This is HUGE, as if Kazakhstan was hiring GHWBush. Big news.
The US-Anglo Alliance has bought themselves a dictator who is sitting on top of lots of the Caspian Sea oil and gas that 9/11 was meant to help them get.
Kazakhstan's dictator, Mr. Nazarbayev, has personally visited the Bush compound in Maine, Tony Blair, and the Queen of England while America's youth were yucking it up over Borat's antics as a 'Kazakhstan journalist.'
BAE is sort of like the UK's Carlyle Group, an enormous military-industrial monster that comprises a large part of the British government.
When someone wrote that maybe I was right about Borat being used as a psy-op in another thread on this news, Prof Pan made this bizarrely misleading comment about me, "he's hijacking attention away from the actual story." Wha? Yeah...right.
Some folks just can't admit when they are wrong.
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=9650
>great additional info on BAE in this other thread<
(Hey, PP. I started this here thread about oil geopolitics three weeks ago while others were still all about Borat. You know it, too, PP.)
news source-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1963338,00.html
Monday December 4, 2006
The Guardian
Sir Richard Evans, former chairman of Britain's biggest arms company, BAE Systems, has gone to work for the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Sir Richard is to become chairman of Samruk, the oil and gas-rich central Asian country's state holding company. It was formed earlier this year to control a collection of state enterprises, many of which are said to be linked to the Nazarbayev family. They include KazMunaiGas; Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (railways); Kazakhtelekom; KEGOC (Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company), and Kazpost (postal services).
It is intended to float some, or all, of the companies in London. The potential flotation of KazMunaiGas was flagged in September when the oil and gas group said it wanted to raise more than £1bn by selling 40% of its exploration and production arm. It is chaired by Mr Nazarbayev's son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, who was appointed six months ago. The Kazakh embassy in London says it is also planning to float the airline, Air Astana, which was launched as a joint venture with BAE Systems when Sir Richard was chairman.
A Kazakh official said: "The key reason behind the establishment of Samruk is to improve asset management, corporate governance and transparency of the national companies and their budgets."
Sir Richard is one of a string of leading British businessmen recruited in recent months to improve the prospects of a successful London stock market flotation for central Asian and Russian firms.
Many institutional investors, including CIS, Hermes and F&C Asset Management, are wary of the flood of companies from Russia, former Soviet states and eastern Europe joining the London Stock Exchange, believing that their corporate governance standards are inadequate. Less than three months ago, Kazakhmys, the FTSE-listed Kazakh copper mining group, announced the resignation of its chief executive, YK Cha, and broke governance guidelines by handing his duties to the chairman, Vladimir Kim. Kazakhmys was also unable to guarantee that Mr Cha would not dump his 16% stake in the group, which would hit the share price.
Sir Richard held talks with Mr Nazarbayev when he came to London on a three-day visit last month.
Mr Nazarbayev also had lunch with Tony Blair and met the Queen. Sir Richard, who still works as a consultant to BAE, was the architect of the continuing Al-Yamamah arms deals with Saudi Arabia, and also signed off on confidential agency deals with other countries, which are being probed in the wide-ranging Serious Fraud Office inquiry into corruption allegations.
Shortly after he stepped aside as BAE chairman, Sir Richard was interviewed at length by the SFO at the end of 2005. Sir Richard and BAE deny any wrongdoing, and the current chairman, Mike Turner, made public threats last week that a £6bn Saudi contract to buy Typhoon aircraft could be derailed if SFO inquiries into Swiss bank accounts were not curtailed.
Mr Nazarbayev, too, has faced problems with corruption inquiries.
The trial in New York is scheduled to start in January of the oil broker James Giffen, who is accused by federal prosecutors of secretly channelling $84m (£42m) in payments from Mobil Oil - as it was then called - and other companies, to accounts controlled by the president and former prime minister, Nurlan Balgimbaev. The payments were made to Leichtenstein trusts with Swiss bank accounts, prosecutors say.
Mr Giffen's defence is that he was authorised by the CIA to make the payments. He told prosecutors that he followed the president's instructions and "arranged for the creation of a number of these accounts". He added that "the president wanted the accounts and the movement of money to them to be kept secret".
The Kazakh government - which Transparency International ranked 122nd out of the 146 nations in its 2004 corruption perceptions index - denies the allegations. It claims that Mr Nazarbayev, who has not been charged, instructed his ministers in 1996 to route funds to Switzerland as a safeguard in case of an economic collapse.