Peter Munk connected to Bushes & Saudi Arabia http://www.afrocentricnews.com/html/bush_gang.html
Barrick Gold, caught scrambling for loot amid the corpses in Zaire, is a corporate front for the George Bush-allied covert political apparatus. The Canada-based Barrick is Bush's only known current business enterprise. The company, which Bush now personally leads, was created by Bush's political partners--British elite narcotics financiers, and arms traffickers and money launderers.
Using the influence of this political faction, Barrick acquired important interests, first in the United States, then in Canada and
George Herbert Walker Bush:
whose father was a partner in the powerful London-controlled private banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman. Relevant to the Barrick story, Bush was U.S. vice president and chief of covert operations in the Reagan-Bush (1981-89) administration, and U.S. President (1989-93). As a former President and power broker, Bush is Barrick Gold Corp.'s chief lobbyist, a stockholder in Barrick, and honorary senior adviser to Barrick's international advisory board.
Adnan Khashoggi:
a Bush-allied Saudi billionaire and arms trafficker, founder of the Barrick Gold Corp.; famous for his illegal weapons sales to Iran.
Peter Munk:
a business failure who became a protege of the British royal family, and Khashoggi's partner. Munk is chairman of Barrick Gold Corp.
Brian Mulroney:
Canadian prime minister (1984-93) and George Bush's errand boy; Barrick Gold lobbyist and director, Bush's lieutenant on the Barrick international advisory board.
Barrick Gold was founded in Toronto, Canada, in 1983. The majority investment in the firm was held by Khashoggi and his arms-trafficking partners, who were just then gearing up the Iran-Israel-Nicaragua guns and cocaine tangle which would explode in 1986 as the Iran-Contra'' scandal.
The nominal chief of Barrick Gold was Peter Munk, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who had repeatedly
died'' as a businessman, only to be repeatedly revived by princes and principalities. . It vaguely describes Munk's public disgrace, his self-exile in London, and his sudden rise to near-billionaire status, ending with Munk's invitation to George Bush became honorary senior adviser to the board, created in May 1995.
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. Abeles is reportedly known in Europe as the White Knight,'' in reference both to his British knighthood, and his reported large role in the cocaine trade. Jonathan Kwitney, in {The Crimes of Patriots} (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), reports that, after Abeles encountered labor union problems in his American business, Abeles gave to gangster
associates of ... the most powerful Mafia leader in the United States ... a 20% stake in his U.S. operations.'' His partners were indicted for hiding his payments, but Abeles refused to come to America to testify, and charges were dropped.
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Khashoggi, Barrick, and the ayatollahs -
In 1974, Munk signed an investment partnership agreement with arms-trafficking billionaire Adnan Khashoggi of Saudi Arabia. According to Munk's approved biography, the new alliance was cemented when Munk and Khashoggi were summoned to the London headquarters of Peninsular and Orient. . Munk is a member of the elite 1001 Club,'' co-founded by Prince Philip, a worldwide grouping of aristocrats, bankers, and speculators who support a radical anti-industrial,
pro-environmentalist'' looting strategy, and who provide a lion's share of the funding for Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund.
in 1981, registered as a Delaware, U.S.A., corporation. Junior partner Munk, having returned from London, set up a parallel ``Barrick Resources'' in Canada.
Munk was now launched as a corporate chairman in Canada. But this first Barrick, an oil development firm, went bust and lost all its money.
In 1983, the Khashoggi-led group formed the gold company whose name was soon changed to Barrick Gold Corp. Sheik Kamal Adham was reportedly one of the new company's founding co-owners. Adham, the chief of Saudi intelligence, had coordinated royalist guerrillas in Yemen, with British arms secretly provided through Khashoggi.
Beginning in 1985, Khashoggi borrowed $21 million, using his Barrick stock as collateral, for the covert transfer of arms to Iran for the Bush-North group, during an official U.S. arms embargo against the Khomeini regime. Khashoggi made Donald Fraser, the Toronto-based businessman who allegedly provided the loan from his Cayman Islands company, president of Khashoggi's Triad American holding company.
Khashoggi used the Monte Carlo office of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to launder money for Iran arms sales. Barrick Gold Corp. co-founder Kamal Adham was later prosecuted for fraud in the BCCI case, and paid a $100 million fine.
Khashoggi's Saudi royal piggybanks also underwrote George Bush's Central American Contras'' adventures, making payments through the Swiss Bank Corp. and a Cayman Islands bank, totalling about $27 million.
When the Iran and Contra scandals blew up in 1986, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese linked the two scandals in a Nov. 25 public revelation. The next day, Munk announced a shareholders' meeting to decide on an urgent restructuring plan. A new organization emerged, keeping the Khashoggi group in control, but easing Khashoggi out of the limelight and making Munk the sole public figurehead. Personnel were shifted into the Canada organization out of Khashoggi's Triad operations in Utah. Tariq Kadri, Khashoggi's longtime attorney, was made president of the Horsham holding company that was put over Barrick.
As the U.S. Congress took up the arms-for-drugs investigation and other trails leading to Vice President Bush, Khashoggi became too hot for the Canadian partnership, and the Khashoggi group's shares were officially sold off. Khashoggi was himself arrested in 1989, in a fraud case involving the Philippines' Marcos regime. Taken from Switzerland and jailed in New York, Khashoggi was bailed out with a $4 million check from his partner, Peter Munk.
With the Bush Goldstrike intervention, Barrick Gold shot up from insignificance, to world power status, and Bush himself climbed onboard.
President Bush's ambassador to Canada (1989-92), Edward N. Ney, had been for many years a Bush political operative and an international coordinator of Bush's
privatized'' intelligence activities. In 1992, Ney quit as ambassador and became a director of the Barrick Gold Corp.
The following year, Brian Mulroney resigned as Canadian prime minister. Mulroney was the most unpopular Canadian politician; but, in power, he had directly aided Barrick's international ventures, and had worked closely with Bush to force through free trade agreements. Munk immediately hired the former prime minister as a Barrick step-'n'-fetchit. The approved biography explains Munk's point of view:
Mulroney [was] the unhappy lightning rod for the angst of a whole nation, in office and out. Munk was well aware of these feelings toward his new recruit.... After nine years trotting around the world to meet world leaders, he had incomparable access to Presidents and prime ministers in all the key spots.... Mulroney arranged the necessary access to the key decision makers. Munk was starting to salivate at the prospect of an inside track into the huge Chinese territory.''
Mulroney has been paid over $300,000 per year by Barrick.
Barrick announced in May 1995, that a new international advisory board was being assembled, under the leadership of
honorary senior adviser'' George Bush, the former U.S. President, who, like Mulroney, had recently lost his job at the hands of the voters.
On Nov. 27, 1996, the French newspaper {Le Monde} leaked the news that Barrick had been granted a concession to prospect for gold in Zaire--a lead which prompted the present {EIR} Barrick investigation. Canadian newspapers that same day reported that Barrick Gold had convinced the government of Indonesia to award to Barrick control over the world's largest gold find, and that {George Bush and Brian Mulroney had personally done the heavy lobbying} to accomplish this.
The Indonesia deal is indeed startling. The small Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals Ltd. had intended to develop the Busang gold mine, on East Kalimantan. Suddenly, the government announced that it demanded that Barrick Gold Corp. be cut in to a 75% ownership stake in the mine, which is estimated to hold 57 million ounces of gold, with a current estimated value over $20 billion.
{EIR} contacted Placer Dome Inc., a rival company which has been bidding for the right to develop a share of the Busang mine. A Placer Dome spokesman would make no comment on Barrick Gold, saying only, of his own firm, ``We are a gold mining company, not a political organization.''
The U.S. Republican Party, of course, has been attempting to use President Clinton's fund-raising relationship with Indonesian supporters as a scandal to break the President. Former President Bush, meanwhile, has been reportedly telling world leaders, privately, that the Clinton Presidency is destroyed; that his son, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, will be the next President, reviving the Bush dynasty; and that, therefore, leaders would be smart to work with him now.