CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M NO HONOR ETC...
Leissner Was Key Goldman 1MDB Banker Not Ng, Defense Lawyer Says


Patricia Hurtado and Greg Farrell
Thu, March 3, 2022,

(Bloomberg) -- Roger Ng’s lawyer said Tim Leissner was the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who built “critical” relationships in the 1MDB scandal, not his client.

Marc Agnifilo, the lawyer, said Thursday that was why his cross-examination of Leissner frequently touched on the banker’s private life.

“Our premise is that all of the relationships he has, they’re all strategic,” Agnifilo said. “Tim Leissner was instrumental not just in his capacity as an efficient Goldman Sachs employee, but in having personal connections with people.”

Ng is accused of conspiring with Leissner and Malaysian financier Jho Low in a scheme to bribe officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi and loot hundreds of millions of dollars out of 1MDB. Leissner, who pleaded guilty in 2018, is the government’s star witness against Ng, who he described as maintaining Goldman’s relationships with Ng and others.

But Ng argues Leissner, his former boss, led those relationships. Agnifilo on Thursday was arguing to introduce into evidence an email between Leissner and former Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd. Chief Executive Officer Rohana Rozhan, whose boss owned a $650 million stake in 1MDB. Rozhan was also Leissner’s mistress.

“It is relevant in light of Mr. Leissner’s testimony that it was Mr. Ng who had these ‘critical relationships’ to help these deals move forward,” Agnifilo said. Leissner “was putting Roger in all of this when Leissner is the one who’s using connections. Sometimes he uses intimacy,” the lawyer said.

The judge said she would consider whether to allow the evidence in and rule later on Thursday.

Central bank sanctions strike at the foundations of Russia’s economy

March 4, 2022

The writer is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Of all the sanctions the west imposed on Russia last week, sanctioning Russia’s central bank is by far the most fateful. “We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy,” said Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister. This is not hyperbole. And if managed smartly by the west, these sanctions can also stop the war in Ukraine and beyond.

The possibility stems from an unsung feature of any modern central bank. The Russian central bank is, like others, not only the lender of last resort to commercial banks in its domestic currency, the rouble, but also the lender of last resort in foreign exchange. FX reserves support the exchange rate and the value of the rouble, ensure the stability of the banking system and its deposits, prevent runs on banks, bail out the foreign debt of state and private corporations and manage the sovereign wealth fund.

Western sanctions strike at these foundations of the Russian economy. And this has become possible because of the digitalisation of international finance.

Unlike in times past, most components of FX reserves are not physical certificates of government bonds or piles of cash in dollars, euros, pounds and yen. In the 21st century, they are electronic book entries on the computer ledgers of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the European Central Bank, European national central banks, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and Swiss commercial banks.

This digitalisation separates ownership and control of FX reserves. Russia owns them but western issuers and computerised holders of these assets control access to them. At the end of February, they collectively closed Russia’s access to these assets, froze them and banned all private transactions with the Russian central bank so that it cannot sell securities and cannot withdraw cash from western banks. From a source of economic strength during peacetime, FX reserves turned into the source of a crash during war.

Within a fateful 24 hours, the Russian central bank and Russians lost access to 60 per cent of FX reserves, $388bn out of a total $643bn. They lost access to entire arrays of assets: securities and deposits in western central banks ($285bn) and in western commercial banks and brokerages ($103bn). The Russian central bank is left with $135bn worth of gold in its vaults, $84bn of Chinese securities denominated in renminbi, a $5bn position in the IMF and a residual $30bn in actual cash, dollars and euros. (These are my calculations from central bank data).

With 60 per cent of FX reserves out of commission, Russia has to rely on the remaining 40 per cent, but there is no freedom to operate there either. The central bank cannot sell gold for dollars and euros because all transactions with it are prohibited and foreign bankers and dealers do not want to invite western wrath. The IMF reserve position is untouchable. Some $84bn in Chinese securities could, hypothetically, have been sold back to China, with a discount, to be paid in dollars, cut to $50bn, but China’s state banks have already refused financial deals with Russia. Which leaves only $30bn in cash — too little to prevent financial and economic ruin.

The rouble is already in freefall and the run on banks in full swing. Russian corporate and individual depositors have $280bn in dollar and euro denominated account balances with Russian commercial banks. Banks cannot have that much foreign cash on hand and the central bank doesn’t have cash to save them. Now people want to withdraw rouble deposits, not because they are afraid that next time the roubles won’t be there but because they expect that next time their bank won’t be there. The Russian people saw bank failures during the default of 1998 and expect no less.

The final implosion will be over supply chains. Businesses will demand dollars for payments. The successful part of the economy, producers of natural resources and high-value goods, will operate in dollars. The rest will have to resort to barter and endure supply interruptions, work stoppages and unemployment. The government may ban foreign currency transactions and demand that businesses trade only in roubles. This is unenforceable. The economy will break and a GDP contraction follow.

These developments will weaken the Russian war effort but, alas, may not be sufficient to stop the war. But something else may. The west can offer the Russian government a deal: cash for peace. This is akin to the IMF practice of conditional loans. The west has frozen $388bn in Russian assets. We can offer to unfreeze assets in tranches, say, $50bn a piece to save their economy in exchange for withdrawing forces from Ukraine, pledging not to ever use nuclear weapons and, generally, starting a return to humanity.

Source: Financial Times

European Deals Worth $300 Billion Left Exposed by War in Ukraine

Dinesh Nair and Ruth David
Thu, March 3, 2022


(Bloomberg) -- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left dealmakers in Europe unsure about if and when roughly $300 billion of mergers, acquisitions and listings will go ahead.

Fresh volatility in the market, rising energy prices and worries about a drawn-out war are pushing corporate boards and previously free-spending private equity firms into wait-and-watch mode. That’s raising questions about an M&A pipeline with some high-value transactions in the works.

They include Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.’s sale of its international Boots drugstore unit, Novartis AG’s potential disposal of its Sandoz generics arm and National Grid Plc’s efforts to offload a stake in its gas transmission business.

These alone represent about $45 billion of deal value, according to Bloomberg News reports, and have the potential to boost a slowing market for M&A in Europe.

Even before the invasion, the deals boom had started to show signs of fatigue in the region as gloomy economic and geopolitical forecasts soured sentiment. European deal values were down 22% year-on-year through Wednesday, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Another roughly $50 billion of possible deals could come from German national railway operator Deutsche Bahn AG selling or listing its logistics arm, KKR & Co.’s pursuit of Telecom Italia SpA, and any sale by Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc of its infant nutrition unit. And then there’s the potential for a blockbuster sale or spinoff of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s 50 billion-pound ($67 billion) consumer health unit.

Elsewhere, Russia’s military attack on Ukraine has effectively shut the market for initial public offerings in Europe.

Among the big IPOs set to kick off in the coming months in Europe are Thyssenkrupp AG’s electrolysis plant business Nucera, Eni SpA’s renewables division Plenitude, Olam International Ltd.’s food ingredients and EQT AB’s skincare business Galderma. These IPOs have the potential to create listed companies with a combined value of about $50 billion.

Volkswagen AG, meanwhile, continues to explore a blockbuster IPO of Porsche that could value the sportscar brand at more than $95 billion.

It’s unlikely big offerings will go ahead in the next few weeks. Volatility in the short to medium term could also hurt the IPO ambitions of private equity firms including CVC Capital Partners and Ardian SAS.

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Russia's financial "fortress" falters under the West's sanctions


Kate Marino
Thu, March 3, 2022


Re-created from the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center; Chart: Axios Visuals; Does not include gold held domestically. *This value also encompasses smaller financial institutions. The status of these reserves is unclear.

Russia spent seven years building a financial “fortress” that could help it withstand the impact of sanctions imposed by the West — and the keystone was $630 billion in central bank foreign exchange reserves.

Driving the news: Presumably, Russia didn’t expect the G7 nations to go so far as to freeze those reserves, which they did this week — a move nearly unprecedented in scope.

Why it matters: That fortress isn’t so strong after all if Russia can't use its billions to support its war efforts and fund domestic spending.

The G7 has locked up nearly $400 billion of that money, according to estimates by the Atlantic Council's GeoEconomics Center.

Backstory: Since March 2014, Russia has cut its foreign assets held in the U.S. and Europe, while increasing those in China and Japan, as well as its domestic gold holdings, the FT reports.

The big question: How will China handle Russia's yuan assets? China's not expected to freeze them — but faces a dilemma in how to aid its strategic partner, Russia, without running afoul of Western sanctions, Bloomberg writes.

As world scrambles for oil, Canadian producers reluctant to spend on growth

STOCK BUY BACKS, DIVIDENDS & DEAD CAPITAL

Nia Williams
Thu, March 3, 2022

Canadian Natural Resources Limited's Primrose Lake oil sands project 

is seen near Cold Lake, Alberta

By Nia Williams

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - The world is scrambling for oil after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent prices rocketing and upended global supply but producers in Canada, home to the world's third-largest reserves, have no plans to significantly boost output.

Despite the surge in oil prices to 11-year highs, Canadian companies are wary of spending aggressively to grow oil production after the pain of 2020's pandemic-induced oil price collapse. Investors are demanding strict capital discipline, while environmental opposition to new fossil fuel projects and the Canadian government's plans to cap carbon emissions are also deterring growth.

Benchmark U.S. crude shot as high as $116 a barrel on Thursday on expectations that the market will be short of crude for months following sanctions on Moscow and major companies divesting Russian oil assets following the invasion of Ukraine. [O/R]

Producers of Canadian heavy oil, which trades at a discount to U.S. crude, are raking in more than $100 a barrel, adding billions of dollars in revenues.

But companies are reluctant to boost capital budgets even as they reap the benefits of higher cash flow.

"They can sit with their feet up right now, with money flowing into their pockets, while hardly working," said Rafi Tahmazian, portfolio manager at Canoe Financial in Calgary, which owns shares in oil sands producers.

"Why would they want to be a growth business again?"

Most of Canada's reserves are held in northern Alberta's vast oil sands, which account for roughly two-thirds of the country's 4.9 million barrels per day of production.

The huge mining and thermal projects required to extract oil sands bitumen takes years to build and cost billions of dollars, and many international oil majors turned away from Canada during a prolonged downturn following the 2014 oil price crash.

The remaining top domestic producers, including Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, Suncor Energy, are focused on producing existing assets as efficiently as possible to drive down costs.

"The price spike for oil we are currently experiencing due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is unlikely to entice producers into changing their investment plans in the near term," said Ben Brunnen, vice president of oil sands at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Producers would need a clear signal from the Canadian government that it supports large energy infrastructure investments to grow gas and oil production and export capacity, Brunnen added.

'VERY VOLATILE' CYCLES

Instead Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has promised a cap on oil and gas emissions, which could limit the industry's growth.

The focus on cutting global carbon emissions has made financing massive oil sands projects more expensive, analysts say, and long-term demand forecasts suggest the world will need less oil, not more, by 2050.

Canadian Natural, the country's biggest producer, plans to bump up oil and gas output by 5% this year, while Cenovus , Canada's second-largest oil and gas producer, said its 2022 production guidance published in December remains unchanged.

"These geopolitical situations, as fast as (price) goes up, as fast it can go down," said Canadian Natural President Tim McKay in an interview. "It's very volatile, so you have to manage to those cycles."

Outside the oil sands, conventional oil and gas producers are also cautious about expanding drilling programs. Instead they are prioritizing paying down debt incurred during the pandemic and returning value to shareholders, who have been clear in demanding companies keep a tight rein on spending.

"There's now a strong price signal for growth...but we're still in a place where sentiment has not fully changed, where we would have full investor and political support," said Jonathan Wright, chief executive of NuVista Energy, which produces 52,000 barrels of oil equivalent of gas and liquids.

($1 = 1.2659 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nia Williams; additional reporting by Rod Nickel; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Oil-Rich Canada Lays Out Ground Rules for Inaugural Green Bond

Esteban Duarte and Brian Platt
Thu, March 3, 2022



(Bloomberg) -- Canada, the world’s fourth largest oil producer, is a step closer to issuing its first green bonds after releasing the rules that govern the notes.

Green bonds are part of Canada’s larger plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. The nation intends to issue C$5 billion ($3.9 billion) in sustainable debt to fund everything from planting trees to building carbon capture facilities, according to documents released Thursday by the finance department.

While the green-bond program will help the government to finance projects that reduce pollution, it excludes the oil and gas sector -- the biggest contributor to GHG emissions in Canada.

“This is part of a growing trend of sustainable finance and it’s going to help us gain some experience and understanding of it,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in an interview. “We’re really looking at best practices in the sector in terms of what can and can’t be financed with this money.”

As Canada gets closer to taking orders for the deal, companies and governments are rushing to the green bond market to finance environmentally-friendly initiatives. Global sales of green bonds hit a record $513 billion last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Canada’s government has been progressively adding mechanisms to deliver on its 2030 emissions reduction target, including imposing a national carbon tax. The country is already positioned to cut emissions by about 36% below 2005 levels by 2030, and is working on additional measures to achieve its targets.

Last year, the government named Kathy Bardswick, a former chief executive officer of The Co-operators Group Ltd, as the inaugural chair of Canada’s Sustainable Finance Action Council, which aims to support the development of a domestic sustainable finance market. Also in 2021, the government picked HSBC Holdings Plc and Toronto-Dominion Bank to arrange the transaction, as well as advise on the design of Canada’s green bond framework.

UK seeks investors for nuclear plant as it eases out China’s CGN

March 4, 2022


The British government is seeking financial advisers to raise billions of pounds for the proposed Sizewell C nuclear plant in Suffolk as ministers close in on a tacit agreement with Beijing to remove Chinese state-backed energy group CGN from the £20bn project.

A new company would replace the joint venture between French utility EDF and CGN that is developing the £20bn Sizewell C plant in Suffolk, according to people familiar with the government’s plans. EDF holds 80 per cent under the current structure with the remainder held by the Chinese group.

Under the revised plans, both the UK government and developer EDF would take a 20 per cent stake each in the new vehicle and end CGN’s involvement in the project, reflecting how diplomatic relations between Beijing and London have deteriorated in recent years.

The government this week launched the search for investment bankers to find investors for the remaining 60 per cent stake, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The new company would be chaired by Stephen Billingham, a City veteran who was previously finance director of British Energy, the group that owned Britain’s operational fleet of nuclear reactors before it was bought by EDF in 2008.

As part of the settlement, CGN is expected to remain a partner in Hinkley Point C, a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power station under construction by EDF in Somerset in south-west England. It is the first and only one of a planned new generation of nuclear reactors under construction.

The Chinese company is financing a third of the costs to build the plant, which is nine years behind schedule. Its knowledge is also considered critical to the project because of its experience of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) technology, a Franco-German design, used in Hinkley Point C. CGN was the first to build working EPRs at a plant in Taishan in China.

The need to push ahead with Sizewell C, which will also use EPR technology, has taken on new urgency with the war in Ukraine adding to already high gas prices that are feeding through into more expensive domestic energy bills.

Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has insisted that Britain’s reliance on gas imports will fall in the long-term as the government encourages more renewable energy and new nuclear power stations.

Pressure to build more nuclear plants has also increased after EDF, which owns the country’s existing fleet along with Centrica, had to close several plants early. The remaining six operational power stations provide about 16 per cent of Britain’s generating capacity.

But this will drop further when Hinkley Point B in Somerset closes in July with four of the remaining five plants scheduled to shut by March 2028.

CGN’s involvement in Britain’s civil nuclear programme has come under intense scrutiny since the government announced a ban on Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei from its 5G mobile phone network in 2020 citing national security concerns.

CGN was also blacklisted by the US in 2019 over accusations of stealing US technology for military use. Simone Rossi, head of EDF’s UK arm, has said previously that US investors would be needed to finance Sizewell C, which would prove problematic were CGN to remain involved.

EDF and the UK government hope to attract private investors to Sizewell C via a “regulated asset base” model which is used to finance other infrastructure including gas networks and airports.

The model assures private investors a steady rate of return from an early stage but is controversial as consumers pay towards the financing of the project via a surcharge on their energy bills long before it is completed.

CGN and EDF Energy both declined to comment.

Source: Financial Times

Hong Kong Tycoon Victor Li Nears £15 Billion Sale of U.K. Power Assets to Private Investors

Dinesh Nair, Manuel Baigorri and Vinicy Chan
Thu, March 3, 2022


(Bloomberg) -- A consortium led by Macquarie Group Ltd. and KKR & Co. is in advanced talks to buy the U.K. electricity distribution business controlled by Hong Kong tycoon Victor Li, in what could be one of the sector’s largest deals this year, people familiar with the matter said.

The bidder group also includes APG, China Investment Corp., Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and PSP Investments, according to the people. A deal could value UK Power Networks at as much as 15 billion pounds ($20 billion) and an agreement may be reached in the coming weeks, they said.

UK Power Networks is jointly owned by the Li family’s CK Infrastructure Holdings Ltd. and fellow group companies Power Assets Holdings Ltd. and CK Asset Holdings Ltd.

Shares in CK Asset Holdings fell as much as 2.8% in Hong Kong on Friday, touching their lowest level in more than two months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. CK Infrastructure shares climbed up to 1.6%, while Power Assets rose as much as 1.2%.

Deliberations are ongoing and there’s no certainty they’ll result in a deal, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. The business could also still attract interest from other infrastructure investors and energy companies, the people said.

A representative for Li’s companies said the group often receives offers for different assets, declining to comment further. Representatives for APG, KKR, Macquarie, OTPP and PSP declined to comment, while a spokesperson for CIC couldn’t immediately provide comment.

Formerly owned by France’s Electricite de France SA, UK Power Networks owns and maintains electricity cables across London and the south east and east of England and serves about 8.3 million homes. It was acquired in 2010 by Li’s companies.

Distribution grids are the local networks that feed directly into homes and businesses, putting them at the heart of the energy transition. Higher allocations from pension and sovereign wealth funds and investors’ desire for long-term, stable returns have made infrastructure one of the hottest sectors for dealmaking.

Last year, National Grid Plc agreed to buy PPL Corp.’s U.K. electricity distribution business for 7.8 billion pounds as it prepares for a low-carbon future. As part of this push the London-listed utility is looking to offload its roughly $10 billion gas transmission business, which is drawing interest from Macquarie, Bloomberg News has reported.

Elsewhere, SSE Plc has lined up banks to lead the sale of minority stakes in two electricity networks valued at more than 10 billion pounds.

(Updates with share price moves in fourth paragraph.)

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CalPERS says has ceased new investment flows into Russia

Thu, March 3, 2022, 
By John McCrank

NEW YORK, March 3 (Reuters) - The California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest U.S. pension fund, said on Thursday it has ceased all transactions in Russian publicly traded equity and has stopped the flow of any new investments into the country due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

CalPERS is also assessing its real estate investments in Russia, the fund operator said in a statement.

As of March 2, CalPERS owned around $420 million of Russian public stocks and $345 million in illiquid real estate assets, according to a letter the fund operator sent to California Governor Gavin Newsom seen by Reuters.

CalPERS' total investments in Russia represent about 0.17% of its total investment portfolio and it holds no Russian debt, the letter said.

Western sanctions on Moscow have prompted a wave of investors to announce they were cutting positions in Russia. Authorities in Russia, however, have banned local brokers from selling securities held by foreigners.

"It is important to note that current sanctions, market restrictions, and closure of local stock exchanges have placed significant constraints on CalPERS’ ability to liquidate its holdings," CalPERS said in the letter, signed by Theresa Taylor, president of the CalPERS Board of Administration.

The pension fund also said it was reviewing all its investments in emerging markets, including Russia, due to the impacts the crisis has had on all financial markets.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, said it had suspended the purchase of all Russian securities in its active and index funds on Monday.

 (Reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Bernard Orr)

FRONT PAGE NEWS (NOT)
WSJ News Exclusive | IRS Is Audited Over Its Safeguards Against Favored Treatment of Big Business
March 3, 2022


The Internal Revenue Service’s watchdog is examining how the agency guards against favoring large businesses and global companies in compliance matters as part of a broad audit.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or Tigta, has reached out to people inside and outside the IRS for information since starting work on the audit late last year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry. Among the lines of inquiry is how the IRS handles conflicts of interest and the revolving door between the accounting industry and IRS, the person said.

Source: Wall Street Journal

C.I.A. Black Sites Are State Secrets, the Supreme Court Rules

March 3, 2022


WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday shut down efforts by a detainee at Guantánamo Bay to obtain information from two former C.I.A. contractors involved in torturing him, ruling that the inquiry would impermissibly expose state secrets.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for a badly fractured court, said the main question was whether the information sought by the detainee, known as Abu Zubaydah, would confirm the location of a C.I.A. black site, which is widely known to have been in Poland.

The justices split 6 to 3 on the question of whether the case could proceed. In dissent, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the government sought to avoid “further embarrassment for past misdeeds.”

“The facts are hard to face,” he wrote. “We know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally — more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial and what it calls ‘rectal rehydration.’ Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government’s vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here.”

“This court’s duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “We should not let shame obscure our vision.”

Justice Breyer, on the other hand, insisted that the question at issue was a limited one. “Obviously, the court condones neither terrorism nor torture,” he wrote, “but in this case we are required to decide only a narrow evidentiary dispute.”

He conceded that the location of the black site had been acknowledged by an international tribunal and a former president of Poland. But he wrote that official confirmation of the location of the torture by the United States government was a different matter.

“It stands to reason that a former C.I.A. insider’s confirmation of confidential cooperation between the C.I.A. and a foreign intelligence service could damage the C.I.A.’s clandestine relationships with foreign authorities,” he wrote. “Confirmation by such an insider is different in kind from speculation in the press or even by foreign courts because it leaves virtually no doubt as to the veracity of the information that has been confirmed.”

Abu Zubaydah sought to subpoena the contractors, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in connection with a Polish criminal investigation. The inquiry was prompted by a determination by the European Court of Human Rights that he had been tortured in 2002 and 2003 at secret sites operated by the C.I.A., including one in Poland.

When the case, United States v. Husayn, No. 20-827, was argued in October, David F. Klein, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah said he was not seeking testimony about the location of the black site. “I’m not planning to ask, ‘Did it happen in Poland?’” he said.

Rather, Mr. Klein said, he sought information about his client’s treatment.

“What happened inside Abu Zubaydah’s cell between December 2002 and September 2003?” he asked, giving the dates during which his client was understood to be held in Poland. “How was Abu Zubaydah fed? What was his medical condition? What was his cell like? And, yes, was he tortured?”

Justice Breyer wrote that questions like those “would inevitably tend to confirm or deny whether the C.I.A. operated a detention site located in Poland.”

In a concurring opinion endorsing Justice Breyer’s bottom line but not his reasoning, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that the executive branch was entitled to even more deference than the majority had given it.

Justice Elena Kagan, in a partial dissent in the case, said she agreed that the location of the black site must be protected but said the case could nonetheless proceed.

“I would allow Zubaydah to amend his requests to remove all Poland-specific references,” she wrote, “so that he can obtain testimony about his detention — in whatever country it took place.”

In his dissent, Justice Gorsuch, who had defended the Bush administration’s detention policies as a Justice Department official in 2005 and 2006, said there was no point in barring testimony about the location of the site. “We should not be ignorant as judges of what we know to be true as citizens,” he wrote.

“The location of the C.I.A.’s detention site has been acknowledged by the former Polish president, investigated by the Council of Europe, and proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to the European Court of Human Rights,” he wrote. “Doubtless, these disclosures may have done damage to national security interests. But nothing in the record of this case suggests that requiring the government to acknowledge what the world already knows to be true would invite a reasonable danger of additional harm to national security.”

Abu Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and was initially thought be a high-level member of Al Qaeda. A 2014 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said “the C.I.A. later concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda.”

He was the first prisoner held by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to undergo so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which were based on a list of suggestions drawn up for use on him by Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, both psychologists.

Dr. Mitchell has testified that he and Dr. Jessen, who had experience with an Air Force program that taught pilots how to resist torture, were hired by the C.I.A. to consult on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They were ultimately assigned to carry out the techniques on him in the summer of 2002.

A federal judge granted the government’s motion to block the subpoena, saying that “proceeding with discovery would present an unacceptable risk of disclosing state secrets.”

But a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that it might be possible to segregate information protected by the state secrets privilege, which bans disclosures that could endanger national security, from other materials.

The full Ninth Circuit declined to rehear the panel’s decision, over the dissents of 12 judges who said the ruling was riddled with “grave legal errors” and posed “a serious risk to our national security.”

Source: NY Times

Chess: Russia stripped of 150-nation Olympiad while Carlsen overcomes Covid

March 3, 2022


Chess has followed football and Formula1 in stripping Russia of the right to host its flagship team event, the 150-nation Olympiad, which was scheduled for Moscow in July. India, where the game has boomed with a profusion of teenage talents, has submitted its guarantee of $10m to the global chess body Fide.

Fide has also ended its backing from Russian state sponsors including the gas supplier Gazprom, the fertiliser giant PhosAgro, and the mining firm Nornickel.

However, Nigel Short, who is effectively Fide’s acting president in current conditions, stated that the organisation’s budget had expanded fivefold to more than €13m since its new administration led by Arkady Dvorkovich took over in 2018, and that its current programmes would not be affected by the absence of Russian backing.

Russian and Belarus players will be prohibited from competing with national flags, while the 2016 world title challenger Sergey Karjakin, who has made public statements justifying the invasion, is being referred to Fide’s disciplinary commission. Karjakin is also being ostracised by top tournaments. Norway Chess in Stavanger, which he has won twice, announced his exclusion.

Five Russian grandmasters, playing under the Fide flag, are currently competing as individuals at Belgrade in the Fide Grand Prix. The final Grand Prix leg in Berlin also looks likely to be played normally, but the problem event is the eight-player Candidates at Madrid in June, for which the controversial Karjakin is qualified.

Meanwhile, Norway’s world champion Magnus Carlsen sails on, defeating both Covid and his old rival Ian Nepomniachtchi en route to a 4.5-2.5 final victory in the online $150,000 Airthings Masters, the opening event of the 2022 $1.6m Meltwater Champions Tour.

Just as in their classical world title match in Dubai, the Russian, who had tweeted his opposition to the war in Ukraine, held his own well for five games then collapsed at critical moments.

2459
John Emms v Chris Ward, British championship 2015. White to move and win. Material is level in this pawn endgame, and at first glance the position is blocked with no way through. Can you find White’s instructive winning plan?
Click here for solution

Source: Financial Times