Shirley Porter's 'assets frozen': Blair's Enron nightmare begins

Widely reported in the UK media, the alleged UK and offshore assets of former Westminster Council chief Dame Shirley Porter - a great crony and political contemporary of Margaret Thatcher - were last night frozen by the Council in its bid to recoup some £37m of penalty surcharges that were imposed on her following the 1980s "homes for votes" scandal whereby potential Tory voters were allowed to buy local authority housing stock well under commercial market rates:

For UK journalists specialising in Arab banks and financial institutions of the 1970s and 80s - who testified before Bob Morgenthau's investigative comittee that was instrumental in closing down the New York operations of BCCI - this is very welcome news as it heralds the unravelling of UK-centred money laundering scams going back some thirty years that lead directly to Ken Lay's doorstep and the subsequent massive black hole in Enron's company accounts that forced the company's bankruptcy.

BBC News reports on the Porter story thus:



Dame Shirley's 'assets frozen'

Assets worth millions of pounds said to be controlled by Dame Shirley Porter have been frozen under court orders secured by Westminster Council. Dame Shirley, the council's former leader, owes Westminster £37m in surcharges following the "homes for votes" scandal in the 1980s. The council says it has made a significant breakthrough in its attempt to recover the shortfall owed to local taxpayers. It says assets - understood to be worth about £30m - have been frozen in Guernsey, but Dame Shirley says she has no connection with the money.
She said the council's investigators had sought to involve off-shore trusts whose principal beneficiaries had no connection to the case.

The council has argued the trusts are a sham designed to disguise her control over the family fortune and therefore is money owed to the council for her financial misconduct. The council also says a further order has been granted to freeze Dame Shirley's assets alleged to be held by her son John Porter. It says this is a step forward but that getting hold of the money will depend upon successful enforcement action.

In the 1990s, the district auditor found Dame Shirley guilty of squandering millions of pounds by unlawfully selling off council flats on the cheap, simply to boost the number of Tory voters. She was cleared by the Court of Appeal in 1998, but in 2001, the House of Lords ruled she did have to pay back the money she claimed she did not have. The Tesco heiress, who now lives in Israel, was once said to be the 20th richest woman in Europe with an estimated fortune of £60m, but last year when she was ordered by a court to disclose her assets, she listed just £300,000 worth.

Westminster, which has spent about £1m pursuing the heiress, said it had decided to ask various courts to lift gagging orders which had previously prevented details of its legal actions being publicised. Colin Wilson, head of legal services at Westminster Council, said the council had been engaged in some "very intense activity" over recent months. "We have now made substantial progress. In fact we have obtained disclosure orders against 14 different companies and individuals in the UK, in Guernsey and in the British Virgin Isles, " he told BBC London. These orders require respondents to disclose information to the council about Dame Shirley's past and present wealth. "We have gained a substantial amount of information from those disclosures and in addition, we have frozen in bank accounts many millions of pounds."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3241821.stm



Those who are familiar with the 20 year old saga of the "14 different companies and individuals in the UK, in Guernsey and in the British Virgin Islands" know that these relate to assets that were defrauded/embezzled from one of the principal witnesses against the murderer of a woman accomplice of London-based BCCI administrative headquarters general manager John Hillbery. The woman was an estate agent who was part of a massive property theft/money laundering scam. Since mid 1986 the UK police treated her 'disappearance' as a missing persons enquiry and the matter was widely reported in the UK press as pointing to a suspect already in jail for the brutal murders of other British women. Earlier this year a private property lawsuit judge heard evidence from the witness whose family had been hounded with death threats and acts of harassment for the last 17 years. The alleged perpetrator exposed in the UK press, although connected peripherally, is not the main suspect.

A media blackout has ensured that none of the original police evidence, which has been thoroughly investigated and independently corroborated, every reached the limelight. The background of the case shows that in today's values, some $350 million of UK property assets were laundered out of the UK via offshore tax havens and directly into the coffers of Ken Lay and his gang. These assets were subsequently recovered in a series of complex lawsuits in the US and UK. They left a huge hole in the Enron structure, which was gradually papered over with 'creative accounting' and all the tricks of the trade that have been so widely discussed in the media since the Enron crash. The private lawsuit papers have yet to be placed in the public domain and form the background to continuing police investigations into fraud, embezzelment and money laundering.

Dame Shirley Porter and her son John Porter are directly connected with the gang who masterminded this heist. The frozen assets referred to in the BBC story are connected to the $350 million haul. Some are in the form of UK property that was 'given' to witnesses who were paid off to discredit the evidence of the person testifying against the estate agent's murder and links to BCCI. Others are held in trust for partners of the actual murderer, who is a former business associate of Porter's son John. Both he and the estate agent's murderer were aware that she had alleged that the ownership documents of the $350 million portfolio had been forged in the early 1980s 'by Cherie Booth and her accomplices', pointing the finger at Booth and Blair's legal chambers colleague Lord Charles Falconer, now the UK's Lord Chancellor.

This allegation was subsequently repeated in the UK high court by an economist specialising in Middle East business, who used the pseudonym of Jonathan Becker. He was investigated in the US with cocaine money laundering offences centred on property he owned in Key West, Florida that were handled by - inter alia - the convicted ex-FBI traitor Bob Hanssen. Becker was also busted in the UK in the mid-1990s under a media blackout deal, for a series of massive embezzlements and money laundering ops. He threatened to expose Booth's/Falconer's involvement in the $350 million fraud that ended up in Lay's coffers. He died soon after of an AIDS related condition before the case could be conculded.

Becker was found to be a son of former Stasi spy chief Marcus Wolf and a UK accomplice of ex-CIA traitor Aldric Ames. Those Middle East journalists who worked in the same publishers as he did in the late 1970s and 1980s have testified both to the Morgenthau BCCI committee as well as to UK prosecutors who have handled this and related cases. Their evidence has been kept out of the public domain to protect their families.

No apologies for MY reference to Enron.

If anything this is more 'Whitewater' than Enron.

Firstly - "Dame" Shirley Porter is a serial liar, convicted criminal, and fantisist who is trying to keep herself out of bankruptcy and trying to avoid paying massive surcharges relating to her electoral fraud from years ago. Go back and read all the back issues of Private Eye and the Guardian for the 'skinny' on all her lies and dirty tricks - typical Tory really :-)

If anyone wants to know what the UK was like under Thatcher and the Tories - just go and look at the electoral fraud "Dame" Porter conducted in Westminster.

It was one of the most (of out many) scandalous incidents in electoral fraud in the 20th century. (Not quite our 'Florida' as it was only at a local government level - but still, maybe Porter has Republican friends and gave them some advice?!...)

Oh - and TiB - there's ample opportunity here to say Tory - oh that's Tony :-)

But I see nothing about allegations surrounding Tony Blair or Cherie Booth - only that lowlife Tory, "Dame" Porter...

Without a source I'm not inclined to believe the allegations. OK I know part of the 'story' is that there is a cover-up.

Same thing was alleged about Whitewater. Having read the "Clinton Wars" I'm seeing vast RW conspiracies in all the bushes... !

The Enron stuff came onto the UK debate shortly after it broke in the US, and I don't think it is about to re-emerge. Shirley Porter is a bit of a gift for "new" labour as she illustrates a heck of a lot of what went wrong with the tories. I'm more than happy to let others rip the living daylights out of the corrupt old crone.

Mind you, regarding Enron, here is an article bashing Blair for his involvement, but it is a tad old now.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,636228,00.html

You didn't need 'anti-business bias' or a Luddite's hatred of 'wealth creators' to know that Robert Maxwell was bent or James Goldsmith was a monster. Even the Thatcher administration had its standards. In 1982 it stopped Arthur Andersen receiving Government contracts because the then accountancy and consultancy firm had failed to spot spectacular losses of public money when it audited the accounts of the corrupt DeLorean car maker.

For a company to be censured by the Conservatives was the corporate equivalent of being thrown out of the Gestapo for using excessive force, but the rarity of the phenomenon can't disguise the fact that the Tories recognised that the public interest and business interest weren't always one. Tony Blair's credulity is limitless. He fell for the ideology of the New Economy bubble market that business, any business, was the sole source of creativity and righteousness. The mania still grips the Prime Minister. Wall Street crashes and the black joke of a privatised railway can't shake his faith in the most degraded enterprises.

In opposition, Labour promised to stop the Conservatives' 'dash for gas' and save the jobs of miners who had, stupidly, stuck by their party. Enron hired Karl Milner, a former aide to Gordon Brown who found more remunerative work in the lobbying industry, to oppose the moratorium on gas-fired power stations. Our reporter Greg Palast recorded Milner bragging in 1998: 'We have many friends in government. They like to run things past us some days in advance, to get our view.' He proved the boast wasn't idle by producing an unpublished draft of a Parliamentary report. He then explained how he dealt with energy policy. 'You play on the existing prejudices within the Cabinet for coal, you play on the existing prejudices within the Cabinet for competition, and you play the forces off against each other.'

The combination of influence-peddling and arm-twisting was a stunning success. A few weeks after Enron sponsored the 1998 Labour conference, Peter Mandelson allowed it to buy Wessex Water. In 1999, Stephen Byers sounded the death knell of the coal industry when he scrapped the moratorium on gas-fired stations. Last year the Government gave Ralph Hodge, the chairman of Enron Europe, a CBE 'for services to the power generation and gas industries'.

an unnamed woman estate agent was murdered in 1986. She said that Cherie Booth and Charles Falconer were forgers, and were
passing assets to Ken Lay, in conjunction with a BCCI manager.
Someone (presumably the rightful owners, but you don't say who they are) recovered these assets through lawsuits. You say that although these were lawsuits, the details aren't available to the public.

Shirley Porter's connection to all this is that her son is a former business partner of the murderer, though you don't say who the murderer is. You claim that the assets just frozen are in fact part of those illegally given to Lay. So presumably that means that it was Shirley and/or John Porter who recovered them in the lawsuits, and so are the rightful owners (otherwise how could they have won the lawsuit?) Presumably the murderer murdered the estate agent because she was stealing his/her money, but you don't say.

So Shirley Porter, who now looks like losing her money, is not bothering to make public that the wife of the Prime Minister stole it from her may years ago, and that Porter recovered it legally; she's just pretending that it was the Tesco money, hidden in trusts. Wouldn't it be to Porter's advantage to kick up a fuss now?

You claim some corroboration for this from a dead man, whose real name we don't know. Some unnamed people back up his story, but not in public.

Why should we believe anything you write?

Not even a clue.

100% successful in obscuring a thread of reasoning! However, there is a difference in analysing material and assigning blame merely to rubbish the source.

Journalists are bound by professional codes not to compromise their sources, and also often allude to well documented material which is in the public domain without necessarily repeating names. If a case is still sub judice or if a witness wants to state their position without compromising others' safety and security it can be difficult to get a story aired. Sometimes people want to stay anonymous so as not to refer to their profession/career.

The Porter fiasco goes back some 20 years to the start of Thatcher's reign. The BCCI story ditto. They are inextricably linked. In the UK they are both extremely well documented, likewise the estate agent murder. I have posted extensively elsewhere on the DU about the landmark class action in the UK involving former BCCI creditors who are suing the Bank of England for negligence in a billion pound lawsuit that successive UK premiers have stalled and stymied. Most recently in Octafish excellent composite posting in gen disc on 'bin Laden funds and BCCI trail to Midland' where I have posted my personal connections with this material. Most of the relevant UK evidence cited is virtually unknown in the US media because of myriad gagging orders imposed since the time of Thatcher and upheld by Blair.

Most recently, Blair's own gagging of Bank of England evidence admissibility in the BCCI class action has been much commented on after UK appeal court rulings lifted sanctions and a trial date was finally set for January 2004. It has taken some seven years for these bankrupted creditors who lost their lifetime savings to get the lawsuit heard in court. In UK legal history it is an unprecedented situation as the Bank of England until very recently was the subject of immense priviledge and resolutely defended its status as answering to no one - not even the security and intelligence services.

I am one of several expert witnesses in that action and have supplied corroborated sources of published evidence related to Arab banks and financial institutions in the 1970s and 1980s which I published in conjunction with other professionals. The trial judge has stated he will allow reasonable comment on the case because of extensive coverage in the press especially in the UK and the Middle East, but has drawn the line at outing material that has to be first presented to a jury.

I personally don't give a toss about whether anyone ought 'to believe anything' that I write. But your own agenda in trying to paraphrase my postings to suit your own polemics says more about you than anything else.

The great thing about DU is that anyone can use a user name and post without necessarily revealing their real name or identity or profession or salary or anything else by which they are generally known among their own circle of peers. The exact reverse of what actually happens in professional or public life.

that's why it comes through in my paraphrasing.

For instance, you still haven't named the estate agent. If you say it's well documented, do you mean Suzie Lamplugh? If so, why didn't you say so in the first place? If not, then who?
Why are the BCCI saga and Porter and her gerrymandering connected? Especially inextricably? I've never heard anyone suggest a link before. Is this your personal evidence, about to burst on an unsuspecting world? And when you drag in first Cherie Blair, and then Thatcher's resignation, it appears you're intent on tying every major event in the past 15 years to this one company.

If you are going to give evidence, I suggest you learn how to present facts in a plain way, rather than hints and insinuations, in a hopeless order.

In a another thread about the Russia tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky and his involvement with the Carlyle Group and other higher up's.

I thank you kindly, Sir emad aisat sana