Chilean judicial department to rule Pinochet case: Vice President

[emad]

SANTIAGO, Dec. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- The Chilean judicial department would rule on the case of millions of payments that ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet got from several countries, acting Vice PresidentNicolas Eyzaguirre said Tuesday.

According to the New York Times, a US Senate investigation intoRiggs Bank discovered that Pinochet received at least 12.3 millionUS dollars from the United States, Paraguay, Spain and Britain from 1974 to 1997.

Eyzaguirre said the case is in the hands of the judicial department. "What we have here (against Pinochet) are charges filed by the Internal Revenue Service for tax evasion," he added.

Meanwhile, the Second Tribunal of the Chilean Supreme Court rejected a call from Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who had requested the confiscation of all the assets belonging to Pinochet.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-12/08/content_2307727.htm

[emad]

1. NYT: Bank papers detail millions in Pinochet payments

International Herald Tribune

Bank papers detail millions in Pinochet payments
By Timothy L. O'Brien and Larry Rohter The New York Times Wednesday, December 8, 2004

General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, received multimillion-dollar payments from the governments of several countries, including the United States, during his 25-year tenure as Chile's ruler and military chief, according to documents uncovered during a U.S. Senate committee investigation into suspected money laundering at Riggs Bank.
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The documents, including Pinochet's sworn financial statements, show that he received $3 million from the U.S. government in 1976, as well as $1.5 million from Paraguay, $1 million from Spain, $2.5 million from China, a combined payment of $3 million from Britain, Malaysia and Brazil, and a combined payment of $2.5 million from Britain and China in other years. From 1974 to 1997, the payments totaled at least $12.3 million.
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The documents, originally given to Riggs by the Chilean Defense Ministry, were verified by a senior Riggs executive assessing the sources of the general's wealth. The payments from foreign governments were described as "commissions from service and travel abroad."
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Pinochet, who is 89, assumed control of the Chilean government in 1973 after overthrowing the elected government of Salvador Allende. He instituted a police state, oversaw the kidnapping and killing of some 4,000 political dissidents, laid the foundation of a stable economy and kept a tight grip on the Chilean government until 1990. He remained commander in chief of the military until 1998. He faces potential charges of human rights abuses in Chile as well as legislative and tax service investigations there of his financial dealings.
MORE:
http://iht.com/articles/2004/12/07/news/chile.html

[Judi Lynn]

4. Isn't the euphemism, "human rights violations" almost unacceptable?

A true "one size fits all," it can cover anything and everything up to the actual torture and murder of politically undesirable citizens, and paint it all with the same brush.

Don't you imagine it was a Republican who created this deceptive term?

God, I hope the sky falls on Pinochet and everyone in our government who was connected with that vile hell unleashed upon Chile.



"I heard there's rumors on the internets."

[gratuitous]

2. I'd love to see whose signatures were on those checks

Hmmmm, it's a little hard to read, but the first name definitely starts with an "H" and the last name is kind of long, and starts with a "K." I think there's a "g" near the end of the last name. Think, think. Who could have drawn that check on the U.S. Treasury?

[emad]

3. Can't imagine who you might mean.....here's some other related

stuff to the old General:

This Pinochet biz is about to crack in the UK.

General P has an 85 year old sister living in London called Ausugtina Lowenstein. Her mother was Chilean and her father an Austrian WWII criminal who laundered money for the Catholic Church when he worked as financial adviser to Pius XII. Both he and his daughter were paid in the 1960s by the P2 Lodge to organise bombing campaigns in Europe and mainland UK that were then attributed to the IRA/Provisional IRA/other "Irish" terrorists. Their controller was the Stasi's Markus Wolf who ran espionage and terrorism in East Germany for 15 years.

Lowenstein has lived in London for the last 30 odd years under a fake ID and poses as an International Girl Guides Movement organiser, devout Polish Catholic and property owning landlady. She has convictions going back 60 years for prostitution, brothel keeping, child slavery and sex abuse, money laundering, theft, terrorism and espionage. Her last custodial sentence goes back to 1984 when she received an eventually suspended sentence for laundering Banco Ambrosiano funds to Solidarity in Poland. Sentence was suspended after she did a plea bargain naming P2 Lodge members involved in the racket. Some of this evidence in now part of the bundle that the City of London police came up with in April this year in the Rome murder trial of God's Banker Roberto Calvi.

She has been involved in a series of property fraud/theft/money laundering scams on her own home for over 20 years, owning some £400,000 in mortgages and legal fees. Under Blair's Good Friday Agreement of 1998, she thought she had managed to secure partial immunity from prosecution over this, and the biz was kept to the civil courts.

Now the criminal courts may be involved because she has a son, Henry Gelli, nephew of Licio Gelli, (currently in the slammer facing murder charges in Rome in the Calvi murder trial). Gelli is involved in a criminal prosecution whose paper trail shows that in February this year a Guernsey based bank which held Riggs-originated financial assets for General Pinochet, paid off his mother's £400,000 debts and wiped the slate clean of all Gelli's personal bankrupcy debts.

The US Senate Committee investigation into Riggs - detailed in the New York Times story above - may now like to pick up this thread. Don't know whether the UK's Crown Prosecution Service has yet sent them the relevant papers. But I understand that Gelli's own arrest is imminent and will topple 40 years of fraud, theft, espionage and terrorism in the UK that was previously attributed to Irish terrorism.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Astonishing rightwingers, aren't they?

No doubt children will sit around the campfire at nights and tell each other the terrifying stories of Augusto Pinochet and Augustina Lowenstein.

Two real rip-roaring rightwingdings. They have raised the standard!