Marc Rich and Jamaica

[Wahalla]

Normally I dont pay attention to Diane Abbot... But in this case I lsten to her... never knew this....

Interesting while our goverment was condemning apartheid and we were self righteous in our condemnation...We were breaking bread with one supporter... it reminds me of Barbados that there was a South African their recruiting our cricketers...

Hell I am not a saint... I just bought 1000pounds of Glencore shares....just before they jumped 6 % on Friday...



Jamaica and the Marc Rich connection
DIANE ABBOTT


Sunday, August 11, 2013
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The global commodity trader, Glencore, recently filed a claim in the English courts against the Jamaica Government agency, Clarendon Alumina Production (CAP). Glencore is attempting to block the forward sale of alumina to a Hong Kong rival. This case represents the epilogue of the long relationship between the Government of Jamaica and the man who created commodity trading, the late Marc Rich.
He is now best known as the flamboyant, billionaire tax-avoider who was controversially pardoned by the outgoing American president Bill Clinton. But his role as a commodity trader is probably more significant, certainly in relation to the history of Jamaica. He was a classic commodity trader, buying raw materials from producing countries then delivering the cargoes to manufacturers and other customers around the world. What marked Rich out was his ability to think long term, his willingness to take risks and his lavish use of bribes. The biggest single source of his wealth was the apartheid regime in South Africa. He ignored economic sanctions to make billions by shipping oil to South Africa. But in 1983 he was indicted in the US for tax evasion and went on the run for 18 years until he was finally pardoned by Clinton.
Hide DescriptionCLINTON... controversially pardoned Rich
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It was around the time of his indictment that he became heavily involved in Jamaica, effectively cornering the market in Jamaican bauxite alumina. Between 1980 and 1990, Rich advanced the Jamaican Government almost $320 million to purchase bauxite. It did not hurt that he was also alleged to have offered Jamaican politicians lavish hospitality, including flights on his private jet. And he was also reported to have funded the Jamaican track and field team to take part in the 1984 Olympics.
By 1985, aluminium prices had collapsed and the American aluminium producer Alcoa wanted to shut down its Jamaican production facilities. Rich seized the opportunity to suggest that Alcoa lease the facility to the government and then cornered the market in Jamaican bauxite alumina for the next 10 years. Eventually aluminium prices started to climb again and Rich made a fortune.
Michael Manley, then in opposition, was initially very critical of the Jamaica Government's relationship with Rich. The PNP promised to stop all business with the commodities trader and to closely re-evaluate all existing government contracts with his company. Placards with photomontages were displayed at the party's rallies depicting Marc Rich with blood on his hands. He was ritually denounced as an exploiter and foreign parasite. But, once back in power, Manley performed a U-turn. It was forced on him by the realisation that Jamaica needed at least $45 million in hard currency to meet its IMF tests, and the only entity willing to advance the money was Marc Rich.
By 1993, Rich had sold his shares in the commodity trading part of the Marc Rich Group, which was then renamed Glencore. Now merged with a Swiss mining group into Glencore Xstrata, the group is today one of the biggest commodities companies in the world. Another of the successor companies to the Marc Rich Group was Trafigura, which is another name known to Jamaican politics.
But Rich himself spent the rest of the nineties living in considerable luxury in Swiss exile, but constantly dodging the forces of US law enforcement. The head of the US Marshals Service once said plaintively: "Rich planned his movements very well. We missed him by a few hours in England, by a day or two in Jamaica, and we tried to get him in Germany, but he was very good at avoiding us."
The legendary commodities trader Marc Rich died in June this year. And this final court case, by the company that he founded, marks the end of an era for Jamaica and its bauxite alumina industry.




Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...#ixzz2beO8pCeL

[blugiant]

Marc Rich
Marc Rich, king of commodities, died on June 26th, aged 78

A NEW employee once asked Marc Rich for advice on trading. He expected, perhaps, “Buy low, sell high”, or “Think long-term”. Or perhaps, given Mr Rich’s habit of going to the office at daybreak, “Up with the lark”. Instead, Mr Rich picked up a knife and ran a finger across the edge. “As a trader you often walk on the blade,” he said softly. “Be careful and don’t step off.”

Few walked it more skilfully than Mr Rich. Obsessively, he scanned the globe to see crises coming, wars brewing, shortages looming. He bought before anyone else did, and was first there when countries began to look round for oil or zinc or nickel. After the Korean war, as a mere junior trader at Philipp Brothers in New York, he created a market in mercury, which the army needed for batteries. The price soared. From the late 1960s, somehow anticipating the Arab oil-export embargo, he began to create a spot market for oil. Previously, all crude was tied up by the big companies in inelastic long-term contracts. Starting in Tunisia, Mr Rich began to buy and sell it for immediate delivery, like any other commodity. When the embargo bit after 1973 he was swimming in oil when the majors were struggling, and was able to sell it at a mark-up of as much as $14 a barrel. Some called that profiteering. Mr Rich called it a service charge. He could have demanded more, but that would have been “like taking candy from a baby”.

A free agent in this exhilarating new market, he went from strength to strength. Turning on his insistent, feline charm, he sought out buyers and sellers while his partner Pinky Green arranged shipping. It was a winning combination, forged at Philipp Brothers but soon outgrowing it. In 1974 the two of them, peeved that their bonuses were still so small, left to form Marc Rich + Co. The main office was in Zug in safe, secret Switzerland, no questions asked.

From there, with cat-like tread, Mr Rich found his way round any political or moral obstacle. He sold Soviet oil to apartheid South Africa, despite a UN embargo, and between 1979 and 1994 made profits of around $2 billion there. He sent Soviet and Venezuelan oil to Cuba in exchange for sugar, ignoring America’s ban on trade. He sold on the global market surplus Iranian oil that had flowed to Israel down a secret pipeline, and kept the arrangement going seamlessly despite the Iranian revolution of 1979, another embargo, and the American hostage crisis. The Iranians respected their contracts, he explained. They could not sell their oil, so he bought and sold it for them, using shell companies wherever necessary. Keeping well below the radar, as he always did, he was soon the world’s largest independent oil-trader, with a turnover in 1980 of $15 billion.

Then he stepped off the knife-blade. In 1980-81 he violated America’s domestic oil-price controls by relabelling Texas crude from old fields as new-found, jacking up the price by as much as 400%. He made profits of $105m and shipped them abroad, avoiding taxes of $48m. Once federal prosecutors were after him for that, they charged him with 64 other crimes, including racketeering and “trading with the enemy”. In 1983 he fled to Switzerland with his family, having also tried to spirit away two trunks of subpoenaed business papers.

The outsider

Thereafter he became a fugitive, a star of the FBI’s most-wanted list. He remained—until 1994, when he sold his stake and his company became the vast, tentacular Glencore—the world’s biggest trader of metals and minerals, while darting between Spain, Switzerland and Israel, a citizen of all three. In Marbella or St Moritz, beside a $9.5m swimming pool or among his Braques and Picassos, with a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion, he reconciled himself to exile. His father died in America; he had to say kaddish down the telephone. You cry a little, you move on.

In his own mind he was shy, modest and innocent of everything. American embargoes, he maintained, did not apply to companies based in Switzerland. Bribes, such as the $1m he gave to Nigeria’s transport minister, were paid “in order to be able to do business at the same price as other people were willing to do the business”. Getting round the price controls on oil from old fields was something many of the oil majors had done, too; but only he was faced with criminal prosecution for it.

Why? Perhaps, he mused, because he was Jewish, always the outsider: the refugee boy from Belgium who changed schools so often that he had no friends and hardly talked to anyone. Perhaps because he loved Israel more than America, showering it with money for good causes, helping to airlift Jews from Ethiopia and Yemen, and giving Mossad’s agents contacts in Iran. Or perhaps just because he was making an awful lot of money. He always saw profit where others didn’t care, or dare, to look; he got that from his father, who had started in business by peddling round Antwerp pieces of fabric and scrap metal that factories had thrown away.

In 2001 Bill Clinton pardoned him, his hand pushed by the Israeli prime minister, the king of Spain, an ex-head of Mossad and Mr Rich’s ex-wife Denise, who had given generously to the Clinton library and to Democratic campaigns. The president later regretted his action, calling it “terrible politics”. Mr Rich, oblivious to politics, would have called it good business.

Correction: Mr Rich created a market for mercury after the Korean war, not before it, as this article originally claimed. This was corrected on July 9th 2013.

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21580438-marc-rich-king-commodities-died-june-26th-aged-78-marc-rich

[Tuff Gong]

She hypocrite supreme........done by the same Comrades she is an apologist for!
The only reason she brought it up is because it started under Eddie.

[blugiant]

She hypocrite supreme........done by the same Comrades she is an apologist for!
The only reason she brought it up is because it started under Eddie.

so diss bout blaminn wan parsan raddar dan bunn fiyah pon awl aff dem fe runninn da same racket