War Profiteering :
London's "Peace" Orchestra accepts funding
from billionaire fugitive wanted for arms smuggling,
influence peddling, money laundering, and tax evasion

Fugitive's funding the World Orchestra for Peace follows other recent examples
in which he has distracted from his alleged war crimes by generous donations to charities.

Valery Gergiev, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra,
will lead the concert in West Jerusalem on October 19. (concert listing)

France to go ahead with trial against Gaydamak in October

Despite what appears, from independent investigative journalism, to be overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Arcadi Gaydamak has yet to be tried for his alleged career of war profiteering because he fled France eight years ago, and settled in Israel, which will not extradite him.

A central figure in the bloody scandal known as Angolagate, Gaydamak is believed to have constructed a extraordinarily profitable web of arms smuggling and money laundering.

Two reports follow, one from Amnesty International, one from The Center for Public Integrity, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The World Orchestra for Peace postal address is 26 Lyndale Avenue, London NW2 2QA. Telephone +44 (0)20.7317.8433 or +44 (0)7967.108974. (Email addresses on the orchestra's website appear not to work.) Charles Kaye is the Director of the orchestra.

The full text to the Amnesty International report below is available here

The Center for Public Integrity, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

full report here

Extracts here :

In December 2000, Arcadi Gaydamak fled France, where he was wanted for illegal gun running, tax evasion, money laundering and corruption. He stood accused of helping turn one of the world's longest-standing wars into a honey pot of enrichment for himself and influential friends in Angola, Israel, Russia and France. [He is] a fugitive from justice and a central figure in an arms scandal that had rocked the French political establishment.

Gaydamak claims to be among the five richest men in Israel, which would put him in the billionaire category. He owes this vast fortune, he said, to shrewd speculation on the Russian stock market, particularly oil stocks, and not to the profits of war. Gaydamak insists he was never an arms dealer, rather a "financier of deals." A nearly two-year global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has revealed, however, that Gaydamak epitomized the business of war in the post-Cold War era – an entrepreneur with global ties to arms smuggling, resource exploitation and private military companies.

As East Europe's old regimes crumbled in 1989, Gaydamak's financial genius found its true expression. He diversified and expanded into more lucrative import-export trades with the former Soviet Republics in coal, meat, wheat and, finally, weapons. According to ICIJ's investigation, Gaydamak created a maze of enterprises in Russia, the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, England, Switzerland, and Israel. In France, he formed the International Company of Technology and Investment. In London, among others, it was Minotaure (UK) Ltd and Edsaco Holdings (UK) Ltd; in Jersey, Edsaco Participation Ltd; in Luxembourg, Extrainvest, Palmeto, Luxstreet, and Pivoine; in the Netherlands, Reminvest BV; and he registered at least one company, Rangoon, in the Isle of Man.

Gaydamak seldom signed or put his name to anything. The wide network of shell companies, and the labyrinthine paper structures of his companies, some of them administered by offshore trust accounts, gave him further cover.

Gaydamak was "remarkably capable of profiting from the political and commercial opportunities offered by the end of the Soviet Union," according to a document prepared by the Direction de Surveillance de Territoire, or DST, France's domestic security service. A Dutch intelligence report obtained by ICIJ said that Gaydamak, through his connections in Russia, was able to purchase old Soviet and East European weapons systems that still had markets in war zones in Africa, Asia or Latin America. For example, according to the Dutch report, the Russian state-owned arms company Rosvoorouzhenie was the majority (67.5 percent) shareholder in the Slovakian arms manufacturing company, ZTS Osos, whose weapons Gaydamak sold to the Angolan government during the early 1990s. An Interpol document obtained by ICIJ notes that in 1995 Gaydamak was the representative of ZTS Osos in Russia.

Gaydamak also attracted the attention of Russian and French law enforcement agencies. According to a 1995 communiqué from Russia's Interpol office, a copy of which was obtained by ICIJ under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, American Interpol officials in Washington, D.C., were alerted that Gaydamak was "suspected by our law enforcement authorities of firearms and drug trafficking." In the April 19 letter, the Russians said Gaydamak was "reported to be one of the members of criminal association having international connections" and that "Moscow Organized Crime Control Department advised us the subject was exercising threats through his connections in Moscow to the Bank of Russian Credit."

Russian Interpol officials also contacted their counterparts in France for assistance in investigating Gaydamak. In April 1996, Russian Interpol said Gaydamak was "under suspicion of ... being a member of a criminal organization operating at international scale."

France's foreign intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Secrete Exterieure (DGSE), reported that Gaydamak was a business partner of Alimjar Tokhtakhounov, "a leading member of the Russian Mafia ... involved in kidnappings of Russian exiles in Germany and racketeering," according to a July 28, 1998, DGSE file, shown to ICIJ. Judicial and police sources in France suspected Gaydamak of being involved with Tokhtakhounov in a scheme to launder money, using complicated transactions with real estate and Russian art.

Documents from Russian Interpol from the mid-1990s seem to support suspicions that Gaydamak was protected by political associates in the French Interior Ministry, which controls the police and the French secret service. Russian Interpol complained that their Paris counterparts were ignoring their requests for help in the investigation of Gaydamak's links to criminal organizations: "Our previous messages (of January and March 1994) have never been answered (by French Interpol)," the Russian agents wrote in an April 1996 telex.

A clique of gunrunners
Much of what is publicly known about Gaydamak's international dealings is the result of an extraordinary influence peddling, money laundering and illegal arms sales scandal involving Angola that erupted in France in December 2000 and came to be known as "Angolagate."

The investigation began when two French prosecutors were appointed to examine suspicions of bribery and corruption in the state's weapons export business. The resultant findings rocked the French political establishment and led to the highly publicized arrest of Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the son of former President Francois Mitterrand who is free on bail pending his trial for influence-peddling. Other leading French politicians, such as former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, were implicated in the scandal, but never charged.

A gateway to riches
Angola in the 1990s was not a country for the squeamish. The capital city Luanda, built for 600,000 people, held up to 3 million – almost a third of the population – as people fled fighting in the interior. Corruption was rampant. When Falcone and Gaydamak came to Angola to do business in 1994, the monthly minimum wage was 240,000 kwanzas – about 50 U.S. cents. It cost twice that much to send a child to private lessons (very little of the state school system was intact), a quarter of a month's wages for a loaf of bread, one-eighth for a bucket of clean water, and one-sixteenth to use a toilet in private. Women sold goods and themselves in the marketplace in a desperate scramble to keep up with inflation, estimated by the World Bank at 1,800 percent. Anything with the slightest value was bartered or sold. One family, in the toothpaste business, had their children rummage through trash dumps for spent toothpaste tubes that the adults would then scrape out until they had a full tube to sell.

In this sadly reduced nation, Falcone and Gaydamak saw the gateway to a fortune. Angolan oil fields, already pumping more than half a million barrels a day in 1994, had known reserves comparable to Kuwait. But Angola also had diamonds and other minerals and, as a developing country with an infrastructure destroyed by war, had to import everything and rebuild from scratch. In recognition of his key position as war financier, Gaydamak said that Dos Santos appointed him as economic adviser, issued him a diplomatic passport and made him an authorized signatory on the bank account of the Angolan government.

In late 1994, at the same time the Angolans were receiving weapons via Gaydamak and Falcone, they hired an army of South African mercenaries – warriors of the defunct apartheid state – known as Executive Outcomes. EO, as the company was called, had been a front company for a dirty tricks and hit squad run by South Africa's military intelligence. It was first hired by the Angolan oil company, Sonangol, to protect the company's assets. Drawn from some of South Africa's most notorious military units, the men who worked for EO proved effective because they understood the nature of the bush war and they knew the enemy – in fact, they had been one-time UNITA allies. They provided high-tech skills in communication and weapons systems and piloted the Angolan government's fleet of MiG fighter jets. They also offered training, intelligence, logistics and battlefield planning. The combination of fresh arms and South African mercenaries helped the Angola government force Savimbi to the peace table.

Though that was not to last, Gaydamak was inspired. He saw private military services as a further commercial opportunity and teamed up with two former senior officials of Mossad, Danny Yatom and Avi Dagan, to create a private military company, which they called Strategic Consulting Group. The Israelis, like the South Africans, had a track record of providing security in Angola. In September 1992, Israel had armed the Angolan police, preventing Luanda from falling to UNITA, though the Angolan police were accused of committing atrocities against UNITA supporters.

Yatom met Gaydamak through Moshe Levy, the owner of Lordan-Levdan, another private military company that was training the president of Congo-Brazzaville's private militias under a $50 million contract. The Israelis were under retired Brig. Gen. Zeev Zachrin, who had trained the pro-Israeli militia in Southern Lebanon. But the Congo-Brazzaville deal, which also involved a trade for oil concessions, was controversial in Israel, and Zachrin moved over to Angola, where he took charge of Gaydamak's projects there. Yatom went to Angola, met with Dos Santos and offered him a personal security package to train the presidential guard for $50 million. But even to Dos Santos, this seemed overpriced, and the contract was not awarded. Yatom left the partnership when he was appointed security advisor to then Israeli President Ehud Barak in 1999. Dagan continues to work for Gaydamak.