The U.A.E. – our USA ally (who also provided to 9/11 bombers and harbored bin Laden)based Anham LLC Billed Pentagon $900 for $7 Part!

Based on the questionable costs identified in a $300 million contract with Dubai-based Anham LLC, the U.S. should review all its contracts with the company in Iraq and Afghanistan, which total about $3.9 billion, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen.
“The audit found weak oversight in multiple areas that left the government vulnerable to improper overcharges,” Bowen wrote in the forward to his 30th quarterly report, released today. The contract in question was funded with a combination of money earmarked for Iraqi Security Forces and Army operations and maintenance funds.

Among the “egregious examples of overbilling” by Anham were $4,500 for a circuit breaker valued at $183.30, $3,000 for a $94.47 circuit breaker and $80 for a small segment of drain pipe valued at $1.41.

Bowen’s office called for an in-depth review of the entire contract after discovering “significant weaknesses” in government oversight, questionable competition practices and possible undisclosed ownership affiliations between Anham and some of its subcontractors.

Those costs, it said, “appear to be not fair and reasonable or were not properly documented.”

In one case, Pioneer Iraqi Trading Co., an Anham subcontractor, charged the U.S. $900 for a water level control switch that a competitor had offered for $7.05.

A member of the family group that owns, through a subsidiary, 50 percent of Anham also owns a 90 percent share in Pioneer, though this relationship was never disclosed to the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees military contracts, Bowen’s office found.

“The lack of transparency regarding the relationship between Anham and its subcontractors calls into question whether Anham used due diligence to ensure that the U.S. government received a fair price for the goods and services it purchased,” the inspector general’s report concluded.

In other cases, Anham used subcontractors to purchase items that could have been bought directly from the manufacturer at lower prices, the report said.

When Anham was asked to buy a loudspeaker system to alert warehouse employees of any danger, it chose not to buy the system directly from the manufacturer at the retail price of $44,615, the report said.

Instead, Anham sought bids from subcontractors and paid a company called Knowlogy $90,908. That price included $20,000 for installation, even though the system setup meant little more than wheeling it into place and plugging it in.

Privately held Anham LLC is a contracting firm for projects throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It provides vehicle, transportation, construction, facilities management, procurement, food, power generation, health management, surveillance and training services.

Based on all the questionable costs it found, the special inspector general “believes that all costs under this contract should be carefully examined, as well as all contracts awarded to Anham,” the report said.

Guess who's listening? (But not to your laws...)

The Emirati Telecommunication firm Etisalat is facing a major legal claim by Majestic Infracon Private, the Emerati telecom firms’ partner in Etislat DB, a joint venture into the Indian mobile market.


The firm could be facing $1.6 billion in fines for foreign exchange violations.

Two directors at Etislat DB, Shadhid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, filed the claim.

The Indian press reported that the allegations include that Etisalat didn’t fulfill management obligations. Etisalat has a 44.73 percent share in Etisalat DB.

Balwa and Goenka are both in jail after corruption charges related to bribing officials to obtain licensing for mobile phone networks.

The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). also expressed concerns about the telecom surveillance software Etisalat had used in a Blackberry service it had introduced in the UAE and recommended that the company should not be allowed to offer Blackberry services in India.

India’s Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) has rejected Etisalat investment proposals on grounds of possibility of “round tripping”. Round tripping refers to routing of investments by a resident of one country through another country back to its own country to evade taxes.

------------IN NIGERIA

Etisalat, one of Nigeria’s Cellular phone service providers has been slammed with a N10 Million law suit for illegally swapping a subscriber’s active number without his consent.
Taiwo Egbon, an Etisalat subscriber claim that he woke up one morning and discovered his Etisalat line which he uses in communicating with family members who frequently sends him money from overseas had been cloned.

Legal Hording

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories.
Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.

There's just one problem: only a trickle of the aluminum is leaving the depots, creating a supply pinch for manufacturers of everything from soft drink cans to aircraft.

The resulting spike in prices has sparked a clash between companies forced to pay more for their aluminum and wait months for it to be delivered, Goldman, which is keen to keep its cash machines humming and the London Metal Exchange (LME), the world's benchmark industrial metals market, which critics accuse of lax oversight.

Analysts question why London's metals market allows big financial players like Goldman to own the warehouses which store huge quantities of metal even as they trade the commodity.

Robin Bhar, a veteran metals analyst at Credit Agricole in London says the conflict of interest is so acute he wants U.S. and European anti-trust regulators to weigh in.

"I think it makes a mockery of the market. It's a shame," Bhar said. "This is an anti-competitive situation. It puts (some) companies at an advantage, and clearly the rest of the market at a disadvantage. It's a real, genuine concern. And I think the regulators have to look at it."

Goldman said its warehouse subsidiary Metro International Trade Services has done nothing illegal, and abides by the LME's warehousing rules.

Goldman's warehouse business relies on a lucrative opportunity enabled by the LME regulations. Those rules allow warehouses to release only a tiny fraction of their inventories per day, much less than the metal that is regularly taken in for storage.

The metal that sits in the warehouse generates lucrative rental income.

Little wonder that so many want in. Metro was acquired by Goldman in February 2010, while commodities trading firm Trafigura nabbed UK-based NEMS in March 2010, and Swiss-based group Glencore International acquired the metals warehousing unit of Italy's Pacorini last September.

Henry Bath, a warehousing firm and founding member of the London Metal Exchange in 1877, has been owned for about 40 years by traders or banks including Metallgesellschaft in the 1980s and failed U.S. energy trader Enron at the turn of the century. It now comes under the umbrella of JP Morgan, which bought the metals trading business of RBS Sempra Commodities in July last year.

The long delays in metal delivery have buyers fuming. Some consumers are waiting up to a year to receive the aluminum they need and that has resulted in the perverse situation of higher prices at a time when the world is awash in the metal.

Nick Madden, chief procurement officer for Atlanta-based Novelis, which is owned by India's Hindalco Industries Ltd and is the world's biggest maker of rolled aluminum products. Madden estimates that the U.S. benchmark physical aluminum price is $20 to $40 a tonne higher because of the backlog at the Detroit warehouses. The physical price is currently around $2,800 per tonne.

Premiums for physical aluminum -- the amount paid above the LME's cash contract currently trading at $2,620 a tonne -- in the U.S. Midwest hit a record high of $210 a tonne in May, up about 50 percent from late last year. In Europe, the premium is at records above $200 a tonne, double the levels seen in January 2010.

The ripple effect into Asia has seen the premium paid in Japan increase 6 percent to $120 a tonne in the third quarter from the previous quarter, the first rise in nearly six quarters.

UAE Bank Stole Trade Secrets, Orchestrated Arrest of InfoSpan Executive, Boies Schiller Claims in New Suit

2011-07-22

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/20110720infospan.pdf

We've become pretty jaded when it comes to trade secrets litigation, but we've never seen anything quite like the allegations that Boies, Schiller & Flexner made in a recently-filed suit for California technology outsourcing company InfoSpan Inc. InfoSpan accuses the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, Emirates NBD Bank PJSC, of ripping off its technology, having one of its executives arrested under false pretenses in Dubai, and leaving him penniless and stripped of his U.S. passport after his release.

InfoSpan's 33-page complaint, filed last Friday in Los Angeles federal district court, asserts that Emirates NBD fraudulently seized control of technology InfoSpan developed for mobile banking and then "corrupted the UAE's legal processes" to intimidate the company. The suit seeks unspecified damages for trade secret misappropriation, breach of confidence, breach of contract, and related claims.

Here's the backstory according to InfoSpan's lawyers at Boies Schiller: Beginning in 2007, Emirates NBD had partnered with InfoSpan to use technology the company developed in 2003 to facilitate cross-border fund transfers. Revenues from the project were expected to earn InfoSpan $2.8 billion in fees by 2012. Based on the success of the partnership, the bank even considered buying a controlling interest in InfoSpan.

In May 2008, the complaint alleges, Emirates NBD suddenly suspended user testing of the InfoSpan system. A month later the bank announced that it would independently offer mobile commerce services similar to InfoSpan's. InfoSpan protested, but its fears were allayed when Emirates NBD promised to use InfoSpan's technology if it opened a Dubai data center. By May 2009, InfoSpan had installed the mobile banking system.

But that same month, InfoSpan claims, Emirates NBD informed InfoSpan that it was rescinding its agreement, purportedly because the company had overcharged the bank $1.46 million. The bank also claimed that an InfoSpan subsidiary incorporated in the Cayman Islands had misrepresented itself as existing in the UAE, and that the project was behind schedule and had not met agreed upon standards.

Emirates NBD next filed a criminal complaint with Dubai police alleging that deputy CEO Larry Scudder had defrauded the bank out of the $1.46 million. InfoSpan claims that Emirates NBD had ties with the police and aimed to intimidate the company with "sham" allegations.

In May 2009, according to the complaint, police arrested Scudder at the Dubai airport. They released Scudder the next day but held onto his passport, preventing him from leaving the UAE for the next six months. During that time, InfoSpan claims, Scudder had no income because its offices in the UAE had been closed. "Mr. Scudder survived through the kindness of people at the church he attended in Dubai," according to the complaint.

InfoSpan CEO Farooq Bajwa, who was in California, had tried to cut a deal with Emirates Bank officials to get Scudder's passport released. The complaint claims a bank official told him in substance to sign over the project. In a subsequent call, the same official allegedly told Bajwa that if he ever came back to Dubai, "you'll never leave alive."

The Dubai police finally allowed Scudder to swap his passport for one belonging to someone at his church, permitting him to leave the country. Emirates Bank has meanwhile misappropriated InfoSpan's data center and technology, the complaint claims, and has since marketed InfoSpan's product, including to banks first approached by InfoSpan.

We contacted Emirates NDB for comment via e-mail but didn't hear back, and we were unable to reach a bank spokesperson by phone. InfoSpan counsel William Isaacson of Boies Schiller was not available for comment.

I double dare you....

The real question becomes will the world not see the need to shift its dependence on US economics? The subprime fiasco cratered the world. Now the US freakeconomics threatens the world. Seems the world might be thinking about a more reliable counter-party…but whom? Yep, that’s what I think to …. No alternatives.


The International Monetary Fund said Monday that a downgrade of the U.S. government's credit rating would be "extremely damaging" for the global economy.

The IMF stressed that it is difficult to predict the consequences of a downgrade, since the United States has never had its top-tier rating lowered before.

"As we have said before, a downgrade will be very damaging for both the U.S. economy and the rest of the world," said Rodrigo Valdes, a senior advisor at the IMF. "But there is a lot of uncertainty; nobody really knows what would be the true effects would be."

The IMF's latest staff report on the U.S. came after talks over the weekend between Congress and the White House failed to resolve the dangerous impasse over the U.S. debt ceiling.

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have been deadlocked for weeks over a budget plan that is crucial to raising the nation's borrowing limit. The Treasury Department has warned that if Congress fails to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling is not raised by Aug. 2, the government could have trouble paying some of its bills.

The main credit rating agencies stated last week that they are considering a downgrade of the nation's debt. That could roil global financial markets, which have widespread exposure to U.S. Treasury debt.

After the latest breakdown, lawmakers from opposing parties are now working on separate proposals.

The IMF said U.S. policy makers need to come up with a credible plan to reduce the nation's debt over the long term. But the fund also warned that cutting back too far and too fast could hurt the fragile U.S. economy.

A gradual consolidation of U.S. debt would help reduce the risk of "a global bond market event where investors would lose confidence in the ability of the United States to respond decisively to its looming fiscal challenges," the report states. "Such a loss in confidence would generate major negative spillovers to the rest of the world given the role of U.S. government bond yields as global benchmarks."

Teach your children well,

Their father's hell did slowly go by,
The Treasury reached its debt limit on May 16 and has been taking extraordinary measures such as borrowing from pension funds to finance the deficit and prevent a default. Standard & Poor’s would cut the top AAA rating of the U.S. to D and Moody’s Investors Service said it would likely reduce its credit ranking from Aaa to the Aa range if the government fails to make a debt payment.

“This is one of the Treasury’s last remaining tactics to avoid breaching the debt ceiling,” Brian Smedley, a strategist in New York at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York, said in a telephone interview. “A cutback in net bill supply is not surprising given how close we are to the debt ceiling deadline.”


You who are on the road

Must have a code that you can live by

And so become yourself

Because the past is just a good bye.

A Mercader: not really state of the art.

Pakistan Spies on Its Diaspora, Spreading Fear
They all do it…spy on the USA. Some of them; ok most of them try to recruit former nationals gone American. This alone is why I think all new immigrants to the USA should serve in the military or a US Public Service Corps. First, it would allow better indoctrination into American values and second, it would allow better observation for the clandestine gene.

So before beating up on Pakistan the safe haven for the USA’s greatest enemy (Osama bin Laden) since Emperor Hirohito; let’s check out some relevant Russian and Chinese cases:

Russia

The United States Treasury Department was successfully penetrated by nearly a dozen Soviet agents or information sources, including Harold Glasser and his superior, Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury and the second most influential official in the department.

China

According to federal investigators, four people recently arrested in Los Angeles are part of an extensive network of Chinese military intelligence agents operating here in the United States. The alleged spies have been working in the U.S. since 1990 and, according to documents obtained from the suspects; they may have compromised some of America's most important weapon systems.

All four were arrested and charged with theft of government property. The charges are expected to be upgraded to espionage or espionage-related, according to law enforcement officials.

According to investigators, the ring consisted of Chi Mak and his wife, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, along with Chi's brother, Tai Wang Mak, and his wife, Fuk Heung Li. Documents found at the search of Chi's home in Downey, California, showed that sensitive data on Aegis battle management systems have been passed to communist China.

Chi reportedly holds a secret-level security clearance and worked on more than 200 U.S. defense and military contracts as an electrical engineer with the defense contractor Power Paragon, a subsidiary of L3/SPD Technologies/Power Systems Group in Anaheim, Calif. In addition, Chi had access to details on U.S. aircraft carriers and once was aboard the USS Stennis.

Pakistan

F.B.I. agents hunting for Pakistani spies in the United States last year began tracking Mohammed Tasleem, an attaché in the Pakistani Consulate in New York and a clandestine operative of Pakistan’s military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.

Mr. Tasleem, they discovered, had been posing as an F.B.I. agent to extract information from Pakistanis living in the United States and was issuing threats to keep them from speaking openly about Pakistan’s government. His activities were part of what government officials in Washington, along with a range of Pakistani journalists and scholars; say is a systematic ISI campaign to keep tabs on the Pakistani diaspora inside the United States.

The F.B.I. brought Mr. Tasleem’s activities to Leon E. Panetta, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and last April, Mr. Panetta had a tense conversation with Pakistan’s spymaster, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

Within days, Mr. Tasleem was spirited out of the United States — a quiet resolution typical of the spy games among the world’s powers.

But some of the secrets of that hidden world became public last week when two Pakistani-Americans working for a charity that the F.B.I. believes is a front for Pakistan’s spy service were indicted. Only one was arrested; the other is still in Pakistan.

The investigation exposed one part of what American officials say is a broader campaign by the Pakistani spy agency, known as the ISI, to exert influence over lawmakers, stifle public dialogue critical of Pakistan’s military and blunt the influence of India, Pakistan’s longtime adversary.

ISI’s campaign extends to issuing both tacit and overt threats against those who speak critically about the military.

The ISI is widely feared inside Pakistan because of these very tactics. For example, American intelligence officials believe that some ISI operatives ordered the recent killing of a Pakistani journalist, Saleem Shahzad.

According to one American law enforcement official, the F.B.I. had originally hoped to arrest the two men working for the charity, the Kashmiri American Council, several times earlier this year but was told each time by the State Department or the C.I.A. that the arrests would only aggravate the frayed relations between the United States and Pakistan.

The indictments came as the C.I.A. was trying to negotiate the release of a Pakistani doctor who was jailed by the ISI on accusations that he had helped the Americans track down Osama bin Laden before his killing.

Several Pakistani journalists and scholars in the United States interviewed over the past week said that they were approached regularly by Pakistani officials, some of whom openly identified themselves as ISI officials. The journalists and scholars said the officials caution them against speaking out on politically delicate subjects like the indigenous insurgency in Baluchistan or accusations of human rights abuses by Pakistani soldiers. The verbal pressure is often accompanied by veiled warnings about the welfare of family members in Pakistan, they said.

One Pakistani journalist, who like the others asked to be quoted anonymously because of concerns about his safety, recalled an episode in December 2006 in which a Pakistani man filmed a public discussion about Pakistan’s tribal areas at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The event’s organizers later learned the man was from the ISI, the journalist said.

A second Pakistani author said that at several conferences and seminars in recent years, representatives from the spy agency made their presence known by asking threatening questions.

“The ISI guys will look into your eyes and will indirectly threaten you by introducing themselves,” the author said. “The ISI makes sure that they are present in every occasion relating to Pakistan, and in some cases they pay ordinary Pakistanis for attending events and pass them information.”

The indictments last week were part of a broader F.B.I. investigation into how Pakistan’s government, including the ISI, has secretly funneled money into the United States to influence American policy about Kashmir, a region claimed both by India and Pakistan. The effort, American officials said, included lobbying and publicity activities by the Kashmiri American Council (also called the Kashmiri Center) and by donations to lawmakers.

In recent years, the Justice Department has brought several cases against defendants charged with supporting terror groups that have historically had ties to the ISI, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that carried out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

Abbas, author of "Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror," said there is an alarming trend that includes Pakistani pilots refusing to bomb militant strongholds, and units surrendering to militant groups rather than fire on them.

Last month, Pakistani Taliban insurgents stormed the Naval Air Station in Karachi, apparently armed with inside information on its layout and security. They destroyed two U.S. supplied surveillance aircraft.

Days before he was abducted and murdered, Pakistani journalist Syed Shahzad described that attack as "the violent beginning of an internal ideological struggle between Islamist elements in the Pakistani armed forces and their secular and liberal top brass."

He went on to quote unnamed sources in the ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence service, as saying: "It was shown several months ago that the Pakistan navy is vulnerable to Islamists when a marine commando unit official was arrested.....Now, they (intelligence) realize how the organization (navy) is riddled and vulnerable to the influence of militant organizations."

Brigadier General Ali Khan was close to retiring at the end of a distinguished career in the Pakistani Army when he was detained early in May - and accused of links with an outlawed Islamist group.

His arrest, which became public Tuesday, shocked fellow officers at army headquarters and again raises the specter that senior ranks of the Pakistani officer corps may be infiltrated by Islamist militants.

Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said Khan was believed linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation). He said efforts were underway to arrest members of the group who had been in contact with Khan.

New American intelligence assessments have concluded that Pakistan has steadily expanded its nuclear arsenal since President Obama came to office, and that it is building the capability to surge ahead in the production of nuclear-weapons material, putting it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth largest nuclear weapons power.

There is a good reason to let people spy on your soil. You can always turn them or at least watch what they are spying on. If you know, what they know, and they don’t know it; then you’re ahead. Unless of course they know that you know, and you don’t know it. All very confusing in the spy game, isn’t it?

But what of militant Islam in Pakistan and WMD? We all went to war over Iraq’s alleged program and have bombed and will bomb Iran as it heads in that direction. But what of Pakistan the safe house of Osama bin Laden?  Can it be allowed to be a nuclear threat? The Washington Post, citing nongovernment analysts, said Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal now numbered more than 100 deployed weapons.