$oros conqueers the Ukraine

Author: F. William Engdahl

An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale of Corruption
Column: Economics
Region: Ukraine in the world
Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.
What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.
In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked “Confidential” Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, “A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,” the memo from Soros calls for steps to “restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.” To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that “General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”
Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.
Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does business in Poland.
Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.
Naked asset grab
In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist in: “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement.”
He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU’s “AAA” top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.
Whose risk would the EU insure?
Soros details, “I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment destination.” Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, “The investments will be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of personal gain. “
For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s “shock therapy” messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a “free market” at once, rather than gradually.
The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to “protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.”
Naftogaz the target
The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, “The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…”
In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy: “I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, ‘big bang’ type of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than gradually…Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden subsidies…”
Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization “big bang.”
The Puppet-Master?
The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.
Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.
Soros shapes ‘New Ukraine’
Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros’ IRF money is behind creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature. Soros writes, “The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged. The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…”
Soros’ NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate to push through “reforms,” with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can hardly afford.
In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a “big bank” privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, “You are fortunate to have appointed three ‘new Ukrainian’ ministers and several natives (sic) who are committed to this approach.”
Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015 paper says that, “It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country.” That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee investment fund.
While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine’s constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he complains, “The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency.”
Soros suggests that he intends to create this “visible demonstration” through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature.
George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt laying a subtle role.
George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”
This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February 2014 US coup d’etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of “public-private-partnership.” Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, “George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015.”
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/12/an-american-oligarch-s-dirty-tale-of-corruption/
Soros as Kiev’s Central Banker and Ridiculous US Laws
Column: Economics
Region: Ukraine in the world
If it comes to pass, and it cannot unfortunately be ruled out, recent media rumors say that naturalized US billionaire hedge fund speculator and philosopher, George Soros, a very weary-looking 84-year-old who continues to try to weaken the Russian economy as he did back in 1998, might become the head of the Ukrainian National Bank in Kiev. Soros as head of any central bank in my view is putting the old fox to guard the hen-house. That would complete a quartet of foreign technocrats that clearly would do no good to the shattered real economy of Ukraine nor to peace in the world.
So far it is a report carried only by APA, the Azeri press agency in Baku. They cite a report carried Ukraine’s Channel 112. That report cited sources in the Ukraine parliament, the Verkhovna Rada and people around Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko.
Billionaire speculator Soros is no stranger to Ukraine. In a personal interview with US TV propaganda channel CNN. Soros declared, “I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since and played an important part in events now.” That interview was made after the US State Department February 21, 2014 coup d’Etat.
Soros, via his network of “tax free charitable” foundations has worked with US Government-funded NGOs such as USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (now doing work formerly assigned to the CIA), the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Freedom House, and the Albert Einstein Institute for training in “nonviolence as a weapon of warfare.”
Whether the good Mr. Soros will bring his financial alchemy to Kiev and try to earn the new Finance Minister billions of euros for their strained budget is not at all clear. There is reportedly a list of five candidates including Soros. It reportedly includes former IMF head Dominique Straus-Kahn and at least one person from the US Federal Reserve.
Ukraine: Washington’s New Colony
The naming of Soros or another foreign banker to head the central bank of Ukraine at this point would fit nicely into what emerges as Washington’s strategy to simply run the country–into the ground at that—by proxies. Earlier this month, US State Department favorite Ukraine President Petr Poroschenko engaged in constitutionally dubious manipulations, holding a secret ceremony hours before a Ukraine Parliament vote, to make three now Kiev government ministers from foreign countries into Ukrainian citizens.
The three were Finance Minister Natalia A. Jaresko, a then-US citizen who worked for the US State Department in Ukraine and recently as investment banker for funds of USAID. As Economics Minister sits a Lithuanian investment banker who managed a Swedish investment fund for Ukraine, Aivras Abromavicius. And the new Health Minister is US-tied national of neighboring Georgia, Alexander Kvitashvili whose wife reportedly worked with the CIA.
And New US Sanctions…
The US President Obama just signed into law a new round of economic sanctions against Russia. The US President on December 18 signed into law HR 5859, euphemistically titled, Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014 113th Congress. A more honest title would be, An Act of 2014 to Provoke War with Russia.
The new law calls for “economic sanctions, diplomacy, assistance for the people of Ukraine, and the provision of military capabilities to the Government of Ukraine that will enhance the ability of that Government to defend itself and to restore its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of unlawful actions by the Government of the Russian Federation.”
The new US law gives the US President a dangerous new weapon. If he deems Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant that supplies much of the EU as well as Ukraine, is “withholding” significant natural gas from NATO countries, or from Ukraine, Georgia, or Moldova, he can order draconian new sanctions on Gazprom, something carefully avoided by Washington until now. That means all the CIA or neo-cons running US State Department Ukraine policy need do is convince Kiev to claim Russia is withholding gas or refuse to pay Gazprom, a sword of Damocles over the Russian gas supplier.
Then the new US law, HR 5859, SEC. 9. SUPPORT FOR RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS, specifies that the Secretary of State shall, “directly or through non-governmental or international organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the National Endowment for Democracy, and related organizations–(1) improve democratic governance, transparency, accountability, rule of law, and anti-corruption efforts in the Russian Federation; strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the Russian Federation; (3) expand uncensored Internet access in the Russian Federation…”
This remarkable part of the new law gives open support to a new attempt at a CIA-State Department Color Revolution to topple Putin, using the US Congress and Soros Foundation-financed National Endowment for Democracy, the same cast of suspects who ran the Euro-Maidan Color Revolution a year ago in Kiev. If it reads like a brazen attempt to trample Russian sovereignty and impose a Washington version of “democracy” in another country, one might ask, what bloody right do Washington Congressmen and Presidents have to impose anything on anyone, let alone its own citizens?
To underscore the absurdity of Washington neo-cons and their moral arrogance in deciding where and how they can impose “democracy,” some in the Russian Duma, with characteristic Russian droll humor, apparently made a tit-for-tat mirror image of HR5859. Imagine, as a normal American citizen, how you would feel if the following were to become operational:
United States of America Freedom Support Act of 2014
Sixth Duma of the Russian Federation
AT THE TWENTY-FIRST SESSION
An Act:
To provide assistance for the democratic development of the United States of America and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Representatives of the State Duma and the Federation Council of the Russian Federation assembled in the Federation Assembly…
Sec. 9. SUPPORT FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS.
(a) In General.–The Minister of Foreign Affairs, directly or through nongovernmental or international organizations, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the EURASIA HERITAGE FOUNDATION, and related organizations—
(1) improve democratic governance, transparency, accountability, rule of law, and anti-corruption efforts in the United States;
(2) strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the United States;
(3) expand free and unmonitored Internet access in the United States; and
(4) expand free and unfettered access to independent media of all kinds in the United States, including through increasing Russian Government-supported broadcasting activities.
The Russian spoof merely underscores how ridiculous US foreign policy has become. Little wonder that the USA today enjoys so little respect around the world. Its elected politicians are simply ridiculous.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook