Axis of Evil
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
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December 20, 2006
Goldman CEO's $53.4M Bonus
Breaks Record
By Vinnee Tong, AP Business Writer
Goldman Sachs Breaks Wall Street CEO Bonus Record,
Pays Blankfein $53.4M
NEW YORK (AP) -- John Mack's record for the biggest bonus ever paid to a Wall Street CEO didn't last even a week. It was smashed by the $53.4 million that Goldman Sachs gave its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein.
The bonanza for Blankfein included a cash bonus of $27.3 million, with the rest paid in stock and options. He took the helm of the investment bank in June after President Bush nominated Henry Paulson to be Treasury secretary.
The record payday, disclosed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, breaks the one set just last Thursday when Morgan Stanley disclosed that it paid CEO Mack $40 million in stock and options. Mack, who is 62, rejoined Morgan Stanley 18 months ago to turn around the company after the ouster of Philip Purcell. Mack's short-lived record bested one set in 2005 by Goldman's Paulson, who was given $38.3 million.
Other than Blankfein, 11 other senior Goldman executives as a group were granted slightly more than $150 million in shares and stock options. The highest paid among those were Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried, who both hold the titles of president and chief operating officer. They each received $25.6 million in shares and options in 2006.
Any cash bonuses for the other executives were not mentioned in the filings.
The bonuses come after Goldman reported last week that it had earned the highest yearly profit in the history of Wall Street. Net profit rose 70 percent to $9.4 billion on revenue of $37.67 billion. Goldman and other firms have benefitted from a surging market for takeovers and a strong stock market.
Goldman said last week it had set aside a total of $16.5 billion this year for salaries, bonuses and benefits. On average, this would translate to $622,000 per employee.
The bonuses come in a year in which Goldman shareholders have benefitted from a rise of about 58 percent in the company's share price, the strongest returns of any Wall Street investment house.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. have said they would pay about $12 billion in compensation each. Lehman said last week it paid its chief executive, Richard Fuld, $10.9 million in stock this year...
Yahoo Finance
December 6, 2005
MMC CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER MICHAEL CHERKASKY
TO SPEAK AT GOLDMAN SACHS FINANCIAL SERVICES
CEO CONFERENCE 2005 ON DECEMBER 6
Marsh & McLennan Press Release
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, November 28, 2005 - Michael G. Cherkasky, president and chief executive officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. (MMC), will speak at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services CEO Conference 2005 on Tuesday, December 6, 2005, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time....
MMC is a global professional services firm with annual revenues exceeding $12 billion. It is the parent company of Marsh, the world's leading risk and insurance services firm; Guy Carpenter, the world's leading risk and reinsurance specialist; Kroll, the world's leading risk consulting company; Mercer, a major global provider of human resource and specialty consulting services; and Putnam Investments, one of the largest investment management companies in the United States.
Approximately 59,000 employees provide analysis, advice, and transactional capabilities to clients in over 100 countries. Its stock (ticker symbol: MMC) is listed on the New York, Chicago, Pacific, and London stock exchanges....
June 3, 2005
Marsh & McLennan reviewing strategy
No current plans to sell Putnam unit, company says
By Alistair Barr, MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Marsh & McLennan Cos. said Friday that it's started a strategic review of all its businesses but added there are no current plans to sell its Putnam Investments unit.
The company's comments followed a Friday report in the Boston Globe that said Marsh & McLennan had hired investment banks Goldman Sachs Group (GS) to come up with a value for its Putnam mutual-fund and Mercer consulting divisions.
The move could be a precursor to a breakup of the giant financial-services company, the newspaper added.
"An internal strategic review focusing on all our businesses is underway," Marsh & McLennan spokeswoman Barbara Perlmutter said Friday. "There are no current plans to sell Putnam."...
Marsh & McLennan was rocked last year by a bid-rigging scandal at its main Marsh insurance brokerage division. After being sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in October, the company settled for $850 million and adopted a slew of reforms.
Despite engineering a settlement, Marsh & McLennan shares have continued to stagnate.
The stock slumped by almost half in the days following Spitzer's suit but are still more than a third below their level before the scandal broke in October. Marsh shares were up 19 cents at $28.89 in Friday trades....
Putnam Chief Executive Ed Haldeman said on Thursday that Marsh & McLennan "will look at all of the businesses, and, since Putnam is one of those businesses, they will think about that."
Haldeman also cautioned that the outcome of Marsh's review isn't certain and added that it's possible the company could still hold on to Putnam.
May 18, 2004
Marsh & McLennan to buy Kroll
$1.9 billion offer delivers 32% premium for consultant
By Luisa Beltran, CBS.MarketWatch.com
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Marsh & McLennan Co. unveiled a $1.9 billion cash acquisition of risk consulting firm Kroll late Tuesday.
Marsh & McLennan Co. (MMC ) , the nation's leading insurance broker, will pay $37 a share for each outstanding Kroll (KROL) share. The price represents a near 32 percent premium to Kroll's closing share price of $28.10 Tuesday, Marsh said in disclosing the transaction after the market closed.
Both Marsh and Kroll's boards have approved the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter. The transaction, subject to customary closing conditions, still needs approval by Kroll shareholders.
The acquisition is expected to add to earnings in 2005, Marsh said.
"The addition of Kroll will broaden and deepen the capabilities of our fast-growing risk consulting and advisory businesses by adding services which clients need to reduce the impact of an adverse event," said Marsh Chairman Jeffrey Greenberg in a statement Tuesday.
Jules Kroll, founder and executive chairman of Kroll, will vote his 7.3 percent of company shares for the transaction. Michael Cherkasky, Kroll's CEO, plus eight other Kroll senior managers, will also back the transaction, Marsh said.
New York-based Kroll, a leading risk consulting firm, provides services such as background checks, drug testing, computer forensics and data recovery. Clients include law firms and celebrities.
The transaction will broaden Marsh's risk and insurance services, adding corporate restructuring, business intelligence and investigation, employee screening and security services.
Once the deal is consummated, Kroll will become part of New York-based Marsh's risk and insurance services unit.
Greenhill & Co. (GHL ) advised Marsh while Goldman Sachs (GS) and Morgan Joseph served as Kroll's advisers.
Shares of Marsh added 15 cents to close at $42.74 Tuesday
April 22, 2002
The Case for Bush Administration
Advance Knowledge of 9-11 Attacks
by Michael C. Ruppert
A dispassionate examination of existing reliable, open-source evidence on advance warnings of the Sept. 11 attacks provides strong and sustainable grounds to conclude the Bush Administration was in possession of sufficient advance intelligence to have prevented the attacks, had it wished to do so.
With a known intelligence budget of approximately $30 billion, it must be assumed there are classified files that only add to the weight of the available data presented here....
This article will focus on four primary areas where the U.S. had information that forewarned of the attacks in sufficient detail to have prompted their prevention. Those areas are: Documented warnings received by the United States Government (USG) from foreign intelligence services; Obvious and large scale insider stock trading in the days before the attacks; Known intelligence successes achieved by the USG in its penetrations of Al Qaeda; and, the case of Delmart “Mike” Vreeland, a U.S. Naval intelligence officer jailed in Canada at the request of U.S. authorities, who -- with his attorneys -- spent months attempting to warn USG and Canadian intelligence officials of the pending attacks, only to be rebuffed and ignored.
This article will not focus on a number of well-known and documented instances where the Bush Administration actively interfered with or curtailed investigations into Al Qaeda-linked groups that could have provided even more intelligence. Included in this category are reports by the BBC’s Gregg Palast, the French book “The Forbidden Truth,” and a lawsuit/OPR complaint filed by an active FBI agent alleging investigations that could have prevented the attacks were derailed by superiors, in some cases on orders from the White House.
WARNINGS FROM FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES
This section focuses on known advance warnings received by the U.S. government from foreign intelligence services that proved to be specific enough to have identified the date (within one week), method, targets, and perpetrators of the attacks....
As reported in the respected German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14, 2001 the German intelligence service, the BND, warned both the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.”
The story specifically referred to an electronic eavesdropping system known as Echelon, wherein a number of countries tap cell phone and electronic communications in partner countries and then pool the information. The BND warnings were also passed to the United Kingdom....
According to a Sept. 14 report in the Internet newswire online.de, German police, monitoring the phone calls of a jailed Iranian man, learned the man was telephoning USG intelligence agencies in summer 2001 to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in the week of Sept. 9. German officials confirmed the calls to the USG for the story but refused to discuss additional details.
In August 2000 French intelligence sources confirmed a man recently arrested in Boston by the FBI was an Islamic militant and a key member of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. The FBI knew the man had been taking flying lessons at the time of his arrest and was in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 13.
According to a story in Izveztia on Sept. 12, Russian intelligence warned the USG that as many as 25 suicide pilots were training for missions involving the crashing of airliners into important targets.
In an MSNBC interview on Sept. 15, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that he had ordered Russian intelligence to warn the USG “in the strongest possible terms” of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings before the attacks on Sept. 11.
As reported by CNN’s Daniel Seberg on Sept. 28, Newsbytes’ Brian McWilliams on Sept. 27 and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Odigo, the Israeli instant messaging company located in Herzliyya, Israel, received telephone calls stating that attacks on the WTC were imminent. The calls came less than two hours before the first plane hit the WTC. This information was immediately forwarded to Israeli and U.S. intelligence.
Conclusion: From just these six press stories, then, the USG had received credible advance warnings, some from heads of state, that commercial aircraft would be hijacked by as many as 25 suicide pilots at airports, with Boston a strong candidate, during the week of Sept. 9. The call to Odigo would have signaled the exact day.
No known preventive measures were taken.
INSIDER TRADING
The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that occurred before the attacks involved only companies hit hard by the attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
In order to argue that the massive and well-documented insider trading that occurred in at least seven countries immediately before the attacks of Sept. 11 did not serve as a warning to intelligence agencies, then it is necessary to argue that no one was aware of the trades as they were occurring, and that intelligence and law enforcement agencies of most industrialized nations do not monitor stock trades in real time to warn of impending attacks.
Both assertions are false.
Both assertions would also ignore the fact that the current executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for enforcement is David Doherty, a retired CIA general counsel. And also ignored is the fact that the trading in United Airlines stock -- one of the most glaring clues -- was placed through the firm Deutschebank/Alex Brown, which was headed until 1998 by the man who is now the executive director of the CIA, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard.
One wonders if it was a coincidence then, that Mayo Shattuck III, the head of the Alex Brown unit of Deutschebank -- which had its offices in the WTC -- suddenly resigned from a $30 million, three-year contract on Sept. 12, as reported by the New York Times and other papers.
The American exchanges that handle these trades, primarily the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) and the NYSE, know on a daily basis what levels of put options are purchased. “Put options” are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a given stock’s share price will fall dramatically. To quote 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, “Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market.”
It is hard to believe that they missed:
- A jump in UAL put options 90 times (not 90 percent) above normal between Sept. 6 and Sept.10, and 285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack– [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- A jump in American Airlines put options 60 times (not 60 percent) above normal on the day before the attacks. [CBS News, Sept. 26]
- No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. [Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE]
- Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in the purchase of put options on its shares. [ICT Report, Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam, Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE].
- Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. [Ibid]
These trades were certainly noticed after the attacks.
“This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you’ve ever seen in your entire life… This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence,” said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20.
“’I saw put-call numbers higher than I’ve ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets,’ said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle,” reported the Montreal Gazette on Sept. 19. The paper also wrote, “Agence France Presse, on Sept. 22, reported, ‘And Germany’s Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said on the sidelines of the meeting that a report of the investigation showed “bizarre” fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence.
“Weltke said the transactions, ‘could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge,’ particularly heavy trading in oil and gold futures.”
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, “Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, ‘it’s absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe.”
How much money was involved? Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germany’s intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13. Other experts have estimated the amount at $12 billion. CBS News gave a conservative estimate of $100 million.
Not a single U.S. or foreign investigative agency has announced any arrests or developments in the investigation of these trades, the most telling evidence of foreknowledge of the attacks. This, in spite of the fact that former Security and Exchange Commission enforcement chief William McLucas told Bloomberg News that regulators would “certainly be able to track down every trade.”
What is striking is that a National Public Radio report on Oct. 16 reported Britain’s Financial Services Authority had cleared bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading. If not bin Laden, then who else had advance knowledge? Who else had certainty that the attacks would succeed to give them confidence to make millions of dollars in stock purchases?
It has been standard and established USG policy to be alert and responsive to anything even remotely resembling an attack on U.S. companies and/or the economy. The word “remote” does not apply here. The possible claim by the Bush Administration that, ‘Gee, we just happened to miss this,’ becomes even more implausible when considering the lengths intelligence agencies go to in order to track stock trades.
Note that the Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism was the first entity to release a detailed report on the insider trading. That alone is prima facie evidence of a direct relationship between the financial markets and terrorist investigations.
CIA and the Markets
We can thank Fox News on Oct. 16 for breaking post 9-11 stories disclosing the use of sophisticated PROMIS software by the FBI and the Justice Department. A multitude of court records and investigative reports have established not only the reality, but the versatility of a program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data bases in different languages into one readable format. PROMIS has since been refined to include artificial intelligence and ”back doors” inserted by intelligence agencies to allow for surreptitious retrieval and/or removal and alteration of data.
The Fox stories clearly confirmed, especially when added to stories from last summer by the Washington Times which were based on interviews with Justice Department officials, that PROMIS was used to monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time environment.
This writer has written extensively on the software. More information can be found on the Web site at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/index.html....
CONCLUSION
There is clear and substantial evidence to suggest that the Bush Administration had sufficient foreknowledge of the attacks of Sept. 11 to have prevented them.
Rather than viewing each of the four listed areas as a separate piece of evidence, they should be considered as a body, in the exact same way exhibits presented to a jury in a criminal trial are viewed as a body.
By viewing the evidence in this manner, an unavoidable conclusion is reached -- the USG knew 25 suicide hijackers during the week of Sept. 9 were going to use United and American airlines commercial planes, some of them likely originating in Boston, to attack the WTC and the Pentagon. A multitude of press stories and intelligence reports indicate the WTC would have been the primary target.
Given the financial commitments made during insider trading activity that occurred immediately before the attacks involving businesses that were directly damaged by the attacks, the threats had clearly moved from the realm of speculation to reality. Why else would mysterious investors have risked millions of dollars to purchase the put options? There is compelling evidence to suggest these trades were noted by the CIA and other USG entities.
Recently, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., has been widely criticized in the mainstream press for raising the need for a Congressional investigation to answer some of these obvious questions. This, in spite of the fact that popular reaction indicates a different sentiment. An opinion poll, conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution just a day after McKinney’s remarks received wide public attention in a Washington Post story dated April 12, was pulled after poll numbers showed that 51 percent of the respondents agreed with McKinney.
The people seem to recognize and agree with the opinion of former CIA officer Mike Osborne who says, “I think that the U.S. government needs to get behind McKinney’s questions because her agenda is truth and justice, and nothing else.”
© COPYRIGHT 2002, FTW Publications, www.copvcia.com
Read the complete article at...
www.thepowerhour.com/911_analysis/bush-knew2.htm
# # #
"Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our Fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."
-- Abraham Lincoln
National Priorities Project - Cost of War
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Last Updated on January 20, 2008 by The Catbird