Athens: Israeli defense minister says ISIS funded with ‘Turkish money’

January 26, 2016 By administrator

Israel’s defense minister has alleged that the Islamic State terror group has long been funded with “Turkish money.”

“As you know, Daesh (Islamic State, previously ISIS/ISIL) enjoyed Turkish money for oil for a very, very long period of time. I hope that it will be ended,” Moshe Yaalon told reporters in Athens on Tuesday after meeting his Greek counterpart, Panos Kammenos, Reuters reports.

“It’s up to Turkey, the Turkish government, the Turkish leadership, to decide whether they want to be part of any kind of cooperation to fight terrorism. This is not the case so far,” he said.

Earlier, Russia had accused Turkey of shady dealings with ISIS. In December, the Russian Defense Ministry released maps and satellite images it said proved that Turkey was the main consumer of oil smuggled out of Syria and Iraq by the terrorists. The ministry also claimed that the Turkish president and his family were involved in the criminal dealings.

Iran has also said it was in possession of photographic and video evidence of ISIS oil entering Turkey in trucks.

In December, Syria’s envoy to the UN Bashar al-Ja’afari also accused Turkey of supporting terrorist groups. The diplomat appealed to the UN, urging it to end Ankara’s “violations and crimes.”

Turkey has denied the accusations, while the United States last month rejected Russia’s claims that the Turkish leadership was linked to ISIS oil smuggling.

Turkey has “permitted jihadists to move from Europe to Syria and Iraq and back, as part of Daesh’s terrorist network, and I hope this will stop, too,” Yaalon added, according to a transcript of the Israeli minister’s comments provided by the Greek Defense Ministry.

The #ArmenianGenocide Blood Money Trail: Possibly the Greatest State Theft in History

August 19, 2015 By administrator

By Len Wicks,

On 24 April 1915, Ottoman Turks arrested and later murdered more than 250 Armenian leaders in Constantinople (Istanbul).
On 16 May 1915 an Ottoman law was enacted to allow the confiscation (theft) of ‘abandoned’ Armenian property of genocide victims.
On 24 July 1915, Ottoman policy: half the stolen Armenian money to go to the government’s Central Committee, and the other half to go to those killing Armenians – mainly criminals called chetti who had been released from prison and armed by the government.

1. Western Armenia: six million Turkish gold pounds plus physical property (20,545 buildings, 2,549 religious sites and 1,082 km2 of land), cash, bank deposits and jewellery were stolen from about 1.5 million unarmed Armenians murdered by Turks and Kurds.
2. Constantinople: during 1915-1916 all stolen Armenian money was transferred by order to the State Treasury at Constantinople.
3. Berlin: five million Turkish gold pounds of Armenian assets was funnelled to the Reichsbank in 1916 in exchange for promissory notes (in 2006, a lawsuit was filed against Deutsche and Dresdner banks, asserting profiteering from the atrocities). On 29 October 1918, Dr. Nazim Bey took 65,000 Turkish gold pounds and 600,000 Turkish gold pounds worth of jewellery, fleeing to Germany.
4. London/Paris: During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Armenian delegation assessed USD3.7 billion of losses (US$50 billion+ today, compared to Nazi bank theft of US$5.6 billion) just by the Armenian Church. Instead of returning the Armenian wealth, Britain and France sold it to the United States via J.P. Morgan Bank in Paris to New York, for U. S. Treasury Certificates.
5. New York: in 1918, the Turkish government attempted to get the money from 2,400 New York Life insurance policies of Armenians it had killed, arguing that there were no identifiable heirs to the policy holders, but did not succeed.
6. Incirlik: the United States spends billions supporting a US Air Force Base in SE Turkey, which Turkey threatens access to if the USA recognises the Armenian Genocide

(http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/05/turkey-us-vote-armenian-genocide).
http://originsdiscovery.com

Turkey angered as Austria bans foreign money for Muslim groups

February 26, 2015 By administrator

A sign leading to the Islamic Center mosque, (Photo: Reuters)

Austria’s parliament passed a law on Wednesday that seeks to regulate how Islam is administered, singling out its large Muslim minority for treatment not applied to any other religious group.

The “Law on Islam” bans foreign funding for Islamic organizations and requires any group claiming to represent Austrian Muslims to submit and use a standardized German translation of the Quran. report Zaman

The law met with little opposition from the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population, was backed by Austria’s Catholic bishops and was grudgingly accepted by the main Muslim organization. But it upset Turkey’s state religious establishment.

“We want an Islam of the Austrian kind, and not one that is dominated by other countries,” said Sebastian Kurz, the 28-year-old conservative foreign minister –formally the minister for foreign affairs and integration — who is easily Austria’s most popular politician.

Austria’s half a million Muslims make up about 6 percent of the population and are overwhelmingly the families of Turkish migrant workers. Many of their imams are sent and financed by Turkey’s state Religious Affairs Directorate, the Diyanet.

Mehmet Görmez, head of the Diyanet, said before the law was passed that “with this draft legislation, religious freedoms in Austria will have fallen back a hundred years.”

Austria’s biggest Islamic organization, IGGiO, accepted the law, but its youth arm opposed it, as did the Turkish-financed Turkish-Islamic Union in Austria (ATIB), which runs many mosques and has vowed to challenge the bill in the Constitutional Court.

Bloomberg-Business: Turkey’s $7.9 Billion Mystery Money That’s Simply Vanished

January 29, 2015 By administrator

No one knows where this money is coming from?

by Onur Ant

Something bizarre is happening on Turkey’s accounting books, and nobody’s quite sure why.

Turkey attracted $7.9 billion of income from unexplained sources during the first eight months of 2014, compared to an outflow of $90 million during the same period a year ago, according to the central bank data. In the three months that followed, $5.6 billion of that left the country.

Unexplained flows of foreign funds into and out of the economy — marked as “net errors and omissions” in Turkey’s Balance of Payments report — showed violent swings during the first 11 months of 2014. Outflows in November were estimated to be $3.46 billion, the biggest monthly exodus in more than 16 years, according to central bank data.

Massive amounts of mysterious inflows or outflows raises doubts about Turkey’s ability to finance its current-account deficit, which the government has called the economy’s “Achilles Heel.”

Note that it’s not uncommon for countries to have “net errors and omissions” in their balance of payments sheets. What makes Turkey’s “puzzling” is how big these flows are as a ratio to the country’s current account deficit, according to Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an emerging markets strategist at Swissquote Bank SA in Geneva.

This shortfall in what comes into the country versus what leaves the country, which is the broadest measure of trade in goods and services, has been a huge headache for Turkey. It approached 10 percent of Turkey’s gross domestic product in 2011, prompting policy makers to take action to get Turkey’s consumers to buy fewer imported goods.

The gap matters because economists use that to gauge how vulnerable Turkey’s economy is to sudden changes in global financial markets. And while fresh capital — any capital — helps in a country that desperately needs it, the fact that no one knows where some of that is coming from makes it especially difficult to predict when it will disappear. That’s exactly what happened in the latter months of 2014.

“There is no way to predict what is going to happen to these flows in 2015,” Mehmet Besimoglu, chief economist at Oyak Menkul Degerler, said by phone from Istanbul.

Besimoglu has his theories about the source of money and why it leaves. Inflows might be linked to capital flight from Iraq and Syria, where the advance of the Islamic State has pushed more than around 1.5 million people across the border to Turkey. Outflows tend to take place during periods of lira appreciation, he said.

One sea change on the horizon is an eventual normalization of monetary policy, aka interest-rate increases, in the U.S. Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan has repeatedly said U.S. rate increases is the single most important threat to Turkish economy this year. Higher rates in the world’s largest economy could lead to a shift in investors’ appetite for assets in emerging markets including Turkey, which rely on foreign capital to finance their current-account deficits.

Morgan Stanley last year listed Turkey in what it calls the “Fragile Five” economies. These countries are most vulnerable to a withdrawal of the foreign investment needed to finance their shortfall in capital coming in versus capital going out. South Africa, Indonesia, India and Brazil are the other four.

Mysterious inflows were higher than outflows in 22 out of the last 29 years that the central bank has keep records of, reducing the need for financing through official sources.

Report finds more than $35 bln flew out of Turkey illicitly in past 10 years

January 17, 2015 By administrator

Turkish police expose counterfeit lira banknotes seized following a terrorism financing operation last year in İstanbul. Turkey remains on FATF’s gray list for terrorism financing and money laundering. (Photo: Today’s Zaman)

A total amount of $35.6 billion flew out of Turkey illicitly in the past ten years, according to the latest report by a Washington-based advocacy organization which aims to curtail global illicit financial flows

The December 2014 report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI) titled “Illicit Financial Flows from the Developing World: 2003-2012,” found that developing and emerging economies lost US$6.6 trillion in illicit financial flows from 2003 through 2012, with illicit outflows increasing at an staggering average rate of 9.4 percent per year—roughly twice as fast as global GDP.

According to the report, Turkey ranked 26th in the list of countries with largest average illicit financial flows with $3.5 billion having flown out of the country on average per year between 2003 and 2012.
China ranked first in the list with $125.2 billion having flown out of the country between 2003 and 2012.

The report found that while $1.9 flew out of Turkey illicitly in 2003, the amount increased to $3.4 in 2007 and to $10.7 billion in 2011.
According to the report’s primary findings, $991.2 billion flowed illicitly out of developing and emerging economies in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. The illegal capital outflows stem from crime, corruption, tax evasion, and other illicit activity.
The report found that “the fraudulent misinvoicing of trade transactions was revealed to be the largest component of illicit financial flows from developing countries, accounting for 77.8 percent of all illicit flows—highlighting that any effort to significantly curtail illicit financial flows must address trade misinvoicing.”

GFI is a non-profit, research and advocacy organization which conducts research on national and multilateral policies, safeguards, and agreements aimed at curtailing illicit financial flows and enhancing global development and security.

UK Investors pull $27bn out of UK in one month amid fears of Scotland’s exit – report

September 14, 2014 By administrator

Almost $27 billion of financial assets were pulled out of Britain in August in the run up to Scotland’s vote on independence, according to a new report by a London-based consultancy comparing the capital outflow to the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.

The financial outflow of 16.8 billion pounds ($27 billion) in August was the biggest since the white heat of the 2008 financial crisis when the US bank Lehman Brothers went bust, according to a CrossBorderCapital report compiled by the consultancy and released on Friday.

“Sterling outflows have been an issue since the end of June, but they really gathered pace in August and now look like intensifying again with the possibility of Scottish independence coming to the front of investors’ minds,” said Michael Howell, the managing director of the CrossBorder Capital.

The consultancy pointed out that the figures also dwarfed the selling of UK assets around the 2010 general election, afrer which there were several days of uncertainty over who would form the government.

Howell added that UK outflow was more than double the combined outflow from Germany and Australia and only Japan is currently seeing a faster rate of capital outflow from the country. This year UK has experienced a net 127 billion pound outflow ($206bn), while in 2013 a net 39 billion pounds ($63bn) flowed into the nation’s economy, he added.

The daily equity flow data pointed to “some of the largest UK equity selling on record, demonstrating investor concerns ahead of the Scottish referendum next week,” said Morgan Stanley on Friday.

Scotland is to vote in a referendum on its independence from Britain on Thursday, with opinion polls displaying a narrow gap between the pro-independence campaigners and those against the exit from the union. The latest ICM/Sunday Telegraph poll showed the biggest ‘Yes’ share of the referendum campaign, with 54 percent reporting an intention to vote ‘yes’ and 46 percent ‘no’.

The new liquidity report comes as the world’s leading investment banks warned of the financial folly Scotland would face if it votes for leaving the 307 year union with the UK.

On Friday, Deutsche Bank issued a paper criticizing independence and saying that it would be one of the greatest historic mistakes ever made.

“A ‘yes’ vote for Scottish independence on Thursday would go down in history as a political and economic mistake as large as Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failure of the Federal Reserve to provide sufficient liquidity to the US banking system, which we now know brought on the Great Depression,” said Chief economist David Folkerts-Landau.

Deutsche Bank described the desire for independence as ‘incomprehensible’ saying it will entail negative consequences.

Three retail giants joined the debate in a letter to the Scottish Daily Record newspaper on Friday. Sir Ian Cheshire, of B&Q-owner Kingfisher, Marc Bolland, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, and James Timpson, of cobbler and key-cutter Timpson agreed that consumers north of the border will suffer from the country’s exit

“We are concerned about the greater complexity of trading across a national border coupled with the uncertainty over big issues such as the single currency and membership of the EU,” the joint letter read.

“Within our group there is first-hand experience of trading across national borders – in France, Ireland and across the world. Our experience is that it always leads to more red tape and higher costs and we feel it is important to share this experience.”

“We know that running a separate pricing system in Scotland will mean taking the difficult decision as to whether or not to pass on the increased costs through higher prices to Scottish consumers.”