulnerable children in the worst possible way", the Søre Sunnmøre district court in western Norway wrote in its verdict.

According to the court, some of the victims lived in "almost inhuman" conditions, which the man perpetuated with his actions. The prosecutor initially demanded a 12-year prison sentence, but the court decided on a harsher punishment given the victim's young age as an aggravating factor.

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201901161071517147-norway-paedophile-philippines/

Mo Brooks: Democrats ‘Aiding and Abetting’ 2K Illegal Alien Killings Every Year

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says Democrats have “aided and abetted” the deaths of about 2,000 Americans every year at the hands of illegal aliens due to their support for open borders and mass illegal immigration.

In a speech on the House floor on Tuesday, Brooks highlighted just a few of the stories of American citizens who have been killed by illegal aliens:

Louise Sollowin was a beloved mother, wife, and grandmother. Louise spent 50 years helping her sister fire up the oven at Omaha, Nebraska’s Orsi’s Italian Bakery, where she worked well into her 80s. [Emphasis added]

In 2013, after 93 years of life, Louise was brutally raped and beaten to death by an illegal alien. To make matters even more horrific, Louise’s daughter found her bleeding, battered and dying mother with a naked illegal alien passed out on top of her. [Emphasis added]

In 2010 in Houston, Texas, 14-year-old Shatavia Anderson, was shot in the chest and killed by two illegal aliens. Shatavia loved her family and loved talking on the phone. She proclaimed that one day she was “gonna be somebody.” Shatavia was robbed of that dream by illegal aliens. [Emphasis added]

In July 2018 in my home town of Huntsville, Alabama, two drug cartel related illegal aliens took Oralia Mendoza and her 13-year-old granddaughter, Mariah Lopez, from their home in the dark of night. Oralia was stabbed to death while her teenage granddaughter, Mariah, was forced to watch. Later, and in order to eliminate a witness, the illegal alien drug cartel members then beheaded Mariah and abandoned her body in the woods. Mariah’s decaying body was not found for weeks. Mariah was a special needs student at Challenger Middle School. Her teachers described her as a “sweet little girl” who “had a lot of friends.” [Emphasis added]

…

In 2009 in Huntsville, Alabama, then 19-year-old Tad Mattle was driving home with his girlfriend from a church social. While stopped at a red light, an illegal alien who was fleeing the scene of yet another crime, and whose blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit, rear-ended Tad Mattle’s car. This illegal alien had three prior DUIs. Tad Mattle’s car exploded on impact, tragically killing Tad Mattle and his girlfriend. [Emphasis added]

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/01/15/watch-mo-brooks-democrats-aiding-and-abetting-2k-illegal-alien-killings-every-year/

DOJ report shows just how few legally-purchased guns are used to commit crimes

A Department of Justice report shows that only seven percent of nearly 300,000 state and federal prisoners who possessed a firearm during their crime purchased the gun from a licensed firearm dealer.

The report estimates that 287,400 prisoners had a gun on them when they committed the crime for which they are imprisoned, and a majority of those prisoners either stole the gun, found it at the scene of the crime, or bought it off the street or from the underground market, according to the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates.

Approximately 13 percent of state and federal prisoners surveyed used a gun during their crime, and of those prisoners, only 1.3 percent obtained it from a retail source.

The survey also revealed that only 0.8 percent of prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense got the firearm from a gun show, a statistic which shows that "gun show loopholes" often decried by gun control advocates are not contributing significantly to crime.

"[The survey has] consistently show that there is no such thing as criminals exploiting a 'gun show loophole' to arm themselves for their crimes," said Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president of government and public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, according to Guns.com. "Perhaps lawmakers should spend less time on these 'solutions in search of a problem' and more time on fixing the background check system, or on any of the issues that voters actually rank as a priority."

Here's a breakdown of the numbers showing where state and federal prisoners who possessed a firearm during the offense for which they are serving time got their guns:

10.1 percent obtained the gun by purchase or trade from a retail source. 7.5 percent from a gun store, 1.6 percent from a pawn shop, 0.4 percent from a flea market, and 0.8 percent from a gun show.

25.3 percent got the gun by purchasing, renting or borrowing it from a family friend, or receiving it as a gift.

43.2 percent obtained the firearm off the street or from an underground market source

The fact that about 90 percent of firearms possessed by prisoners during the commission of crimes were not purchased or traded at legal retail sources could be used to inform the debate over gun control efforts, which often target legal gun owners and purchasers by restricting the availability of guns from legal sources or by attempting to outlaw possession of certain types of guns.

Democrats quickly introduced gun control legislation after taking control of the House, submitting a bill that would require universal background checks for gun sales.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/doj-report-reveals-just-how-few-guns-used-in-crimes-are-purchased-legally

Full Report:

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf

Ukraine’s Cult of Stepan Bandera: Not a Detail, but a Cornerstone

During the recent years of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, there has been one issue where the Western mainstream press simply cannot fully ignore or reject the Russian arguments. This issue concerns the life and actions of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) and his followers from what is known as the “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, a far-right organization that took terrorist actions against Polish and Soviet officials from the 1920s to the 1950s and which is now legally protected from any criticism in Ukraine).

THE “WRONG” AND “RIGHT” VICTIMS

Because Bandera was born on January 1, 1909, celebrations of his birthday have become disgusting New Year’s rituals in Ukraine in recent years, with thousands participating in Nazi-style torch-lit marches that include shouted protests against “Putin’s Russia” and rants such as, “Jews out!” which are heard by everyone except the police. This New Year was no exception, since the current Ukrainian government under President Petro Poroshenko (who publicly identified himself as a Banderite after taking office in 2014) officially added Bandera’s 110th birthday to the list of Ukraine’s most important anniversaries. This time, there were several quiet voices of condemnation heard in Poland, Israel, and even the US. Why? In truth, torches, masks, political murders, and mob attacks against “pro-Russian” public figures are nothing new in post-Maidan Ukraine. And these things usually pose no problem for the mainstream press of the US and its allies. So, why is Bandera an exception?

The answer is ethnic, as awful as that may sound. Unlike Poroshenko with his aerial bombings of the Russian-speaking Donbass in 2014 and 2015, Bandera killed the “wrong” victims, the representatives of those nations that are valued even by the modern Western media, with its double and triple standards. In the 1930s Bandera killed Polish officials, in the 1940s his people killed civilian Jews and Polish peasants, and these are groups whose plight even the New York Times cannot ignore today. If Bandera’s infamous slogan “Death to enemies!” had been directed only against “disloyal” Russians and anti-Banderite Ukrainians (the groups currently persecuted by Poroshenko), Bandera would have been no different from his modern admirers in the Ukrainian government. But Bandera’s followers from the OUN decimated the Jewish population of Lvov and Kiev in 1941, trying to curry favor with the advancing Germans. And between 1943 and 1944, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), taking its orders from Bandera’s OUN officers, ethnically cleansed his native Western Ukraine of ethnic Poles, killing from 70,000-100,000 of them (the infamous “slaughter of Volhynia”). The aim was to create an “ethnically pure” Ukraine before the arrival of the Red Army in late 1944. Documents published by the Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka indicate that Bandera and the OUN hoped that the Red Army would soon be replaced by Anglo-American domination. “His strategy was to clean up the house before the arrival of the real master,” Motyka concludes in his book.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/01/15/ukraine-cult-of-stepan-bandera-not-detail-but-cornerstone.html

Benefiting Israel Tops Congressional Agenda

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously was unaware that he was being filmed when he commented that “America is a thing you can move very easily, moved in the right direction.” His predecessor Ariel Sharon was even more to the point when he reportedly said “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that …don’t worry about American pressure; I tell you, we, the Jewish people, control America and the American people know it!”

If this were only chest thumping rhetoric one might just shrug and go about one’s business, but actions speak louder than words, even in the world of corrupt politicians, where nothing is ever as it seems to be. In the past year alone, the U.S. government has moved its Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, has stopped criticizing the Netanyahu government’s expansion of illegal settlements, and is reportedly currently contemplating recognizing as legal Israel’s illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights. All the moves were and are contrary to actual American interests.

Furthermore, Israel, a country having a European level standard of living to include free education and medical care, has received more than $250 billion in “aid” from Washington. It currently is receiving $3.8 billion yearly from the U.S. Treasury as a base figure guaranteed for ten years, with supplements for special projects and programs. Adding in trade arrangements favorable to Israel and the money it gets from American Jewish donors’ tax-exempt contributions, the real total per annum approaches and may even exceed $10 billion. Much of the donor money, including that from the Kushner Foundation, has gone to fund the illegal settlements on the West Bank in violation of U.S. law. And then there is the $2.7 billion given yearly to Egypt and Jordan, essentially bribes to maintain friendly relations with Israel.

The ultimate irony is that any aid to Israel is illegal in light of the fact that it has violated the Symington and Glenn amendments to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Actdue to its undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Both Congress and the White House have chosen to ignore that complication, one more demonstration of Jewish power in the United States. In truth, Ariel Sharon, if he was quoted correctly, had it right. Jewish Americans do control or at least exercise considerable influence over key sectors in the U.S. They are overwhelmingly disproportionately present on Wall Street, in the entertainment and news industries, in academia, in high value professions and in government at all levels. Their collective power both enriches and protects Israel at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer and genuine national interests. It also enables Israeli agents in the U.S., like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to avoid scrutiny and regulation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938.

Some federal government agencies exist largely to promote Israeli interests, most notably the Treasury Department’s Office for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, which has only had Jewish Under Secretaries heading it since it was founded in 2004. It is currently run by Israeli Sigal Mandelker. The office has focused on punishing Iran, Israel’s principle enemy, throughout its existence.

Jewish power is most perniciously evident in U.S. foreign policy, where it has a strangle hold on relations between Washington and the Arab countries of the Middle East. Much of this leverage is derived from the fact that the principal donors to both the Democratic and Republican parties – Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson-are both Jews having very strong ties to Israel. Saban is an Israeli and Adelson may have Israeli citizenship. With both parties more than willing to act on behalf of Israel, the United States has engaged in a number of wars that serve no national interest and which have, on the contrary, brought with them devastating consequences, including the rise of new terrorist groups.

https://southfront.org/benefiting-israel-tops-congressional-agenda/

European Commission to step up preparations for no-deal Brexit

BRUSSELS, January 16. /TASS/. The European Commission will have to step up preparations for a no-deal Brexit after the UK parliament voted to reject the withdrawal agreement between London and Brussels, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in a statement.

"The risk of a disorderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom has increased with this evening's vote," the statement reads. "While we do not want this to happen, the European Commission will continue its contingency work to help ensure the EU is fully prepared. I urge the United Kingdom to clarify its intentions as soon as possible."

However, the European Commission president said that "on the EU side, the process of ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement continues."

"The Withdrawal Agreement is a fair compromise and the best possible deal. It reduces the damage caused by Brexit for citizens and businesses across Europe," Juncker added. "It is the only way to ensure an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union."

A total of 432 lawmakers voted against the deal, approved by London and Brussels last November after some 18 months of negotiations. Only 202 members of parliament supported it. The 230-vote margin has become the biggest defeat for a UK premier in parliament in 95 years.

http://tass.com/world/1040162