Pope Francis excommunicates popular Archbishop as he doubles down on critics

 

This is what autocrats due to control the narrative. It's the only way to push through reforms that are unwanted and unhealthy. How many times in the history of the Catholic Church have they condemned and even destroyed the most holy among them?

Vatican excommunicates far-right critic

of Pope Francis

By Ehren Wynder

Far-right Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó once accused Pope Francis of covering up the sexual abuse scandal surrounding American ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. File Photo by Giuseppe Giglia/EPA-EFE

July 5 (UPI) -- The Vatican said Friday it excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States and a staunch critic of Pope Francis.

Viganò was found guilty of schism -- meaning he has split from the church -- for refusing to recognize the authority of the pope and the liberal reforms enacted after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, according to a statement from the Vatican.

Vigano would probably say that it was the church that left him rather than the other way about.

"The Most Reverend Carlo Maria Vigano was found guilty of the reserved delict [violation of the law] of schism," the statement read.

The archbishop responded to the verdict in a post on X, where he linked to the decree that the Vatican sent him.

"What was attributed to me as guilt for my conviction is now put on record, confirming the Catholic Faith that I fully profess," his post read.

The ultra-conservative archbishop, who served as papal ambassador to Washington, D.C., from 2011 to 2016, emerged as one of Pope Francis' fiercest critics over his support of immigrants, leniency toward LGBTQ people and a pro-vaccine position.

Viganó in 2018 went into hiding after he penned a letter calling for the pope to resign and accusing him of covering up sexual abuse by American ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

He also in public statements called the pontiff a "false prophet" and a "servant of Satan."

Since then, he has aligned himself with far-right conspiracy theories criticizing COVID-19 vaccines and accusing Western "deep state" powers of igniting the war in Ukraine.

In other words, he has found the truth.

The Vatican in June charged Viganó with schism and summoned him to Rome to appear before the tribunal in charge of religious discipline, but he refused the summons, saying in a statement that he did not recognize the tribunal's authority.

"I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio," he said at the time of the charges, using the Argentinian pontiff's given name.

Viganó's excommunication means he will no longer be able to observe Mass, receive or administer sacraments or hold official positions within the church. He will, however, be able to keep his title.

Pope Francis has punished other far-right opponents within the church. Last year he fired Bishop Joseph Strickland from his diocese in Tyler, Texas. Strickland was a leading voice among American conservative Catholics who criticized the liberal reforms of the Vatican.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, who accused Francis of diluting Catholic doctrine, was evicted from his Vatican-subsidized apartment last year, as well.

The pope in 2022 defrocked the Rev. Frank Pavone, leader of the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, after he was found guilty of "blasphemous communications on social media, and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop," according to the Vatican.

Pavone argued he had not been properly notified of the decision, and the letter did not specify what communications or disobediences led to the decision.

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Catholic Convulsions > Archbishop Vigano called Francis a False Prophet - now charged with schism

 

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò summoned to Vatican for trial over schism charge

JUN 21, 2024 11:00 AM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò regards the schism charges being brought against as “an honor,” which is understandable, considering that the Church has become a foremost exponent of wokeism, and has in many ways abandoned its Christian tradition, as with its relentless pandering to Islam.

Archbishop Viganò says he faces schism charges

from Vatican’s doctrinal office

National Catholic Register, June 20, 2024:

The disgraced former papal nuncio to the United States, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, announced that he has been charged with schism by the Vatican’s doctrinal office, after a six-year rogue period in which he called for Pope Francis to resign and labeled him a “false prophet.”

I wonder... did he call him a false prophet, or The False Prophet? 

On June 20, the archbishop posted on his own website a two-page decree from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith ordering him to appear for a trial regarding “public statements that show a denial of points necessary for the preservation of communion with the Catholic Church.”

The decree is dated June 11 and is signed by Msgr. John Kennedy, secretary of the doctrinal office’s disciplinary section, requesting that Viganò present himself on June 20 at 15:30 to formally receive the accusation and evidence against him.

In 2018, Viganò penned an 11-page letter alleging a widespread Vatican cover-up of allegations against ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and called on Francis to resign. Since then, many of the claims he alleged have been discredited, but the Italian archbishop has become something of a hero to some right-wing Catholics for his support of former U.S. President Donald Trump, opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines, spreading of Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and his outright rejection of the Second Vatican Council.

While many mainstream Catholics have dismissed the former Vatican diplomat, he has continued to use his website and social media to promote his radicalized views, with his posts being shared by high-profile individuals such as Trump and being widely promoted within certain pockets of the U.S. Catholic Church. 

In the weeks following Viganò’s 2018 attack against Francis, many bishops’ conferences around the globe issued statements specifically denouncing the former nuncio. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops did not and more than two dozen U.S. bishops issued statements of support for Viganò at the time.

In October 2021, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the then-head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, penned a fiery response to Viganò charging him with carrying out a “political frame job” and labeling his actions as “extremely immoral.”

More recently, in 2022, Italy’s military chaplain, Archbishop Santo Marciano, published an open letter to Viganò condemning his spread of conspiracy theories.

In his June 20 blog post, Viganò said he considered the charges brought against him to be an “honor,” adding that Vatican II is a “moral and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is a necessary metastasis.”..

The Great Slaughter: A forgotten genocide of WWII

..

In just one day, Croatian Nazi allies killed more than 2,300 Serb

civilians in three villages and a mine, without firing a shot

FILE PHOTO. Ustaše militia execute prisoners near the Jasenovac concentration camp. © Wikipedia

“It was the single biggest slaughter of civilians in their homes in a single day, in such a small rural area – not just in the Second World War, but in the entire history of humanity.” Those are the words of Lazar Lukajic, a Serb historian, describing the genocidal rampage that took place over some 10 hours of February 7, 1942, less than two miles from where he lived. 

The entire world has heard of Lidice, a Czech village that was destroyed by Nazi Germany in reprisal for the resistance’s assassination of the SS occupation governor, Reinhard Heydrich. In June 1942, the Nazis shot all of the village’s adult males and sent its women and children to death camps, before razing Lidice to the ground. A total of 340 villagers were killed. German propaganda proudly trumpeted this atrocity to discourage resistance elsewhere.

Yet few know the names of Drakulic, Sargovac and Motike – the villages where several months prior, it wasn’t Hitler’s Germans but their Croatian allies that massacred over 2,300 people in a single day, using only axes and mining tools. “Without a single bullet being fired… Every single victim met their murderer face to face, on their own doorstep, before being slaughtered in cold blood,” Dragana Tomasevic, director of the Jasenovac and Holocaust Memorial Foundation (JHMF), told RT.

The villagers were killed solely because they were Orthodox Christian Serbs. In the Independent State of Croatia – a militantly Catholic client state allied with the Rome-Berlin Axis – that was grounds enough to be killed, expelled, or forcibly converted, in a genocidal campaign that served as the opening chapter of the Holocaust. It was no coincidence that the killers – members of the bodyguard regiment of the Croat Poglavnik (leader) Ante Pavelic – were accompanied by a priest. Fra Tomislav Filipovic, a Franciscan from the nearby monastery of Petricevac, would go on to become known as “Friar Satan.”

Prologue to the Final Solution

February 7, 1942 was less than three weeks after the notorious Wannsee Conference, the gathering of high-ranking Nazis at which they decided that the “final solution of the Jewish question” would be genocide. By that time, however, Hitler’s Croatian allies had already been killing Serbs and Jews for months. The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, NDH) was proclaimed on April 10, 1941 – just four days after Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia. Originally intended as a client of both Germany and fascist Italy, it was under the operational control of the Ustasha (literally “insurrectionists”), a fascist-inspired nationalist movement that defined Croat identity through the prism of militant Roman Catholicism and hatred of “Eastern Schismatics,” i.e. Orthodox Serbs. 

FILE PHOTO. A unit of Ustaše in Sarajevo. © Wikipedia

More than two million Serbs found themselves under NDH rule in territories of present-day Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and parts of northern Serbia. They were denied their own name, called only “Greek Easterners,” and were immediately placed under the same kind of restrictions that Jews in Germany had been subjected to under the Nuremberg racial laws. The Pavelic regime also outlawed Jews and allowed for the seizure of their property. Pogroms in major cities such as Zagreb and Sarajevo began almost right away.

It was the Serbs that the NDH focused on, however, seeking to kill a third, expel a third, and convert a third – a policy formulation attributed to both Culture Minister Mile Budak and Justice Minister Andrija Artukovic. 

“The omission of Croatia from the conventional Holocaust studies is like a book whose first chapter is torn out,” wrote the late Jonathan Steinberg, a professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania and a noted Holocaust scholar. Steinberg also described the NDH targeting of Serbs as the “earliest total genocide to be attempted during World War II.” 

The first recorded mass murder of Serbs was recorded in Bjelovar, a city some 50 miles north of Zagreb, on April 27-28, 1941, when about 180 unarmed civilians of all ages were shot. Soon, however, the Ustasha began saving bullets and favoring cold steel – knives, hammers, axes and even improvised implements – to butcher their victims. Starting in May 1941, the Ustasha used the natural ravines of the Dalmatian hinterlands as pits for thousands of murdered Serbs – sometimes still alive when they were thrown below. Only the intervention of outraged Italians forced them to close the camps such as Jadovno and the Pag salt pits, in August 1941. By then, however, a new series of camps was in the works – the Jasenovac complex, on the Sava River, in the German zone.

Hitler himself had endorsed the persecution of Serbs – whom he blamed for the demise of Germany and Austria in WWI – and urged Pavelic against showing “too much tolerance” at a meeting in June. This meant that reports from General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, his military envoy to Zagreb who spoke of the “madness” of the Ustasha and warned that their atrocities were fueling the Serb resistance, fell on deaf ears.

‘Like sheep when a wolf attacks’

Massacres of civilians as collective punishment for insurgent activity were routine in occupied and partitioned Yugoslavia. In German-occupied Serbia, the policy of shooting 100 civilian hostages for every Wehrmacht soldier killed and 50 for every one wounded had managed to temporarily discourage the royalist resistance, but the Communists carried on regardless. Several units of Communist Partisans operated on Mt. Kozara, northwest of Banja Luka, in present-day Bosnia but then part of the NDH. Responding to one of their railroad raids, the local Ustasha shot dozens of civilians in the hamlets of Piskavica and Ivanjska on February 5 – and would do so again a week later, killing a total of 520 people. What happened on February 7, however, was not a reprisal massacre at all. The company of Ustasha, detached from Pavelic’s own bodyguard regiment, came directly from Zagreb with only one mission: kill every Serb they could find.

Dragan Stijakovic was 16. When the Ustasha came to his home in Motike, he hid under the bed. In testimony recorded in 2003, he described how an Ustasha bayoneted his entire family to death, starting with his mother.

“The Ustasha stopped in the doorway briefly and in silence, looked around the room, then went through the door and pushed the bayonet in my mother’s chest, just under the left breast,” he said. “When she fell, the Ustasha took his rifle and plunged the bayonet into her face, stabbing her just under left eye.The rest of my family continued to look on in horror. Completely frozen, paralyzed; rooted to the spot like sheep when a wolf attacks,” Stijakovic added. The Ustasha then “calmly… stepped over my mother and started stabbing one by one, as if stabbing the bales of hay with a pitchfork.”

I’m watching this all happening in front of me. I cannot move. As if I’m paralyzed. I see everything, I am fully aware of everything, but I cannot move a single muscle. I cannot move a single part of my body. As if my body is dead, and my mind and senses are alive and well.

A telegram sent from Banja Luka to the Ustasha Surveillance Service (Ustaska Nadzorna Sluzba, UNS) in Zagreb on February 11 describes the killings this way: “One company of Ustasha troops, commanded by Oberleutnant Josip Mislov… on February 7 at 04:00 seized Rakovac mine and used pickaxes to kill 37 Greek Schismatic workers. Continued to use pickaxes and axes to kill Greek Schismatic men, women and children in villages of Motike, where around 750 were killed, Drakulic and Sargovac, where around 1,500 were killed. Killing ended around 14:00… Detailed report to follow.”

Neighbors’ betrayal

How did the Ustasha from Zagreb know who to target? Both Serbs and Croats lived in the three villages. The clue is found in the follow-up report, which names some of the local Croats who acted as guides.

From the mine, the Ustasha proceeded to Drakulic, the report says. They were guided by three local men – the miner Ivo Juric, Stipo Golub, and Simun Pletikosa – who pointed out the Serb houses. Everyone was taken outside and killed. The company then moved to Sargovac. On the way back, they slaughtered 70 families in the village of Motike as well. Axes were used for the killing in the villages, in addition to mining picks. The Croat villagers then looted the food, livestock and even furnishings from the Serb homes, but were told to bury the dead. The burials went on for three days.  

“Many bodies were buried without limbs, as they had been eaten by pigs and dogs,” the report noted.

A school record from Sargovac Primary School of 1942. For every slaughtered Orthodox child and entry was made stating: "Passed away on 7th February 1942". © JHMF

A photograph, taken by Ustasha Stipe Kraljevic, shows six of his comrades posing with the severed head of Jovan Blazenovic, a Serb from Drakulic. Four of the six have been identified: Ante Pezic, Meho Ceric, Franjo Likanac and Marko Kolakovic. The extended report also details how the slaughter at Rakovac was carried out: The miners were ambushed when they came to start their shifts, with the Serbs separated, then struck with blunt implements and “finished off” with picks to the head. The same method was used against the third-shift miners who were returning to the surface. The bodies were thrown into the mineshaft.

Both of the reports are contained in the book ‘Friars and Ustasha Slaughter’, published by Lazar Lukajic in 2005. It also contains the testimony of Dragan Stijakovic and 12 other surviving villagers. According to Lukajic, the total number of Serbs killed in the massacre was 2,315, of which 1,363 were from Drakulic, 257 from Sargovac, and 679 from Motike, as well as 16 miners from other villages who were killed at Rakovac.

‘Father Satan’

Tomasevic, who heads the JHMF charity in the UK, is the granddaughter of Dragan Stijakovic’s brother Mladen, who was in a German prisoner-of-war camp at the time of the massacre. She told RT that Friar Filipovic of Petricevac did not just accompany the Ustasha company, but personally took part in the slaughter.

Mimicking Christ and his apostles, the friar took 12 of the Ustasha into the elementary school in Sargovac, where he started butchering the children. Dobrila Martinovic, the schoolteacher who survived the slaughter, later told Lukajic that Filipovic personally murdered the seven-year-old Radojka Glamocanin in front of her, to show the others how to kill. A page from the school log for February 7, 1942 lists 58 Serb children as dying of “natural causes.”

Filipovic also reportedly told the Ustasha that he would absolve them of any sins, and that their killing was “baptizing” the “apostates.” After word of his role in the massacre got out, the abbot of Petricevac defrocked Filipovic, and the German military envoy, General von Horstenau, demanded he be prosecuted. Though the former friar was court-martialed and jailed, his fall from grace did not last long. In March 1943, he caught the attention of Vjekoslav ‘Maks’ Luburic, the Ustasha in charge of Croatia’s death camps. Luburic dubbed the ex-friar a “master of his trade” – i.e. killing Serbs – after which Filipovic took on the second surname, “Majstorovic.” 

Luburic had Filipovic-Majstorovic appointed commander of Stara Gradiska, one of the camps in the Jasenovac complex, where Serb inmates were slaughtered with knives, axes, hammers and other blunt instruments. To his victims, he became known as “Fra Sotona” – Friar Satan.

Captured by the Communists after the war, Filipovic-Majstorovic was put on trial for war crimes and hanged in 1946, dressed in a Fransciscan frock. He was never excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

The sin of silence

While some of the butchers of Drakulic, Sargovac and Motike were punished at the end of the war, many more were not. Disclosing the full extent of Croat atrocities against the Serbs would have made it impossible to put Yugoslavia back together after the war. Though the Communists originally intended to break it apart – their infamous 1928 agenda called for its partition along ethnic lines to destroy “greater Serbian bourgeois imperialism” – they were less inclined to do so once they were in power, and had the backing of both the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

So while the NDH genocide was acknowledged, it was declared that the Serbian royalists were the moral equivalent of the Ustasha and that the Communist Partisans were the only true resistance to Axis occupation. Peoples of Yugoslavia were told to embrace equity, in the form of “brotherhood and unity” – and if that meant living next door to one’s executioners, so be it.

This meant that the survivors had to wait years to recover just the family heirlooms looted by the neighbors implicated in the slaughter of their relatives. The same neighbors found jobs and power in the new government. A discreet monument erected to the victims of the Great Slaughter in the 1960s could not identify them as Serbs, so as not to hurt the Croats’ feelings. 

This is also why the Stijakovic brothers and other survivors could not get their testimonies published until the 2000s – long after the propaganda of the 1990s smeared the Serbs as genocidal war criminals and their WWII executioners as innocent victims, in a new “history” written by the Cold War victors.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

Corruption is Everywhere > Russian Oligarch Agrees to $500m US Fine; Pandora Papers - Same Old, Same Old; FBI's Political Bent; Shocking Political Move By Trudeau's Liberals

..

Russian billionaire Oleg Tinkov agrees to pay $500 million

to escape prosecution for US tax fraud

2 Oct, 2021 08:07

© AFP / Olga Maltseva

The founder of one of Russia’s largest private banks has reached a plea deal with the US authorities after the tycoon agreed to pay over $500 million in a fraud case that accused him of concealing assets to evade taxes.

The banker, whose fortune is reportedly worth about $8 billion, agreed to pay $506,828,377, including unpaid taxes from 2013, the penalty for civil fraud, and interest, the Justice Department said on Friday.

Oleg Tinkov was arrested in Britain in February 2020 at the behest of the US, but avoided extradition because he was undergoing medical treatment for leukemia.

According to the US Justice Department, the billionaire hid $1 billion in assets and income in 2013. Back then, Tinkov renounced his US citizenship, days after Tinkoff Credit Systems, the Russian branchless online bank he’d founded, held an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange.

According to the prosecutors, Tinkov falsely reported income of less than $206,000 in a tax return despite getting over $192 million after selling part of his majority shareholder stake when his bank went public. 

Oops! Missed a few zeros there.

The US tax regulations requires American citizens to pay taxes on income earned abroad as in the case of Tinkov, who returned to Russia after receiving his American passport in 1996. Individuals with more than $2 million in assets who renounce their US citizenship are required to pay an exit tax based on any income and capital gains they would receive if they sold their assets.

Huge 'Pandora Papers' leak exposes secret offshore accounts

of politicians, celebrities and billionaires

Canadians named in confidential files include former auto-racing

and figure-skating champions

Zach Dubinsky and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists · 

CBC News · 

Posted: Oct 03, 2021 12:30 PM ET

The offshore fortunes of prime ministers, royalty, billionaires, athletes and celebrities are being laid bare in a giant new leak of tax-haven financial records, even bigger than the Panama Papers, revealed today by a global consortium of media outlets.

The leaked files, dubbed the Pandora Papers, show 35 current or former world leaders and more than 300 other public officials around the globe who have held assets in or through tax havens. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, the current prime ministers of the Czech Republic and Kenya, and the king of Jordan have all benefited from the anonymity or tax advantages of their offshore holdings, the records reveal.

The 11.9 million files — consisting of everything from emails to bank statements, incorporation documents and shareholder registries — are from 14 firms that provide offshore services, and were leaked by a confidential source to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The ICIJ has provided access to the files to 150 of its partner news organizations around the world, including CBC/Radio-Canada and the Toronto Star in Canada. 

So far, the CBC and the Star have identified the names of at least 500 Canadian citizens or residents in the records.

Much like the Panama Papers leak in 2016 or the Paradise Papers the following year, the secret files provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how certain global elites — or in other cases, high-profile criminals — take advantage of financial wizardry or opaque corporate structures to either shield assets, wriggle out of their tax obligations, or hide wealth entirely.  

After the Panama Papers came to light five years ago, world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, repeatedly pledged to crack down on such tax abuses and to clean up the murky world of offshore finance. But the new Pandora Papers show that the global offshore world, while chastened, continued to thrive in recent years.

"When we published the Panama Papers a few years ago, there was a lot of outcry around the world saying that this was a system that needed to end," said Gerard Ryle, the ICIJ's director. "But we're now seeing the very people who could end the system … themselves benefiting from it." 

There is nothing inherently illegal about having an offshore bank account or company, as long as it is properly declared to tax authorities, and plenty of major businesses operate overtly and legally in and through tax havens. However, the anonymity provided in offshore jurisdictions, coupled with their minimal or non-existent tax on income, also makes them a magnet for money launderers, tax evaders, corrupt politicians and other criminals. 

Canadians

The leaked files contain details on hundreds of offshore companies and accounts set up by or for Canadians. 

Here are some of the most prominent names.

Jacques Villeneuve had offshore companies set up in zero-tax jurisdictions from the start of his career.

(Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)

Jacques Villeneuve

The only Canadian to ever win a Formula 1 championship, Villeneuve lived a life of luxury in Monaco and Switzerland during most of his racing career, but lived in Quebec for a period in the 1990s and from 2007 to 2013. The Pandora Papers show he had offshore companies set up in zero-tax jurisdictions from the start of his career, back in 1992. They were set up to receive racing and endorsement income.

Elvis Stojko, seen in the men's short program during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, says he didn't

even know which country his offshore trust was in until CBC mentioned it. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Elvis Stojko

The karate-chopping figure skater won hearts with his edgy Olympic performances and world championship wins, but the money from his success wasn't bad, either. The leaked files show Stojko transferred Canadian assets worth up to $6.5 million into an offshore trust in the Caribbean in 2007, while he was living in Mexico. Skate Canada, an organization that receives public funding, signed off on the transaction. Stojko told CBC News that he relied on his lawyer to handle his finances, and had "no real involvement or interest" in any of it. "When my longtime lawyer recommended that I set up a trust ... I did not question his advice, and I trusted him to act in a manner which was both in my best interests and in compliance with the law." Skate Canada declined to comment.

Firoz Patel

The Quebecer is currently serving a three-year sentence in a Connecticut prison after pleading guilty last year in the U.S. to conspiring to launder money, via his and his brother's unlicensed online payment platforms Payza and AlertPay. The Pandora Papers show that just as the investigation into the Patel brothers was hitting its full stride, Firoz Patel flew to the United Arab Emirates where he acquired an offshore company. From prison, Patel said the corporation was set up legitimately to do business in Asia and had nothing to do with Payza.

Alexandre Cazes

The alleged criminal mastermind behind the dark web marketplace AlphaBay — an online bazaar for buying and selling drugs, guns and stolen credit card info — amassed a fortune worth about $29 million, according to U.S. authorities. The Pandora Papers show for the first time how he used a network of shell companies to obscure his ownership of various assets, including luxury homes.

The Pandora Papers show some of the ways Alexandre Cazes was able to shift his money around with some degree of anonymity. (Kathy Gauthier/Facebook)

Cazes died in 2017, a week after he was arrested. It's believed the Trois-Rivières, Que., native took his own life while in custody. 

Fred Sharp

Sharp's Vancouver firm, Corporate House, was known as the go-to investment outfit for wealthy Canadians wanting to keep assets hidden and use offshore havens to minimize their taxes, sources in the wealth management industry told the CBC in 2016. Not surprisingly, Sharp was revealed that year as the most frequently named Canadian in the Panama Papers leak.

The Canada Revenue Agency began auditing him and a number of his associates right after. Nothing much has come of it yet — at least in Canada — as Sharp and co. filed dozens of lawsuits to block the CRA's efforts. South of the border, however, Sharp's machinations caught the eye of the FBI, and he and a couple of clients were charged with securities fraud in August. He's less prominent in the new Pandora Papers leak, which mainly shows his firm doing routine administration of offshore companies. Sharp did not comment in response to questions from CBC News and the Toronto Star.

CBC News will report in depth on some of these cases, and other Canadian names, in the weeks ahead.

Global names

Outside of Canada, the prominent names in the leak include eight sitting presidents and three current prime ministers. Some of them had already declared their offshore assets, while for others, such as Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, their holdings were previously a secret. 

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta told an interviewer in 2018 that 'every public servant’s assets must

be declared publicly.' He himself, however, seems to have been an exception.

(Yasuyoshi CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images)

"Every public servant's assets must be declared publicly so that people can question and ask — what is legitimate?" Kenyatta had told a BBC interviewer in 2018. The leaked records show he and his mother were beneficiaries of a secretive foundation in Panama, while other family members own five offshore companies with assets worth more than $38 million. Kenyatta and his family did not reply to ICIJ partner journalists' requests for comment.

Among the other prominent global names: 

Czech PM Andrej Babis

Listed in Forbes magazine's tally of global billionaires, Babis rose to power promising to crack down on corruption and tax evasion. The Pandora Papers reveal he used a string of shell companies to purchase a sprawling estate, Chateau Bigaud, in southern France and seven other nearby properties before he entered public office. He did not disclose the shell companies in the public declarations he's required to file by law, according to Czech state records obtained by an ICIJ media partner. Within three weeks, a Czech prosecutor will decide whether to lay fraud charges against him in an unrelated case. Babis didn't respond to the ICIJ's requests for comment. 

Pop singer Shakira 

The Colombian-born pop music sensation is already well known for her tax troubles. Though she declared herself a resident of the Bahamas, authorities in Spain determined she was actually living in Barcelona from 2011 to 2014 but not paying taxes, and in July a Spanish magistrate cleared the way for her to go to trial on criminal charges laid in 2019. The Pandora Papers reveal that even as that investigation in Spain was underway, she was incorporating new offshore entities in the British Virgin Islands, one of which, Titania Management Inc., has never previously been publicly revealed. A copy of her Spanish ID is among the leaked files.

Jordan's King Abdullah II is connected with several offshore companies registered in tax havens,

including the British Virgin Islands. (Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images)

King Abdullah II

Jordan's ruler, the leak reveals, secretly owns 14 luxury homes in Britain and the U.S., purchased between 2003 and 2017 through companies registered in tax havens. The total value is more than $134 million. Writing to ICIJ on the king's behalf, attorneys denied anything improper about owning homes through offshore companies and said the king doesn't have to pay taxes under Jordanian law. But had the purchases been public, the timing could have alienated many Jordanians. Most of the real estate deals took place since 2011, after Arab Spring protests posed the first serious threat to the Jordanian monarchy in generations. Lately, protests against the royal family have intensified amid allegations that nepotism and corruption are choking the country. Jordan is also one of the poorest countries in the region and depends on foreign aid, including $800 million from Canada in the past 10 years.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair, seen last month, purchased shares in a company registered in the

British Virgin Islands in order to acquire a building in London that became the offices of his wife's law firm.

(Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Former U.K. PM Tony Blair

Britain's longest-serving Labour prime minister and his wife, lawyer Cherie Blair, purchased an $11-million Victorian building in London in 2017 for her law firm. But it wasn't an ordinary real estate transaction. Instead of buying the property, they acquired the shares of the British Virgin Islands company that owned it, from the family of Bahrain's industry and tourism minister. By purchasing the company shares instead of the building, the Blairs benefited from a legal arrangement that saved them from having to pay more than $580,000 in property transfer taxes. Cherie Blair said in replies to questions from the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper that her husband was not involved in the transaction and that the "seller for their own purposes only wanted to sell the company" and not the property. Blair said she and her husband took immediate steps after acquiring the property to merge it back into a U.K.-based holding company, making it fully taxable in Britain. 

The consequences for countries of wealth moving offshore, out of the reach of tax authorities, are particularly devastating this year, as national treasuries struggle against the whipsaw of a COVID-induced economic slowdown and sharply higher costs for health care, protective equipment and social programs.

The equivalent of at least $14.3 trillion is held offshore, according to a 2020 study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. However, the complexity and secrecy of the offshore system make it impossible to know how much of that is tied to tax evasion and other crimes and how much has been reported to authorities.

"These are loopholes that are available to wealthy people but not available to others," Robert Palmer, executive director of the advocacy group Tax Justice UK, told ICIJ partner the Guardian. "Politicians need to fix the tax system so that everyone pays their fair share." 

Too many politicians get money under the table to make sure that never happens.

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As Lebanese got poorer, politicians stowed wealth abroad

By BASSEM MROUE

yesterday

AP

Bank customers hold up defaced posters of Riad Salameh, the governor of Lebanon's Central Bank, right, and Makram Sadir, secretary-general of the Association of Banks in Lebanon, with Arabic that reads: "Stole my future," during a protest in front of the Central Bank in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021. Dozens of Lebanese gathered outside a bank in Beirut's downtown demanding that they be allowed to withdraw their deposits that have been blocked amid Lebanon's severe financial and economic crisis. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

BEIRUT (AP) — A trove of leaked documents confirmed that for years, Lebanon’s politicians and bankers have stowed wealth in offshore tax havens and used it to buy expensive properties — a galling revelation for masses of newly impoverished Lebanese, caught in one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns in decades.

Some of the newly outed holders of offshore accounts belong to the same ruling elite that is being blamed for the collapse and for derailing the lives of ordinary Lebanese who have lost access to savings and now struggle to get fuel, electricity and medicine.

Bold-faced names in the leaked documents include the longtime central bank governor, a pivotal figure in the failed policies that helped trigger the financial crisis, as well as Prime Minister Najib Mikati and his predecessor.

The documents, named the “Pandora Papers,” were examined by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, with the first findings released on Sunday. The ICIJ report exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories.

It was based on a review of nearly 11.9 million records obtained from 14 firms that provide services in setting up offshore firms and shell companies. Clients of such firms are often trying to hide their wealth and financial activities.

Setting up an offshore company is not illegal, but reinforces the perception that the wealthy and powerful play by different rules — a particularly upsetting notion for many Lebanese.

The papers show how members of the political class were sending wealth abroad for years, even as they urged people to deposit money in Lebanon’s banks, assuring them that it was safe, said Alia Ibrahim, a Lebanese journalist.

“We are not talking about regular citizens,” said Ibrahim, a co-founder of Daraj, a Beirut-based independent digital media platform, and one of scores of journalists across the world who worked with ICIJ on the investigation into the documents.

“These are politicians who served in public office for years, and they are partly responsible for the current crisis Lebanon is going through,” she said.

Lebanon is in the midst of what the World Bank says is one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns in the past 150 years. More than 70% of the population has been thrown into poverty, their savings nearly wiped out in the crisis that began in late 2019 and was in part caused by decades of corruption and mismanagement by the political class.

Hundreds of thousands of people staged nationwide protests against corruption starting in late 2019. Yet two years later the same politicians still run the country in the same way, protected by the sectarian-based system.

One of the protesters, Samir Skaff, said that the Lebanese are not surprised to be told that the political class “is made up of a bunch of thieves.”

“We have been saying that for years,” he said.

Offshore companies, though not illegal, can be used to elude taxes or hide illicitly gained money. The leaks only add further confirmation to what Lebanese have long said about their ruling class — though repeated reports of graft or illicit activity in the past have failed to bring change.

One of the 14 firms listed by ICIJ as providing offshore services is Trident Trust, with 346 Lebanese clients making up the largest group, more than double the second-place country, Britain.

One focus of the revelations is Riad Salameh, who has been Lebanon’s central bank governor for nearly 30 years.

Daraj reported that the documents showed Salameh founded a company called AMANIOR, based in the British Virgin Islands, in 2007. He is listed as its full owner and sole director, which Daraj said appeared to violate Lebanese laws forbidding the central bank governor from activity in any enterprise.

Salameh’s office told The Associated Press that the central bank governor has no comment on the documents. ICIJ quoted him as saying that he declares his assets and has complied with reporting obligations under Lebanese law.

Salameh, 70, is being investigated in Switzerland and France for potential money laundering and embezzlement. Local media reported over the past months that Salameh and his brother as well as one of his aides have been involved in illegal businesses, including money transfers abroad despite the capital controls imposed at home. Salameh had denied making such transfers.

Other documents showed that Marwan Kheireddine, chairman of Lebanon’s Al-Mawarid Bank, was involved in setting up a flurry of offshore businesses in the months just before the economic crisis hit in late 2019. In November that year, his bank and others began imposing capital controls that meant Lebanese could pull very little money out of their accounts even as the currency crashed, wrecking their savings’ value.

The Pandora Papers reveal that in 2019, Kheireddine received control of an offshore firm in the British Virgin Islands, which he then used to buy a $2 million yacht.

In January 2019, he and his brother set up four firms in Britain on the same day, all based at the same London address, and all registered as “small companies,” which Daraj said meant they are exempt from auditing. In 2020, Kheireddine bought a $9.9 million New York penthouse sold by American actress Jennifer Lawrence, Lebanese media reported at the time.

Kheireddine is a former Cabinet minister and a senior member of the Lebanese Democratic Party. He did not respond to calls and a text message by the AP.

Prime Minister Mikati, a businessman who formed a new government last month, has owned a Panama-based offshore company since the 1990s. He used it in 2008 to buy property in Monaco worth more than $10 million, Daraj reported from the documents.

The leaked documents also show that his son Maher was a director of at least two British Virgin Islands-based companies, which his father’s Monaco-based company, M1 Group, used to obtain an office in central London.

Mikati released a statement saying his family fortune was amassed prior to his involvement in politics and was “compliant with global standards” and regularly scrutinized by auditors. Contacted by the AP, Mikati’s media adviser Fares Gemayel said he had no comment.

Speaking to Daraj, Maher Mikati said it was common for people in Lebanon to use offshore companies “due to the easy process of incorporation” and denied the purpose was to evade taxes.

Mikati’s predecessor as prime minister, Hassan Diab, was a co-owner of a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, Daraj reported.

Diab’s office said in a statement Monday that he helped establish the company in 2015, but it did not do any business and he resigned from the firm and gave up his shares in 2019.

“Is the setting up of a company against the law?” the statement said.

Diab’s government resigned days after a massive Aug. 4, 2020, blast in Beirut that killed and injured hundreds and destroyed the city’s port and nearby neighborhoods. Diab was charged with intentional killings and negligence in the case. He denies any wrongdoing but has refused to be questioned by the judge leading the investigation.

Corruption? FBI Raids Home of NYPD Sergeants’ Union Head

Who Criticized de Blasio and Cuomo

OCT 6, 2021 8:00 PM 

BY ROBERT SPENCER

My latest in PJ Media:

As Matt Margolis noted in July, the FBI is “corrupt and needs reform.” This reform became all the more urgent last week, when it was revealed that the feds were far more deeply involved in the January 6 insurrection-that-wasn’t-an-insurrection at the Capitol than had been previously known. But instead of moving to restore its shattered reputation and proving it hasn’t become little more than the far-Left’s muscle, the FBI on Tuesday raided the home of Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) President Ed Mullins, a Trump supporter and outspoken critic of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

According to the New York Daily News, the raid “also targeted the police union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters.” The FBI confirmed that it was “carrying out a law enforcement action in connection with an ongoing investigation” into the 13,000-member SBA. Said de Blasio: “All I have been told is the FBI has raided the SBA HQ and it’s in connection with an ongoing investigation, but we don’t have further details on that at this moment.”

The mayor couldn’t resist, however, kicking Mullins while he was down: “A lot of what he’s done has been really, really destructive — especially in the middle of a crisis where we’re trying to unify and we’re trying to get through together. I think he’s been a divisive voice. … All I hear is the FBI raid. I want to hear the details before I comment further.”

Mullins aroused de Blasio’s ire when he posted the arrest report of Chiara de Blasio, the mayor’s daughter, on Twitter; Chiara de Blasio was arrested in May 2020 during the George Floyd riots in Manhattan. According to the Daily News, Mullins was accused of “violating department rules” in disclosing Chiara’s private information, while his lawyer, Andrew Quinn, noted that the report had already been publicized and stated: “We see this case an attempt to chill Ed Mullins’s First Amendment rights.”

Amid the controversy, Mullins “vowed to continue speaking out whenever he believes cops are vilified or mistreated” and declared: “De Blasio’s City Hall has been at war with cops since his first days in office. Charges against union activism that City Hall doesn’t like — speaking truth to those who claim power — is sadly what we’ve come to expect from this administration.”

Mullins has made other enemies as well. Former mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, who previously had worked for de Blasio, excoriated Mullins for alleged “racism.” And in May 2020, New York’s then-Health Department Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Babot declared “I don’t give two rats’ a**es about your cops” in response to a request for more masks for the police. Mullins tweeted in response: “Truth is this b***h has blood on her hands but why should anyone be surprised the NYPD has suffered under DeBlasio since he became Mayor.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

Wilson-Raybould wasn't consulted on freeing Catholic Church

 from residential school compensation deal: source

Critics question decision to leave the justice minister of the day 'frozen out' of the case

Jason Warick · CBC News · 

Posted: Oct 07, 2021 2:00 AM CT

A source close to the case told CBC News that Jody Wilson-Raybould was not consulted on the federal

government's decision to absolve the Catholic Church of its financial responsibilities to residential schools survivors,

even though she was the justice minister at the time. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press)

No one in the federal government is saying who made the final decision to relieve the Catholic Church of its financial responsibilities (2nd story on post) to residential school survivors.

But a source with direct knowledge of the controversial 2015 case told CBC News that then-minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn't consulted, even though a lawyer in her department signed the final release.

"This is stunning. It's just unbelievable that the first Indigenous minister of justice was frozen out of a decision like this," said Tom McMahon, a former general legal counsel for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission who also spent 17 years as a lawyer in the Department of Justice.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, said she was also alarmed to hear that Wilson-Raybould was left out of the loop.

"This was a critical file on one of the most important issues facing the country," said Turpel-Lafond, a former Saskatchewan provincial court judge and member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation.

"Why didn't they consult her? Were they worried she'd have a different opinion?"

A Department of Justice official referred a CBC interview request to the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations; no one at that department returned interview requests on Tuesday or Wednesday. Wilson-Raybould herself declined CBC News' interview request.

Saskatoon Catholics raised $28.5 million to build this cathedral in 2012. Critics say the church's

 promise to compensate residential school survivors was being largely ignored at the time.

The story was similar across Canada. (Jason Warick/CBC)

In July 2015, Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench Justice Neil Gabrielson ruled on a years-long dispute between the federal government and Catholic Church entities.

Under the landmark 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), Catholic officials and their team of lawyers overseeing the deal had made three promises totalling $79 million.

They pledged to make "best efforts" to raise $25 million to benefit survivors; in the end, less than $4 million was raised. They promised to pay restitution amounting to $29 million in cash; that sum was not paid in total after the church spent millions of dollars on legal and administrative expenses.

And they committed to delivering $25 million worth of "in-kind" services as compensation to survivors; critics say some of that spending was designed to convert survivors, not to help them heal.

Gabrielson ruled in favour of the Catholic Church, approving the Catholic Church's buyout proposal of less than $2 million and freeing the church from its remaining financial commitments to residential school survivors.

Less than a month later, on Aug. 14, 2015, the federal government (under Stephen Harper) filed an appeal. In a four-page document, provided this week to CBC News by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, a senior lawyer for the Department of Justice cited several reasons to dispute Gabrielson's ruling.

The document says Gabrielson erred in assuming a deal had been reached, erred in assuming the federal lawyer on the file had the authority to approve the deal, and had made "palpable and overriding errors in his assessment of the facts." The federal government asked that the July decision to be cancelled or "quashed."

That fall, Justin Trudeau's Liberals won a majority government. On Nov. 4, 2015, Prime Minister Trudeau's first cabinet was sworn in. We Wai Kai Nation member and former Crown prosecutor Jody Wilson-Raybould was appointed Canada's first Indigenous minister of justice.

Six days later, on Nov. 10, another document was filed in the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal by a senior Department of Justice lawyer.

The "Notice of Abandonment" informed the court that the federal government's position had changed. The appeal was withdrawn and the case was closed immediately. No reasons were given.

Michael Wernick, who resigned in 2019 as clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to cabinet following allegations he and others pressured Wilson-Raybould on the SNC-Lavalin file, previously served as deputy minister in the department then known as Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

In a series of email responses this week to CBC News, Wernick said he had nothing to do with the decision to abandon the appeal, and neither did cabinet or the Privy Council.

"I can't know who was made aware at the time," Wernick wrote.

Apparently, nobody was!!!

Then-clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick arrives for a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall

in Ottawa on Monday, March 18, 2019. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

Wernick said the decision may not have reached the ministerial level because it wasn't seen as significant enough.

"… You are viewing it with the benefit and lens of hindsight where it looks bigger now six years later because of what we know now than it may have looked at the time in the context of a myriad of other matters and issues swirling around, especially in the hectic period of on-boarding a new government," Wernick wrote.

"Which matters are brought to the attention of people at the top is always subject to judgment. Ministers are responsible to Parliament for their portfolio but can't possibly know everything that is going on."

Turpel-Lafond and McMahon said Wernick's argument makes no sense.

"That tells you something. How could this not be seen as a major file? Do survivors think that?" McMahon said.

Turpel-Lafond said survivors deserve answers.

"It doesn't add up. It doesn't add up legally. It doesn't add up politically. Why did the federal government let them off the hook? Did the receptionist make the decision?" she said.

"You don't vigorously appeal and then abandon it for no reason. What happened?"

She said the legal appeal process is now closed but she's still calling for an independent review of the actions of both the federal government and the Catholic Church.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is director of the University of British Columbia's Indian

Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. (Mike McArthur/CBC)

A senior Department of Justice official (CBC has agreed not to name the individual) said the minister should always be briefed on significant decisions such as this one. The official said the lawyer working on the file would send an "early warning brief" to the deputy minister and then the minister, usually within a matter of hours.

The official said it's "inconceivable" that no one flagged this as a significant file. The decision to leave Wilson-Raybould out must have been deliberate, the official said.

Longtime NDP MP Charlie Angus has been asking these questions for years. In 2016, he wrote to Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett about the decision to absolve the Catholic Church of its responsibilities.

"The Catholic Church got their way with the courts, crying poor. No one has been given a sense of why they were allowed to walk away," Angus said.

Angus said the timing of the appeal's abandonment is suspicious.

"Trudeau appoints a cabinet. The government drops the appeal. There had to be discussion about what to do with the Catholic Church, and they let them walk. I've asked for answers and I've had none," he said.

"Who was it that let the Catholic Church walk?"

Last month, following calls to boycott Sunday mass and a petition to revoke the Catholic Church's tax exemptions, Canada's Catholic bishops issued a public, written apology to survivors. They also pledged to launch a new fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $30 million over five years.

Survivors interviewed by CBC News say they're skeptical, given the history of broken promises.