---------- Initial Header -----------
From : "Vladimir Krsljanin"
Date : Mon, 2 Dec 2002 17:35:12 +0100
Subject : Carla del Ponte - a dirty washer of NATO dirty laundry
(translation from Konkret, 12, 2002)
TRANSLATION OF INTERVIEW BY JURGEN ELSAESSER WITH FELIPE TUROVER ON
CARLA DEL PONTE (source, Konkret, December 2002)
Translated by Colin Meade 02/12/02
[quotation]
Felipe Turover: "Carla del Ponte told the hit-men where to find me".
[Introduction]
"Justice is a woman", said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan about Carla
del Ponte, currently Chief Prosecutor in the Hague trial of Slobodan
Milosevic. Felipe Turover's experience of the Swiss jurist is very
different. 37-year old Felipe comes from a Spanish Republican family
whose parents fled with him from Franco to the Soviet Union. After the
death of the dictator, Felipe returned to his native land before going
back at the end of the 1980s to Moscow as a financial expert. From 1992
to 1999 he worked for the Yeltsin government managing debts with Western
creditor banks.
[Interview]
Elsässer: You are the chief witness in the Mabetex case, also known as
Russiagate. What is it about and how does Carla del Ponte come into it?
Turover: Mabetex is a construction company based in Lugano in Italian
Switzerland. It belongs to the Kosovo Albanian Beghijet Pacolli who now
has a Swiss passport. In the 1990s Pacolli and his business partner
Viktor Stolpovskich won some two billion euros-worth of orders from the
Kremlin, supposedly for building and restoration work in the government
and presidential complex. It has been proved that billions of dollars
vanished from Russia through this operation, with millions being spent
on bribes in Moscow in return. Pacolli acted as guarantor for credit
cards for Yeltsin and both his daughters, according to the Banca del
Gottardo which issued the cards. Carla del Ponte, at that time a Swiss
public prosecutor contacted me in 1997 and asked me to be ready to
testify in the case. Later she invited the Russian investigating
prosecutor Yuri Skuratov to Switzerland and put me in touch with him.
At that time she already had a reputation as a great fighter for justice
and I therefore did as she asked. That was an almost fatal error.
Elsässer: Why?
Turover: I was dependent on her honesty and had made it clear to her
from the start that my testimony placed my life in danger. I was still
at the time working as an advisor to the Russian authorities, i.e. for
the very people I was incriminating with these documents. So what did
Ms del Ponte do? She gave my full name and job to the press. This was
as if I had given information to the US Drug Enforcement Agency about
the Escobar Clan out of Medellin and then, while still in the lions'
den, read in the New York Times that I was the chief witness against
Escobar. In my case, it was Moscow rather than Medellin and the
newspaper was the Corriere della Sera but the effect was the same. I
was in big trouble and saved my life by hurriedly getting out of
Moscow. Since then, for the past three years, I have been living
undercover. I have Carla del Ponte to thank for this. She told the
hit-men where to find me.
Elsässer: Isn't that an exaggeration? How is a Swiss Federal
Prosecutor responsible for an article in an Italian newspaper?
Turover: Both the Corriere journalists got all their information from
del Ponte, including my mobile phone number. They told me so
themselves, because they knew my life was in danger.
Elsässer: Del Ponte has denied that.
Turover: Then she's not telling the truth. And I've already said this
many times and she has never threatened to sue for slander. The reason
is simple: she has no proof, but I do.
Elsässer: Mabetex boss Pacolli is not only a construction magnate, but
is also said to have close ties to the Kosovo Albanian KLA terrorists.
Turover: That's right. He himself has stated that at least until 2000
his group owned the Kosovo Albanian daily "Bota Sot" which even the OSCE
condemned for racist articles. Its agitation was aimed mainly at the
Serbs, but it also made an anti-Semitic attack on me as the "Jew
Turover".
Elsässer: If it were the case that the Yeltsin clan had received Kosovo
Albanian bribes, this might explain his behaviour in spring 1999. As
NATO prepared for war against Yugoslavia, he didn't lift a finger to
help the Serbs, his supposed brother people. At the Rambouillet
Conference, when the NATO states took an extremely biased pro-Albanian
position, Moscow didn't protest, although its diplomats were at the
negotiating table. Did the Kosovo Albanians buy Yeltsin's passivity?
Turover: That's possible. We're looking here at a symbiosis of
politics, plunder and money laundering on a large scale.
Elsässer: And del Ponte?
Turover: All the preliminary inquiries in the Mabetex case in
Switzerland were politically abandoned at the highest level. Moreover,
the documents that del Ponte had received from her Russian colleague
Skuratov somehow ended up in Pacolli's possession. He reported back to
his Russian friends Yeltsin and Borodin and subsequently Skuratov, an
honest and competent lawyer, was shunted aside, in spite of three almost
unanimous resolutions in his support from the Russian Senate. The end
of Skuratov was also the end of the Moscow Mabetex case - the
proceedings were finally abandoned in December 2000.
Elsässer: Was del Ponte acting to protect the Albanian Mafia or the
Yeltsin clan?
Turover: Neither. She acts only in her own interest. She is
indifferent to political goals. Look at the point in time when she made
public what she knew about the Mabetex case, including my name - the end
of August 1999. That was a blow not only to me, but to Yeltsin too.
It's true that she later failed to follow through on the case, but at
that moment her revelations did serious damage to Yeltsin. The
immediate background was the spectacular coup by Russian elite units in
Kosovo in summer 1999; after the ceasefire they occupied Pristina
airport, getting there before NATO. According to the British head of
KFOR, Michael Jackson, this could have led to world war three. Moscow
was playing for high stakes. It wanted its own occupation zone in
Kosovo to protect the Serbs. In this situation Yeltsin had to be
repudiated. The current US Foreign Minister, Madeleine Albright,
therefore met del Ponte at London Heathrow airport in July 1999 and
probably spelt all this out to her. So then del Ponte went public with
her revelations about Yeltsin in Corriere della Sera and in
mid-September Albright in a statement on CNN stoked up the heat about
Russian government corruption. Yeltsin had to fear an effort to impeach
him and then prosecution. He was let off the hook by two bombings in
Moscow, allegedly by Chechen terrorists. Russian troops went into
Chechnya and public attention was diverted from Russiagate.
Elsässer: Was del Ponte acting as an agent of Washington in this
situation?
Turover: She is no more pro-American than she is pro-Albanian. She
acts in Swiss interests, i.e. in the interests of the Mafia in
Switzerland.
Elsässer: Explain.
Turover: Switzerland and the Swiss banks live mainly off money
laundering. All the world's dictators and major criminals deposit their
money here. Above all the canton of Tessin is exceptionally well placed
for this. People simply carry millions in suitcases and glove
compartments over the border from Italy. Every politician in Tessin
knows about it and benefits from it. And as the canton's public
prosecutor del Ponte protected this activity even before the Mabetex
case at the end of the 1990s. Take the case of a company in Chiasso
accused of money laundering for the Italian Mafia. She stopped the
proceedings. But basically del Ponte is pro-del Ponte. She would do
anything for her career, even bring a case against George W. Bush. She
is in any case a useless lawyer. To my knowledge she has never won a
case in her entire career. Her only talent is self-promotion,
self-marketing.
Elsässer: Her agreement with Albright in any case proved profitable. A
little later she became the Chief Prosecutor at the Hague, at
Washington's behest. The Zurich Weltwoche expressed surprise: "why the
Americans wanted her to succeed the difficult and prematurely ousted
Louise Arbour remains a puzzle. After all they had made no secret of
the fact that they regarded the Court as a useless waste of time".
Turover: Del Ponte and the Swiss government helped Albright and the
Americans - they're honest people, they pay their bills - therefore
rewarded her with the Hague job. Here too she has sold herself
brilliantly. With her, the trial is a total disaster. She has nothing
on Milosevic, and legally he ought therefore to be released
immediately. And so Milosevic, who himself is nothing but a bandit and
con man, can present himself as an innocent victim of persecution and
Serb nationalism is on the rise as the recent elections showed[1]. Do
people in the Hague really not know that the Swiss Federal Government
has appointed a special investigator to look into the del Ponte affair?
How can a woman who is herself the subject of judicial investigation at
the highest level because of serious crimes stay on as Chief Prosecutor
at the UN war crimes tribunal?
Elsässer: In March 2001 you reported Carla del Ponte and persons
unknown to the police for, among other things, endangering your life and
attempted murder (tentato assassinio) in connection with Russiagate.
But the Swiss Federal Prosecutor, Valentin Roschacher, dismissed the
charges against his predecessor. So how can you say that a special
investigation of del Ponte is ongoing?
Turover: Roschacher protected del Ponte and I have therefore brought a
case against him for bias in her favour. This case has not only been
taken up, but in May 2002 the Swiss Federal Council appointed a special
investigator, Arthur Hublard, the former public prosecutor of Jura
canton. He is investigating my accusations against Roschacher - but the
del Ponte case is obviously also involved here. Furthermore, I have
laid charges against Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg.
Elsässer: Against Switzerland, not against del Ponte?
Turover: You can't bring cases against private persons in Strasbourg.
But in substance the charges relate primarily to del Ponte because as
the Swiss Federal Prosecutor she placed my life in danger. It's
preposterous for her to continue to hold office in the Hague when two
such cases are pending.
Elsässer: You are living in hiding, constantly moving house. How long
will you keep this up?
Turover: I have to, otherwise I'm dead because of del Ponte. I have of
course insured myself by making sure that in the event of my demise even
more explosive information than hitherto will be revealed. But that
does not provide me with real security. So far at least five
prosecution witnesses in the Mabetex case have been cleared out of the
way. The most recent victim was Pacolli's personal secretary, a 32-year
old woman, who was found dead in the bathroom, allegedly from a blood
clot. There was no autopsy and she was cremated the next day.
ENDS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Obviously, these disparaging remarks about Mr Milosevic do not
represent the views of the ICDSM. The reason why Carla del Ponte has
got nothing on Mr Milosevic is that the charges against him have no
basis in reality. However incompetent del Ponte may be, she has had a
multitude of "experts", investigators and compliant officials within and
outside Yugoslavia to help her in her quest for "evidence". They have
found nothing because there was never anything there to find.
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sps.org.yu/ (official SPS website)
http://www.belgrade-forum.org/ (forum for the world of equals)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend Slobodan
Milosevic)
icdsm temporary address:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/index.htm
for your donations:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/donations.htm
From : "Vladimir Krsljanin"
Date : Mon, 2 Dec 2002 17:35:12 +0100
Subject : Carla del Ponte - a dirty washer of NATO dirty laundry
(translation from Konkret, 12, 2002)
TRANSLATION OF INTERVIEW BY JURGEN ELSAESSER WITH FELIPE TUROVER ON
CARLA DEL PONTE (source, Konkret, December 2002)
Translated by Colin Meade 02/12/02
[quotation]
Felipe Turover: "Carla del Ponte told the hit-men where to find me".
[Introduction]
"Justice is a woman", said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan about Carla
del Ponte, currently Chief Prosecutor in the Hague trial of Slobodan
Milosevic. Felipe Turover's experience of the Swiss jurist is very
different. 37-year old Felipe comes from a Spanish Republican family
whose parents fled with him from Franco to the Soviet Union. After the
death of the dictator, Felipe returned to his native land before going
back at the end of the 1980s to Moscow as a financial expert. From 1992
to 1999 he worked for the Yeltsin government managing debts with Western
creditor banks.
[Interview]
Elsässer: You are the chief witness in the Mabetex case, also known as
Russiagate. What is it about and how does Carla del Ponte come into it?
Turover: Mabetex is a construction company based in Lugano in Italian
Switzerland. It belongs to the Kosovo Albanian Beghijet Pacolli who now
has a Swiss passport. In the 1990s Pacolli and his business partner
Viktor Stolpovskich won some two billion euros-worth of orders from the
Kremlin, supposedly for building and restoration work in the government
and presidential complex. It has been proved that billions of dollars
vanished from Russia through this operation, with millions being spent
on bribes in Moscow in return. Pacolli acted as guarantor for credit
cards for Yeltsin and both his daughters, according to the Banca del
Gottardo which issued the cards. Carla del Ponte, at that time a Swiss
public prosecutor contacted me in 1997 and asked me to be ready to
testify in the case. Later she invited the Russian investigating
prosecutor Yuri Skuratov to Switzerland and put me in touch with him.
At that time she already had a reputation as a great fighter for justice
and I therefore did as she asked. That was an almost fatal error.
Elsässer: Why?
Turover: I was dependent on her honesty and had made it clear to her
from the start that my testimony placed my life in danger. I was still
at the time working as an advisor to the Russian authorities, i.e. for
the very people I was incriminating with these documents. So what did
Ms del Ponte do? She gave my full name and job to the press. This was
as if I had given information to the US Drug Enforcement Agency about
the Escobar Clan out of Medellin and then, while still in the lions'
den, read in the New York Times that I was the chief witness against
Escobar. In my case, it was Moscow rather than Medellin and the
newspaper was the Corriere della Sera but the effect was the same. I
was in big trouble and saved my life by hurriedly getting out of
Moscow. Since then, for the past three years, I have been living
undercover. I have Carla del Ponte to thank for this. She told the
hit-men where to find me.
Elsässer: Isn't that an exaggeration? How is a Swiss Federal
Prosecutor responsible for an article in an Italian newspaper?
Turover: Both the Corriere journalists got all their information from
del Ponte, including my mobile phone number. They told me so
themselves, because they knew my life was in danger.
Elsässer: Del Ponte has denied that.
Turover: Then she's not telling the truth. And I've already said this
many times and she has never threatened to sue for slander. The reason
is simple: she has no proof, but I do.
Elsässer: Mabetex boss Pacolli is not only a construction magnate, but
is also said to have close ties to the Kosovo Albanian KLA terrorists.
Turover: That's right. He himself has stated that at least until 2000
his group owned the Kosovo Albanian daily "Bota Sot" which even the OSCE
condemned for racist articles. Its agitation was aimed mainly at the
Serbs, but it also made an anti-Semitic attack on me as the "Jew
Turover".
Elsässer: If it were the case that the Yeltsin clan had received Kosovo
Albanian bribes, this might explain his behaviour in spring 1999. As
NATO prepared for war against Yugoslavia, he didn't lift a finger to
help the Serbs, his supposed brother people. At the Rambouillet
Conference, when the NATO states took an extremely biased pro-Albanian
position, Moscow didn't protest, although its diplomats were at the
negotiating table. Did the Kosovo Albanians buy Yeltsin's passivity?
Turover: That's possible. We're looking here at a symbiosis of
politics, plunder and money laundering on a large scale.
Elsässer: And del Ponte?
Turover: All the preliminary inquiries in the Mabetex case in
Switzerland were politically abandoned at the highest level. Moreover,
the documents that del Ponte had received from her Russian colleague
Skuratov somehow ended up in Pacolli's possession. He reported back to
his Russian friends Yeltsin and Borodin and subsequently Skuratov, an
honest and competent lawyer, was shunted aside, in spite of three almost
unanimous resolutions in his support from the Russian Senate. The end
of Skuratov was also the end of the Moscow Mabetex case - the
proceedings were finally abandoned in December 2000.
Elsässer: Was del Ponte acting to protect the Albanian Mafia or the
Yeltsin clan?
Turover: Neither. She acts only in her own interest. She is
indifferent to political goals. Look at the point in time when she made
public what she knew about the Mabetex case, including my name - the end
of August 1999. That was a blow not only to me, but to Yeltsin too.
It's true that she later failed to follow through on the case, but at
that moment her revelations did serious damage to Yeltsin. The
immediate background was the spectacular coup by Russian elite units in
Kosovo in summer 1999; after the ceasefire they occupied Pristina
airport, getting there before NATO. According to the British head of
KFOR, Michael Jackson, this could have led to world war three. Moscow
was playing for high stakes. It wanted its own occupation zone in
Kosovo to protect the Serbs. In this situation Yeltsin had to be
repudiated. The current US Foreign Minister, Madeleine Albright,
therefore met del Ponte at London Heathrow airport in July 1999 and
probably spelt all this out to her. So then del Ponte went public with
her revelations about Yeltsin in Corriere della Sera and in
mid-September Albright in a statement on CNN stoked up the heat about
Russian government corruption. Yeltsin had to fear an effort to impeach
him and then prosecution. He was let off the hook by two bombings in
Moscow, allegedly by Chechen terrorists. Russian troops went into
Chechnya and public attention was diverted from Russiagate.
Elsässer: Was del Ponte acting as an agent of Washington in this
situation?
Turover: She is no more pro-American than she is pro-Albanian. She
acts in Swiss interests, i.e. in the interests of the Mafia in
Switzerland.
Elsässer: Explain.
Turover: Switzerland and the Swiss banks live mainly off money
laundering. All the world's dictators and major criminals deposit their
money here. Above all the canton of Tessin is exceptionally well placed
for this. People simply carry millions in suitcases and glove
compartments over the border from Italy. Every politician in Tessin
knows about it and benefits from it. And as the canton's public
prosecutor del Ponte protected this activity even before the Mabetex
case at the end of the 1990s. Take the case of a company in Chiasso
accused of money laundering for the Italian Mafia. She stopped the
proceedings. But basically del Ponte is pro-del Ponte. She would do
anything for her career, even bring a case against George W. Bush. She
is in any case a useless lawyer. To my knowledge she has never won a
case in her entire career. Her only talent is self-promotion,
self-marketing.
Elsässer: Her agreement with Albright in any case proved profitable. A
little later she became the Chief Prosecutor at the Hague, at
Washington's behest. The Zurich Weltwoche expressed surprise: "why the
Americans wanted her to succeed the difficult and prematurely ousted
Louise Arbour remains a puzzle. After all they had made no secret of
the fact that they regarded the Court as a useless waste of time".
Turover: Del Ponte and the Swiss government helped Albright and the
Americans - they're honest people, they pay their bills - therefore
rewarded her with the Hague job. Here too she has sold herself
brilliantly. With her, the trial is a total disaster. She has nothing
on Milosevic, and legally he ought therefore to be released
immediately. And so Milosevic, who himself is nothing but a bandit and
con man, can present himself as an innocent victim of persecution and
Serb nationalism is on the rise as the recent elections showed[1]. Do
people in the Hague really not know that the Swiss Federal Government
has appointed a special investigator to look into the del Ponte affair?
How can a woman who is herself the subject of judicial investigation at
the highest level because of serious crimes stay on as Chief Prosecutor
at the UN war crimes tribunal?
Elsässer: In March 2001 you reported Carla del Ponte and persons
unknown to the police for, among other things, endangering your life and
attempted murder (tentato assassinio) in connection with Russiagate.
But the Swiss Federal Prosecutor, Valentin Roschacher, dismissed the
charges against his predecessor. So how can you say that a special
investigation of del Ponte is ongoing?
Turover: Roschacher protected del Ponte and I have therefore brought a
case against him for bias in her favour. This case has not only been
taken up, but in May 2002 the Swiss Federal Council appointed a special
investigator, Arthur Hublard, the former public prosecutor of Jura
canton. He is investigating my accusations against Roschacher - but the
del Ponte case is obviously also involved here. Furthermore, I have
laid charges against Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg.
Elsässer: Against Switzerland, not against del Ponte?
Turover: You can't bring cases against private persons in Strasbourg.
But in substance the charges relate primarily to del Ponte because as
the Swiss Federal Prosecutor she placed my life in danger. It's
preposterous for her to continue to hold office in the Hague when two
such cases are pending.
Elsässer: You are living in hiding, constantly moving house. How long
will you keep this up?
Turover: I have to, otherwise I'm dead because of del Ponte. I have of
course insured myself by making sure that in the event of my demise even
more explosive information than hitherto will be revealed. But that
does not provide me with real security. So far at least five
prosecution witnesses in the Mabetex case have been cleared out of the
way. The most recent victim was Pacolli's personal secretary, a 32-year
old woman, who was found dead in the bathroom, allegedly from a blood
clot. There was no autopsy and she was cremated the next day.
ENDS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Obviously, these disparaging remarks about Mr Milosevic do not
represent the views of the ICDSM. The reason why Carla del Ponte has
got nothing on Mr Milosevic is that the charges against him have no
basis in reality. However incompetent del Ponte may be, she has had a
multitude of "experts", investigators and compliant officials within and
outside Yugoslavia to help her in her quest for "evidence". They have
found nothing because there was never anything there to find.
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sps.org.yu/ (official SPS website)
http://www.belgrade-forum.org/ (forum for the world of equals)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend Slobodan
Milosevic)
icdsm temporary address:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/index.htm
for your donations:
http://emperor.vwh.net/icdsm/donations.htm