patrick jane forums

One of the main investors in the Doyen Group was Indonesian billionaire, Erick Thohir.
In 2013, media tycoon Erick Thohir, Handy Soetedjo and Rosan Roeslani bought 70% of Inter Milan for a reported $400 million.

Until December 2012, Rosan Roeslani had been a Director of Indonesian mining group Bumi plc (he also managed its subsidiary Berau Coal). Bumi is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Roeslani took $173 million out of Berau, before buying the stake in Inter Milan, and then promised to put it back “by the end of the year”.

In 2013, none other than Ivanka Trump’s onetime boyfriend, Nathaniel “Nat” Rothschild, owned about 15% of Bumi plc.
Rothschild effectively put Bumi together, in partnership with the Indonesian Bakrie family.
Rothschild claimed to be unhappy with the deal and said:

Roeslani only has the funds and freedom to do this because Bumi’s board have failed to take any legal action whatsoever to date against him.

http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2013/10/20/nathaniel-rothschild-fury-as-rosan-roeslani-buys-stake-in-italian-football-club/
(archived here: http://archive.is/YWE26)


The following article makes a convincing case that Tevfik Arif, born Toifik Arifov on 15 May 1953 in Kazakhstan, was either a “Kazakh gangster” (in the words of Felix Sater) or a KGB operative.

Reportedly, after finishing his education, Tevfik Arif worked in the “Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade” for 17 years, as the “chief economist and deputy director” of the “Department of Hotel Management”.
On the internet there is no reference to any “Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade”. There was however a “USS Chamber of Commerce and Industry” with a hotel division, “V/0 Sovintsentr”. According to a US State Department report with CIA information, a third of their staff was KGB.

In a court case in Turkey, Arif testified that he went on to work in the energy, chemical and metallurgy sector. Arif said he produced (or organised) coal in Russia and copper in Kazakhstan.
Then he went to work for Trans World Group (TWG), a British company headed by the brothers David and Simon Reuben. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Reubens moved aggressively into metals production.
According to the reports, we have to conclude that Arif became a fixer for TWG in Kazakhstan, for which he needed deep connections in political and business circles. The kind of people who had those connections in the former Soviet Union was either (ex-)KGB, or mobsters.

The Arifs managed to buy a highly lucrative chemical plant. How could they?
The real money-maker for the family was Castello Global Ltd., which handled the profits from the chrome trading business. Here is a breakdown of Castello Global’s profits:
2004 - $19.85 million
2005 - $31.04 million
2006 - $39.20 million
2007 - $18.59 million
2008 - $43.87 million
After Arif got a Turkish passport, he moved to New York, set up his new company Bayrock Group in Trump Tower, and partnered with Donald Trump and Felix Sater.

Another pair of fixers, who started working with TWG in 1992, is the brothers Lev and Michael Cherney, who formed a 50-50 partnership with TWG. In 1996, the Swiss authorities accused Michael Cherney of “drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud and sponsoring murder” on behalf of  the crime organisation of Russian mob boss V. Ivankov, nicknamed “Yaponchik”. The Reubens quickly bought out Cherney’s share in TWG for $410 million.
The federal Swiss court exonerated him of the charges, but 2 years later Spain issued an international warrant for Michael Cherney’s arrest for money laundering: https://trump-russia.com/2017/09/30/who-is-tevfik-arif-part-i/


Here’s a bizarre transcript from 2008, where Tevfik Arif explains how they’ve bought 2 coal fields for $400,000-$500,000 that they don’t own.
They also talk about “Khrapunov and his son” who own the coal field (if I understand correctly): https://www.scribd.com/document/348218683/Audio-Excerpts-May-2008


Following is a description and some excerpts from the court document that describes the complaint of attorney Frederick Oberlander, against Bayrock, Tevfik Arif and Felix “Satter” Sater of 10 May 2010.
It really is a strange legal strategy. This was a civil case, where the attorney describes criminal wrongdoing. It’s more like a description of how the Department of Justice and IRS are helping Arif and Sater in their criminal activities.
Then Oberlander argues that because the defendants hid the money they took, his clients (that were working for this criminal organisation) are entitled to part of the money they “skimmed”.

There are 2 main topics in this document:
1) Tax evasion.
2) Taking millions of dollars.

I find the tax evasion boring.
They simply booked “profits” as “loans” (with the help of deaf, dumb and blind accountants) and, when you borrow money, you can’t be expected to pay taxes…

40. One way they did this was to use Bayrock to skim millions of dollars of cash, giving Satter a million dollar a year unreported income and causing Bayrock Group to execute a sham “note” with him, a note Arif and Schwarz have admitted on MP3 was never meant to be repaid
(…)
125. The Satter Frauds II. By late 2007, Satter’s $1,000,000 skims had reached $3,750,000

They showed the FL group from Iceland, since 2008 known as Stodir, a portfolio that included developing property for hundreds of millions of dollars, and sold FL a stake in the “Four Subs” enterprise for $50 million, which they skimmed:

534. The terms of FL’s partnership and “trial merger” with Bayrock called for FL to transfer S50.000.000 and other consideration in return for. inter alia, a partner’s share of the distributions expected to flow up front the Four Projects into the Four Subs, 1(518.
(…)
560. So all through January, February, March, and April, Arif, Satter, and Schwarz were negotiating a deal that would repay hidden interests in Russia and Kazakhstan on behalf of Arif, would give Arif $8,000,000, millions more than he had in personally given what he had already taken out from Michael Samuel’s payment and other withdrawals, would pay Arifs taxes, would pay an old Mafia buddy of Satter’s, possibly do other things for Satter with or without kickback from Lauria, but otherwise do nothing for Bayrock or anyone else, particularly Schwarz.

What’s also interesting is that Felix Sater had been partners in crime with the Gambino crime family in this $40 million fraud:

209. Twenty of Satter’s White Rock confederates, including members of the Bonanno, Gambino, and Colombo Mafia organized crime families, were also convicted, many on racketeering charges. Most were sentenced to prison terms and multimillion dollar restitution.

(6 MB, 165 pages): https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2638421/Kriss-v-Bayrock-Complaint.pdf


This is all the more interesting, because in one of those strange coincidences, President elect Donald Trump rang in the New Year at the Mar-a-Lago with Joseph Cinque - a convicted felon with ties to the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti.
The American Academy of Hospitality Sciences, owned and operated by Cinque, has awarded more than a dozen of Trump's golf courses, hotels, casinos and private clubs with so-called "Star Diamond" awards. Trump was listed on the company's website as its "ambassador extraordinaire", and he appeared in a 2009 video in which he complemented Cinque: "There's nobody like him. He's a special guy". About half of the roughly 30 people listed as "trustees" to the Academy are associates of Trump.
Donald simply denied knowing anything about his criminal past: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-appears-mobster-affiliated-felon-new-year-bash-article-1.2932315
(archived here: http://archive.is/tdW44)


In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., were in a precarious legal position. Emails showed that the Trumps intentionally inflated figures about how well the condos in Trump SoHo were selling to lure buyers. According to a source who saw the emails: there is “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales. They knew it was wrong”.

Trump SoHo was the project for which Trump partnered with Bayrock and Sapir.
Business was slow, but the Trump family claimed the opposite. In April 2008, they said that 31% of the condos in the building had already been sold. Donald Jr. even boasted that 55% had been bought. In June 2008, Ivanka announced to the foreign press at Trump Tower in Manhattan that 60% had been snapped up.
According to a sworn affidavit by a Trump partner: in March 2010, only 15.8% of units had been sold. By law, the sales couldn’t close with less than 15% of the units sold, or Trump and partners had to return the down payments.

The lawyers in the Major Economic Crimes Bureau believed Ivanka and Donald Jr. could have violated the Martin Act, which bans false statements to sell real estate.
The defence team for Trump later acknowledged that some exaggerated statements were made to increase sales. They claimed this was mere “puffery”, harmless exaggeration that didn’t amount to criminal conduct.
Donald Trump Sr. got his personal lawyer for a decade, Marc Kasowitz, to handle the case. On 11 January 2012, Kasowitz donated $25,000 to the re-election campaign of Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr that returned the $25,000 contribution.

On 16 May 2012, Kasowitz visited Vance’s office, in the presence of Dan Alonso and Adam Kaufmann. Vance later overruled his prosecutors and told them to drop the case. On 3 August 2012, assistant district attorney Peirce Moser called the Trumps’ defence attorneys and said they were dropping the investigation.
Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues that it was “amazing I got them off”. Kasowitz has denied making this statement.

Then, in September 2012, Kasowitz contacted Vance’s campaign about hosting a fundraiser. The event was held January 2013, for which Kasowitz personally donated almost $32,000, and 20 of his law firm’s partners and employees kicked in at least another $9,000. In October 2013, as Election Day approached, Kasowitz hosted a breakfast which raised another $9,000 for Vance’s campaign.
Vance later said that New York law allowed him to accept the contributions, but he plans to give Kasowitz’s second contribution back anyway, because: “I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s”.

Kasowitz said his donations to Vance were unrelated to the case:

I donated to Cy Vance’s campaign because I was and remain extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity, as a brilliant lawyer and as a public servant with creative ideas and tremendous ability.

I have never made a contribution to anyone’s campaign, including Cy Vance’s, as a ‘quid-pro-quo’ for anything.

Paul Grand, who earlier had been a partner of Vance’s when the district attorney was in private practice, was part of the Morvillo Abramowitz law firm that defended the Trump SoHo project, said:

Dropping the case was reasonable.
The manner in which it was accomplished is curious.

Five months earlier, Trump and partners had reached a settlement with the disgruntled buyers. Their complaint accused the sellers, including the Trumps, of “a consistent and concerted pattern of outright lies”.
They agreed to return 90% of the buyers’ deposits, plus their attorneys’ fees. Part of the deal was that the plaintiffs wouldn’t cooperate with prosecutors unless they were subpoenaed: https://www.wnyc.org/story/ivanka-donald-trump-jr-close-charged-felony-fraud/
(archived here: http://archive.is/OtuUC)


See Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Tamir Sapir, Alex Sapir, Julius Schwarz and Zina Sapir at Trump Soho Construction Site, 19  September 2007.