And you thought the Fatah corruption died with Arafat?
If you thought that corruption in Fatah and the 'Palestinian Authority' died with Yasser Arafat, you're a fool. Former Arafat aide Mohamed Rashid, who was sentenced in absentia last week to 15 years in prison for corruption, claims he has the paperwork to prove that
Fatah has a secret $39 million bank account in Jordan.
Rashid said that the original sum was $44 million, but dropped after the Fatah leadership spent $5 million on the faction's sixth annual conference.
Rashid, who was Arafat's "moneyman" for many years, said he had all the necessary documents to prove the existence of the bank account.
He said that only PA President Mahmoud Abbas and two of his associates were authorized to deal with the secret account.
"According to my documents, $13 million came for the US, while the remaining sum came from friendly Arab countries," Rashid said. He challenged Abbas to deny the existence of the account, saying he would then reveal the identity of the two associates and the name of the bank and the Arab countries that deposited the money.
Of course, this is small change compared with what Arafat stashed in Switzerland....
By the way, Rashid is an Iraqi Kurd. Who are the 'Palestinians' anyway?
Labels: Abu Mazen, Jordan, Mohamed Rashid, Palestinian Authority corruption
Abu Mazen opens Pandora's box
The photoshop at the top of this post is from MR, daughter # 3, child # 5.
Remember when Abu Mazen attacked former Arafat adviser Mohamed Rashid and we discovered that
Abu Mazen is worth $100 million? It turns out that Abu Mazen's net worth was just the first item in Pandora's box. The second item, reports Jonathan Schanzer, is the net worth of Abu Mazen's two sons, Yasser and Tarek. The two boys have benefited from
a little bit of protectzia.
In stalking Rachid, whether or not the charges have merit, Abbas may have opened up a Pandora's Box. The conspicuous wealth of Abbas' own sons, Yasser and Tarek, has become a source of quiet controversy in Palestinian society since at least 2009, when Reuters first published a series of articles tying the sons to several business deals, including a few that had U.S. taxpayer support.
Yasser, the elder son, graduated with a degree in civil engineering from Washington State University in 1983 and carries both Palestinian and Canadian passports. According to his biography (where he goes by the alias Yasser Mahmoud), he worked for a variety of Gulf contracting firms from the 1980s until the mid-1990s before returning to Ramallah in 1997 to launch businesses of his own.
Yasser now owns Falcon Tobacco, which reportedly enjoys a monopoly on the sale of U.S.-made cigarettes in the Palestinian territories. According to the Toronto Star, Yasser also chairs Falcon Holding Group, a Palestinian corporate conglomerate that owns Falcon Electrical Mechanical Contracting Company (also called Falcon Electro Mechanical Contracting Company, or FEMC), an engineering interest that was established in 2000 and boasts offices in Gaza, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank. This business success has come with a helping hand from Uncle Sam: According to a Reuters report, Abbas's company received $1.89 million from USAID in 2005 to build a sewage system in the West Bank town of Hebron.
According to Yasser's biography, other arms of Falcon Holding Group include Falcon Global Telecommunication Services Company and Falcon General Investment Company, companies about which less is known. Through the Falcon companies, Yasser boasted to an Emirati magazine in 2009 that the companies' revenues total some $35 million per year.
And the Falcon group doesn't even account for everything. Yasser is listed by the New York-based financial information database CreditRiskMonitor.com as the chairman of the publicly traded Al-Mashreq Insurance Company, with 11 offices across the Palestinian territories. The company is valued on the Palestinian stock exchange at $3.25 million.
Finally, Yasser serves as managing director of the First Option Project Construction Management Company, whose website suggests that it does a great deal of public works projects, such as road and school construction, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. First Option employs at least 15 people in offices in Amman, Tunis, Cairo, Montenegro, and Ramallah. This enterprise also benefited from the U.S. government's financial support: As Reuters reported, First Option was awarded nearly $300,000 in USAID funds between 2005 and 2008.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Abu Mazen, Mohamed Rashid
'Palestinian Authority' plans to use 'human rights' group for espionage
The 'Palestinian Authority' wants to use a 'human rights group' called Global Network for Rights and Development (GNRD) to
conduct espionage operations, including against Amnesty International and 'Human Rights Watch' according to a report that appeared briefly on the WAFA ('Palestinian' news agency) website.
According to the documents, the PA’s General Intelligence Service in the West Bank is planning to use the Global Network for Rights and Development as a front for espionage activities.
GNRD was established in Geneva in 2008 with the aim of enhancing and supporting human rights and development by adopting new, creative strategies and policies to achieve lasting change.
The documents are said to be part of a “classified report” prepared by the PA’s General Department of Palestinian External Security.
The plan envisages using GNRD as a front for the establishment of an “effective and credible international human rights group that would be based in Geneva and whose goal would be to defend Palestinian causes” and collect information.
The cost of the project is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.
The report points out the important role of NGOs’ in shaping public opinion and affecting decision-making worldwide.
“These NGOs have a green card to enter any place in the world and operate freely under various pretexts,” the report said. “But we in Palestine are lacking many elements of power.”
The report claimed that many Western countries, including France, Britain and the US, have been using human rights organizations as a “striking arm” to affect policies around the world and remove governments from power. The report referred specifically to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and claims that they are funded and backed by Britain and the US, respectively.
The report recommended that the PA set up a similar “striking arm” that would operate out of Geneva and have representation in at least 50 countries. It said that the main mission would be to gather intelligence with the help of Western nationals.
The 'Palestinian Authority' is denying the story, and blaming it on Mohamed Dahlan and Mohamed Rashid, both rivals of Abu Mazen.
Labels: Abu Mazen, human rights, Mohamed Dahlan, Mohamed Rashid, Palestinian Authority
If you thought that corruption in Fatah and the 'Palestinian Authority' died with Yasser Arafat, you're a fool. Former Arafat aide Mohamed Rashid, who was sentenced in absentia last week to 15 years in prison for corruption, claims he has the paperwork to prove that Fatah has a secret $39 million bank account in Jordan. 
