[Daily Beast] Vahid Alaghband's firm did business with an Iranian airline accused of shipping guns and troops to Syria.
An Iranian businessman accused by the U.S. government of violating sanctions on Tehran donated money to the Clinton Foundation, The Daily Beast has confirmed.
Vahid Alaghband's Balli Aviation Ltd., a London-based subsidiary of the commodities trading firm Balli Group PLC, tried to sell 747 airplanes to Iran, despite a federal ban on such sales. The company pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal information in 2010. In its plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Balli Aviation agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine, serve five years corporate probation, and pay an additional $15 million in civil fines. The hefty sum was "a direct consequence of the level of deception used to mislead investigators," Thomas Madigan, a top Justice Department official, said at the time.
Alaghband is one of an array of questionable actors who've been found in recent months to give to the Clinton Foundation. The gifts -- from foreign governments with human rights violations like Qatar, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and China as well as FIFA, soccer's corrupt governing body -- have complicated Hillary Clinton's campaign for president and raised questions as to whether these entities were trying to curry favor with the former Secretary of State. Not much publically available on the Balli Group PLC or it's leadership. Strange, very strange.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/10/2015 12:01 Comments ||
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#3
If he served time, he must not have donated enough.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
07/10/2015 12:31 Comments ||
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#4
If he served time, he must not have donated enough.
No jail time:
" In its plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Balli Aviation agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine, serve five years corporate probation, and pay an additional $15 million in civil fines"
#5
A more appropriate penalty would have been a corporate death sentence, with all its assets forfeited, all its benefits paid to its insider operatives clawed back a number of years, and some jail time for those men in suits. As if that will ever happen.
[Daily Caller] More than 21.5 million current and former federal employees had their personal information hacked from the Office of Personnel Management, including the fingerprints of everyone who has applied for a security clearance. The director of OPM, Katherine Archuleta, has refused to resign, saying she is "committed" to repairing the historic data breach.
But Archuleta has no background in tech or cyber-security. In the official White House press release on her first day, Archuleta was heralded as "the first Latina" to run the OPM and someone who "[w]ith her breadth of experience as an educator, public administrator, and community leader, Katherine Archuleta possesses an abundance of skills to bring talented people together with different ideas and fresh perspectives to strengthen our federal workforce."
The release focused mainly on Archuleta's history of political appointments, in the Clinton and Obama administrations, and diversity.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/10/2015 12:02 Comments ||
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#4
A hundred years ago the media ousted the incompetent and larcenous Tammany Hall patronage hacks and ne'er do wells. Today the media protects the incompetent and larcenous Tammany Hall patronage hacks and ne'er do wells.
#8
But Archuleta has no background in tech or cyber-security.
Frankly she didn't need to have a background in "tech or cyber-security" - that's what CIOs and Information Security are for. She should have, however, concentrated a bit less on "inclusiveness and diversity" and a bit more on running the OPM.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.