Turkish crime ring helped Iran evade sanctions

Reuters:

In this city's Grand Bazaar, sellers along labyrinthine passageways hawk carpets, jewelry and souvenir knick-knacks to tourists.

Turkish police believe that until recently, the area around the market also sat at the center of an audacious, multi-billion-dollar scheme involving bribery and suspect food shipments to Iran.

To date, no one has been charged. But a recently leaked police report - which contains allegations of payments to top Turkish government officials including cash stuffed into shoeboxes - has added fuel to a growing corruption scandal that has shaken the highest levels of Turkey's political establishment.

A review by Reuters of the report's 299 pages, as well as interviews with currency and precious metals dealers, offer colorful new details of how what police call a "crime organization" allegedly helped Iran exploit a loophole in the West's sanctions regime that for a time allowed the Islamic Republic to purchase gold with oil and gas revenues.

While the gold trade was then legal, the police report alleges the purported crime network bribed officials in part so it could maintain control of the lucrative business.

Then, when the West last July prohibited the gold trade as a sanctions violation, the police report alleges the network concocted records of shipments of food at preposterous volumes and prices to continue giving Iran access to foreign currency.

The police report - which includes transcripts of wiretapped conversations and surveillance photographs - was prepared for prosecutors. Reuters confirmed its authenticity with Ekrem Aydiner, the current chief prosecutor in charge of the case.

Turkey's Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, has called the police investigation a foreign-orchestrated plot without legal merit. In recent months, Turkey's judiciary removed several prosecutors from the case. That has raised questions about whether Turkish law enforcement authorities will continue to pursue it. Aydiner said the matter remains under active investigation.
...
There is much more.

This appears to show corruption at the highest levels of the Turkish government.  I don't think the current Turk government intends to see that justice is done.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more