It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, August 06, 2020
Massive Beirut Explosion Sinks Nearby Cruise Ship
Tuesday's massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, has so far claimed the lives of 135 people and injured around 5,000. The cause of the explosion was 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, sitting unsecured in a warehouse at the Port of Beirut.
Beirut's governor, Marwan Abboud, said damage from the blast is widespread and extends over half of the city, with the cost of the damage estimated to be more than $3 billion.
For more color on the sheer destruction, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf cited Lebanese news agency National News Agency (NNA), which reports the blast also sunk a nearby cruise ship.
The Orient Queen, owned by Abou Merhi Cruises, measures an overall length of 400 feet long, was sunk by the ammonium nitrate explosion.
After the explosion, the vessel was severely left listing to the starboard, with two crew members killed and several injured.
— Cedar News - أخبار بلاد الأرز (@cedar_news) August 5, 2020
A satellite image via Maxar captured the sunken cruise ship.
One can only speculate this wasn't a normal 'explosion'
AND THAT IS HOW CONSPIRACY THEORIES BEGIN
"He Abandoned The Deadly Cargo": Meet The Mysterious Businessman At Center Of The Beirut Blast Saga
Thus far an official ongoing investigation by Lebanese authorities into the cause of Tuesday's Beirut port blast, now considered the largest non-military munitions explosion in history, has dubbed it severe "negligence".
It's now well known that over 2,500 tons of ammonium nitrate, an ultra-combustible chemical compound utilized in fertilizers and production of explosives, was allowed to sit at the port in a warehouse going back seven years.
Specifically, President Michel Aoun identified that it was no less than 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate that detonated as it was "stored unsafely" — though port officials reportedly attempted to warn the government for years that it must be moved. A number of port officials have been placed under house arrest pending the investigation.
Customs chief Badri Daher has told international media that his agency pleaded with Lebanese courts and high officials to order the chemical removed. Daher says the request for urgent removal was madesix times to the judiciary over the years, all denied.
"This did not happen," he said. The end result after the dangerous chemical — which is the same use in the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — was stored there since 2013 (also in undiluted form), was the most destructive blast in Lebanese history, killing over 135 people and injuring more than 5,000 - not to mention an estimated three billion dollars in damage.
"Legal documents, court correspondence and statements by public officials now trying to pass the buck shed light on the operations of the port, which has been dogged by allegations of widespread bribery and controlled in large measure by the militant Hezbollah group," The Washington Post reports.
And the almost unbelievable story of how the explosive substance got there has emerged. It's centered on a derelict and leaking vessel leased by a Russian businessman living in Cyprus. In 2013 the man identified as Igor Grechushkin, was paid $1 million to transport the high-density ammonium nitrate to the port of Beira in Mozambique. That's when the ship, named the Rhosus, left the Black Sea port of Batumi, in Georgia.
But amid mutiny by an unpaid crew, a hole in the ship's hull, and constant legal troubles, the ship never made it. Instead, it entered the port of Beirut where it was impounded by Lebanese authorities over severe safety issues, during which time the ammonium nitrate was transferred off, and the largely Ukrainian crew was prevented from disembarking, leading to a brief international crisis among countries as Kiev sought the safe return of its nationals.
Meanwhile, Igor Grechushkin - believed to still be living in Cyprus - reportedlysimply abandoned the dangerously subpar vessel he leased, as well as its crew, never to be heard from again.
"...the vessel was abandoned by her owners after charterers and cargo concern lost interest in the cargo. The vessel quickly ran out of stores, bunker and provisions."
The ammonium nitrate was supposed to be auctioned off, but this never happened. Apparently exasperated customs and dock officials even suggested Lebanese farmers could simply spread it across their fields for a good crop yield. But not even this simple solution was heeded, nor proposals to give it to the Lebanese Army.
Via The Siberian Times: "The crew - eight Ukrainian and two Russian men - was forced to stay on board of the vessel while the owner Grechushkin declared himself bankrupt and ‘abandoned the ship’. Lebanese authorities agreed to let six out of ten sailors to leave the country, others were left stranded on the ship for almost a year.
Instead the deadly substance languished at port, and the Rhosus sank in the harbor years later. The last crew members weren't allowed to leave the ship and return home until August 2014. Grechushkin may have paid for their return tickets at that time.
“Owing to the risks associated with retaining the Ammonium Nitrate on board the vessel, the port authorities discharged the cargo onto the port’s warehouses,” lawyers acting on behalf of creditors wrote in 2015. “The vessel and cargo remain to date in port awaiting auctioning and/or proper disposal,” it added.
And then later, more warnings, which apparently are in writing in legal documents:
“In view of the serious danger posed by keeping this shipment in the warehouses in an inappropriate climate,” Shafik Marei, the director of Lebanese customs, wrote in May 2016, “we repeat our request to demand the maritime agency to re-export the materials immediately.”
Astoundingly, even lawyers which had represented the effectively abandoned crew of the ship (which Ukrainian media at the time said were "hostages" of the Lebanese government) while it had been detained at port warned Lebanese government officials that the sensitive cargo was in danger “of sinking or blowing up at any moment”.
Yet these series of warnings went unheeded for years amid a notoriously corrupt and inept Lebanese system.
Meanwhile, the fate of the man originally at the center of the saga, whose decision to simply abandon the leaky ammonium nitrate laden ship in the first place, remains somewhat of a mystery and is now largely being overlooked in international media reports. Strangely, it doesn't even appear that Lebanese law enforcement is eager to talk to him just yet.
Cypriot media is saying Igor Grechushkin is not a Cypriot passport holder but is indeed residing in the EU country. Local authorities have indicated they are ready to bring him in for questioning, but they haven't received a request from either Lebanese authorities or Interpol. Cypriot police spokesman Christos Andreou announced Thursday: “We have already contacted Interpol Beirut and expressed our readiness to provide them with any assistance they need, if and when our assistance is requested.”
Why hasn't this happened? So far a few scant details have emerged via a Russia-based English language publication called The Siberian Times. It's also included what it says is the first photograph to have emerged of Grechushkin.
First pictures emerge of a Russian man whose ammonium nitrate cargo detonated in the port of Beirut. The 2,750 tonnes cargo of Khabarovsk-born businessman Igor Grechushkin was detained in Lebanon in 2013 https://t.co/hbu1VJgrespic.twitter.com/yQZqzcBIya
‘The owner of the ship Igor Grechushkin effectively abandoned the ship and the remaining crew.'
'He is not providing us with money, he completely deprived us of all means of communication.
'He told us that he went bankrupt and while I don’t believe him, the most important thing is that he gave up on both the people and the cargo’, wrote captain Boris Prokoshev back in June 2014 in a desperate plea to international organisations, diplomats, authorities of Ukraine and the authorities of the port of Beirut to release them.
Igor Grechushkin is reported to be still residing in Cyprus with his wife.
The Daily Mail has since republished the photographs of Grechushkin and his wife, writing that the Russian businessman "currently lives in Cyprus with wife Irina - has been accused of abandoning his ship in Beirut loaded with the lethal load."
Given that Lebanese officials are now decrying a "crime against humanity" in having stored the deadly cargo at the port in the first place, one would think Grechushkin would at least be subject of investigation along with whatever top Lebanese officials willfully ignored the ticking time bomb in their midst.
Beirut's accidental cargo: how an unscheduled port visit led to disaster
Maria Vasilyeva MOSCOW (Reuters) - The chemicals that went up in flames in Beirut’s deadliest peace-time explosion arrived in the Lebanese capital seven years ago on a leaky Russian-leased cargo ship that, according to its captain, should never have stopped there. “They were being greedy,” said Boris Prokoshev, who was captain of the Rhosus in 2013 when he says the owner told him to make an unscheduled stop in Lebanon to pick up extra cargo.
Prokoshev said the ship was carrying 2,750 tonnes of a highly combustible chemical from Georgia to Mozambique when the order came to divert to Beirut on its way through the Mediterranean.
The crew were asked to load some heavy road equipment and take it to Jordan’s Port of Aqaba before resuming their journey onto Africa, where the ammonium nitrate was to be delivered to an explosives manufacturer.
But the ship was never to leave Beirut, having tried and failed to safely load the additional cargo before becoming embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute over port fees.
“It was impossible,” Prokoshev, 70, told Reuters of the operation to try and load the extra cargo. “It could have ruined the whole ship and I said no,” he said by ‘phone from his home in the Russian resort town of Sochi on the Black Sea coast.
The captain and lawyers acting for some creditors accused the ship’s owner of abandoning the vessel and succeeded in having it arrested. Months later, for safety reasons, the ammonium nitrate was unloaded and put in a dock warehouse.
On Tuesday, that stockpile caught fire and exploded not far from a built-up residential area of the city. The huge blast killed 145 people, injured 5,000, flattened buildings and made more than a quarter of a million people homeless.
Boris Prokoshev, captain of cargo vessel Rhosus (C), boatswain Boris Musinchak (L) and a crew member pose in the port of Beirut, Lebanon, in a summer 2014 photograph. REUTERS/Personal archives of Boris Musinchak
The ship might have succeeded in leaving Beirut, had it managed to load the additional cargo.
The crew had stacked the equipment, including excavators and road-rollers, on top of the doors to the cargo hold which held the ammonium nitrate below, according to the ship’s Ukrainian boatswain, Boris Musinchak. But the hold doors buckled.
“The ship was old and the cover of the hold bent,” Musinchak said by ‘phone. “We decided not to take risks.”
The captain and three crew spent 11 months on the ship while the legal dispute dragged on, without wages and with only limited supplies of food. Once they left, the ammonium nitrate was unloaded.
“The cargo was highly explosive. That’s why it was kept on board when we were there ... That ammonium nitrate had a very high concentration,” Prokoshev said.
BOUND FOR MOZAMBIQUE
Prokoshev identified the ship’s owner as Russian businessman Igor Grechushkin. Attempts to contact Grechushkin were unsuccessful.
The ammonium nitrate was sold by Georgian fertiliser maker Rustavi Azot LLC, and was to be delivered to a Mozambique explosives maker, Fabrica de Explosivos.
A senior representative for Fabrica de Explosivos did not immediately respond when sent a request for comment on LinkedIn.
Levan Burdiladze, the Rustavi Azot plant director, told Reuters that his company had only operated the chemical factory for the last three years and so he could not confirm whether the ammonium nitrate was produced there.
He called the decision to store the material in Beirut port a “gross violation of safe storage measures, considering that ammonium nitrate loses its useful properties in six months.”
Initial Lebanese investigations into what happened have pointed to inaction and negligence in the handling of the potentially dangerous chemical.
Lebanon’s cabinet on Wednesday agreed to place all Beirut port officials who have overseen storage and security since 2014 under house arrest, ministerial sources said.
The head of Beirut port and the head of customs said that several letters were sent to the judiciary asking for the material be removed, but no action was taken.
Reuters could not immediately reach Lebanon’s justice minister for comment. The Justice Ministry is closed for three days of national mourning.
According to Prokoshev, the ship had been leaking but was seaworthy when it sailed into Beirut in September 2013. However, he said Lebanese authorities paid little attention to the ammonium nitrate, which had been stacked in the hull in large sacks.
“I feel sorry for the people (killed or injured in the blast). But local authorities, the Lebanese, should be punished. They did not care about the cargo at all,” he said.
The abandoned Rhosus sank where she was moored in Beirut harbour, according to a May, 2018 email from a lawyer to Prokoshev, which said it had gone down “recently”.
Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington in Dubai, Samia Nakhoul and Laila Bassam in Beirut, Maria Tsvetkova in Moscow, Victoria Waldersee in Lisbon, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi, Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia, Michele Kambas in Nicosia and Jonathan Saul in London; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Mark Bendeich
Macron promises angry Beirut crowds aid won't go to 'corrupt hands'
BEIRUT/PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron promised angry Lebanese crowds in shattered Beirut that aid to rebuild the city would not go to “corrupt hands” and he urged the political authorities to carry out reforms or risk plunging Lebanon deeper into crisis. French President Emmanuel Macron gestures as he arrives at the devastated site of the explosion at the port of Beirut, Lebanon August 6, 2020. Thibault Camus/Pool via REUTERS
Macron was speaking during the first visit by a foreign leader to the Lebanese capital since the biggest blast in its history tore through the city, killing at least 145 people, injured 5,000 and leaving swathe of the capital in tatters.
After visiting the port at the epicentre of the blast, Macron was greeted by crowds in nearby Gemmayze street, one of the most damaged in the city, shouting chants against the political establishment and endemic corruption.
“I guarantee you, this aid will not go to corrupt hands,” said Macron, who was wearing a black tie in mourning.
He promised to send more medical and other aid to Lebanon, while those around him chanted “Revolution” and “The people want the fall of the regime.”
“I will talk to all political forces to ask them for a new pact. I am here today to propose a new political pact to them,” he said, shaking hands on roads strewn with rubble and flanked by shops with windows blown out.
Residents, shop owners and volunteers have led clean-up efforts in the popular street of cafes and restaurants, where the blast ripped out balconies and smashed store facades.
Macron was applauded by the crowds in the neighbourhood, in a mainly Christian part of the capital, with chants of “Vive la France! Help us! You are our only hope!”.
Some also chanted against President Michel Aoun, who is a Maronite Christian under Lebanon’s political arrangement of dividing powerful positions between sects.
‘HOME TRUTHS’
Macron then headed to the Baabda presidential palace, where he was due to hold talks with Aoun, Prime Minister Hassan Diab, who is a Sunni Muslim, and Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament who is a Shi’ite.
After that, he will meet other political groups and civil society at the French ambassador’s residence.
France has long sought to support its former colony and has sent emergency aid since the blast. But it has joined other Western nations in pressing for reforms to root out corruption, cut spiralling budget spending and reduce a mountain of debt.
Shortly after landing in Beirut, Macron said France’s solidarity with the Lebanese people was unconditional, but said he wanted to deliver some “home truths” to political figures.
“Beyond the blast, we know the crisis here is serious, it involves the historic responsibility of leaders in place,” Macron told reporters after being met at the airport by Aoun.
“We can’t do without telling each other some home truths,” he added.
“If reforms are not carried out, Lebanon will continue to sink,” he said, citing reforms to the energy sector, as Lebanon suffers acute power shortages, and public tenders, as well as measures to fight corruption.
Officials blamed the blast on a huge stockpile of a highly explosive material stored for years in unsafe conditions at Beirut port. The government ordered some port workers arrested.
Many Lebanese, who have lost jobs and watched savings evaporate in a financial crisis, say the blast was symptomatic of neglect and corruption in the political system.
Reporting by Michel Rose; additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Edmund Blair
Key Wirecard 'Business Partner' Turns Up Dead In The Philippines After Mafia Links Exposed
Wirecard's collapse was forestalled for years thanks to Germany's financial regulator BaFin, which aided the fraud by targeting journalists (most notably the FT's Dan McCrum) who sought to expose the crude shell game used by the company to mask the fact that 2/3rds of its reported profits were pure make-believe.
Two months after one of Europe's biggest accounting frauds was exposed by an "independent" report ordered by the company, Wirecard's ex-CEO is under house arrest as he awaits trial for fraud charges, while his former No. 2, ex-COO (and purported Russian intelligence asset) Jens Marsalek, remains a fugitive from justice (it's believed he's hiding in Russia). FT reporters digging into Wirecard's shady payments business have recently stumbled upon a disturbing link to one of Italy's most powerful crime syndicates: The 'Ndrangheta, a network of organized crime families based in the southern Italian region of Calabria. Apparently, a significant chunk of the "legitimate" profits that Wirecard managed to generate was tied to its work as a de-facto money laundering network for organized crime groups in Italy, Albania and Russia, the FT reports in a story entitled "Wirecard processed payments for Mafia-linked casino".
Now, one of the owners of a Wirecard "payments partner" based in Manila who received millions of euros in "inward remittances" from the company over his - and was the subject of an FT investigation more than a year ago as the paper was trying to piece together the elaborate shell game being run by the company. That trek took the paper and its reporters to the Philippines, the country where Wirecard claimed to be hiding some $2 billion in profits that auditors never bothered to check.
That man's name was Christopher Bauer. And as the FT reported Thursday, Bauer, 44, has apparently died under mysterious circumstances just weeks after Philippine authorities said they were investigating Bauer and his wife, Belinda Bauer, in a probe involving Wirecard’s partner businesses.
Bauer and his death was reported to a civil registry in Manila last week. Filipino officials repeatedly told the FT they couldn't confirm if the Bauer who died was the same one who ran a Wirecard subsidiary that was, apparently, a key player in the company's sweeping fraud.
Menardo Guevarra, the Philippine secretary of justice, told the Financial Times he had “to determine first if the deceased person is the same person subject of the ongoing investigation”. He would decide whether further investigation into Mr Bauer’s reported death was necessary after obtaining a copy of the death certificate. The Bauers — identified in an Financial Times investigation last year — owned PayEasy as of 2017, according to public filings, and have represented Centurion Online Payment International, a second partner business, in interactions with Wirecard. Mr Bauer in 2015 “reportedly received an inward remittance from Wirecard Asia for consultancy services rendered”, said Mr Guevarra without disclosing an amount.
On closer inspection, Bauer, it appears, was paid hundreds of millions of euros to bring in what appears to be laundered mafia money through digital gaming companies and other clients of PayEasy, the subsidiary that Bauer owned and ran (but was a critical node in Wirecard's network).
Bauer also appears to have been closely tied to Wirecard's fugitive COO Jan Marsalek, who is believed to be an operative working with Russian intelligence.
Mr Bauer, who told auditors from KPMG that he was a Wirecard employee before joining PayEasy some 12 years ago, also owned Froehlich Tours, a bus and coach rental business that shares an office with PayEasy in Manila.
At a meeting in Manila in March, Mr Bauer and Wirecard’s fugitive former chief operating officer Jan Marsalek briefed KPMG and EY on PayEasy’s business, telling the auditors that the company specialised in processing payments for “high-risk clients” in online gaming, gambling and porn, according to a special audit by KPMG.
The Philippine authorities are now investigating how immigration records were fabricated to show Mr Marsalek arriving in the country in June and leaving the next day for China. CCTV footage showed no such arrival.
Notices in a German newspaper appear to confirm Bauer's death, and social media posts made by family members appear to commemorate his death.
On July 27, Mrs Bauer posted an image of a black ribbon on Facebook, while her daughter posted a photo of an urn bearing her father’s name two days later. Mr Bauer’s family on August 1 published a death notice in a regional newspaper in Hesse, Germany, where his parents are living. Mr Bauer’s parents declined to comment. Mr Bauer’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Munich prosecutors, who are leading the criminal probe into Wirecard in Germany, said they had not received any official notice about Mr Bauer’s death. They declined to comment if an arrest warrant against him had been issued.
One shady character hanging out outside Bauer's home in Manila told a FT reporter that he had died of a "heart attack". But considering Bauer's age, that seems unlikely.
Mr Bauer’s cause of death remains unclear. The civil registry declined to comment, citing the data privacy act. A guard at the Bauers’ gated community said he had died of a heart attack. A group of men playing cards outside the Bauers’ house in Manila said the widow could not comment and suggested speaking to her lawyer, whose contact details they declined to disclose. The men were standing by the property’s gate, which was marked by the logo of a local motorcycle club called Iron Cross Sons, whose website features scantily dressed women with Nazi-themed attire.
The men who spoke to the FT reporter at Bauer's home were apparently members of a motorcycle club based in the Philippines whose members wear Nazi-inspired insignia, according to their website.
Links to Wirecard's Russian-intelligence-linked COO? Check. Gangs of Nazis bikers hanging out outside his former home to scare off journalists? Check. Evidence that Bauer was a key link between a multinational corporation once listed on the DAX 30 and organized crime syndicates willing to pay for the privilege of efficiently and safely laundering their money? Check.
We suspect that whatever caused Bauer's death, it probably wasn't natural.
