Reply #50: Corp McPravda missed this one, too: Cheney laundered bribe money.

[Octafish]

SWISS INVESTIGATION INTO BUSH/CHENEY INVOLVEMENT IN OIL COMPANY BRIBES TO KAZAKHSTAN

The GOP presidential ticket may be fending off questions from reporters concerning a Swiss investigation linking George W. Bush and Dick Cheny to big oil's bribes and pay-offs to foreign interests.

by Martin Mann, August 14, 2000

Gov. George W. Bush and Richard Cheny, the Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates, known in Washington as the "oil ticket" for their intimate connections to the petroleum industry, may face worse corruption scandals in coming months than the lewd, mendacious and cash-hungry Clinton administration ever did. The Spotlight has learned from European and U.S. investigative sources.

As Cheney, a millionaire petroleum executive who served as defense secretary in the administration of George Bus, the candidate's father, rose to accept the vice-presidential nomination from the cheering Republican convention in Philadelphia, Swiss prosecutors quietly moved to impound over $130 million in allegedly laundered funds deposited in Swiss banks.

According to preliminary findings of the Swiss inquiry, the frozen funds represent under-the-table payoffs slipped to the top government officials of Kazakhstan by giant U.S. petroleum companies seeking favored access to that oil-rich country, a former Soviet province that attained independence after the collapse of Communism.

Advised by Swiss authorities that the suspect accounts -- more than $85 million found hidden in private numbered accounts controlled by Kazakh President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in a single Geneva bank, Banque Pictet -- may violate the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, federal authorities in New York launched an investigation of their own.

The U.S. probe quickly focused on James H. Giffen, head of the Mercator Corporation, known as an influential American financial advisor to Nazarbayev.

Last month, the Justice Department sent Swiss chief prosecutor Daniel Devaud a confidential memorandum naming Giffen and his public-relations company as targets of a formal federal criminal investigation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/swiss.html

Gee. No wonder Cheney doesn't like France. Many there still have integrity.

And speaking of Presstitutes, imagine how far we'd've gotten had the Fourth Branch gotten off its drunken duffs the past five years? Twenty years? Forty-one years?