Reply #236: bribes is part of it

[Snazzy]

Although those are often on the books on the bribing end, remarkably enough. The receiving dictator needs to hide that (launder that) from his people. Likewise and bigger, siphoning off the profits creates some need for cleansing.

That's what Equatorial Guinea got caught doing at Riggs. Money in from oil co's, not reported back to the country, converted into real estate here and elsewhere.

One thing our domestic money laundering bankers are resisting are regs about reporting foreigner's holdings back to their countries--even though the IRS has increased demands of foreign countries to report back on US citizens. Florida could lose billions upon billions in of deposits if that reporting were to start. Fairly certain I read that it was Jeb working to make sure that doesn't happen.

Although the bribes are small in comparison to the enormous movement of money under various tables (as you pointed out elsewhere in this thread)--they are priming the pump for the whole operation. What's getting Cheney/Halliburtron in the spotlight is not that they offered bribes (that's a gray area in being criminal in terms of a US company) but that they were trading with banned countries. So we get to shine some light on that gray area for a change, see how it works.

The drug trade is cash, $100 bills floating all over the place. That's certainly different than the oil money (except maybe on some bribes and paying mercs).

I mainly got caught up just reading some of the linked DU threads you had (and linked thread from there) so far. We have some of the best info here, really. Thing is so damned complicated--still need to make a chart or a timeline or something. Some of threads had stuff in them I was researching a couple of months back which I had forgotten about (names) in this seemingly never ending scandal overload. Yeah, November.

Back at, probably in Thread #5, late today!