Traditionally, during the summer we take a timeout, just sit back and relax with a tall glass of lemonade or ice tea and read a really good book. For those who simply cannot abandon the keyboard, RBO wants to provide some reading material that you will find every bit as enjoyable as any piece of fiction or spy novel—chapters from the RezkoWatch archive. For those who have read these before, it’ll be a refresher; for those who have not, you’re in for an amazing story—one article at a time.
On January 28, 2008, the Chicago Tribune followed up with more information about Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s unreported $3.5 million loan from the Middle East which caused U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve to revoke his bond on January 28, 2008.
[P]rosecutors recently discovered, $3.5 million was wired from Lebanon. Much of the money wound up in the hands of Rezko friends and relatives who had put up their homes to secure his bond, limiting their financial risk if Rezko fled, prosecutors argued. Assistant U.S. Atty. Reid Schar called the financial maneuvering “a shell game.” …
Prosecutors alleged the $3.5 million wire transfer to Rezko came from Beirut through a company led by a controversial Iraqi-born billionaire who has controlled banks, casinos, telecommunications companies and pharmaceutical firms spanning the globe.
Nadhmi Auchi, who heads General Mediterranean Holding SA, or GMH, bought about 15 Wisconsin pizzerias from Rezko, court records show, and took a stake in Rezko’s most ambitious real estate venture—his effort to develop a 62-acre site at Roosevelt Road and Clark Street.
In 2007, Auchi was listed by Forbes as #279 on the list of the world’s billionaires, with a net worth of more than $3.1 billion:
Onetime go-between for major oil companies and state-owned oil fields in the Gulf1 settled in Britain in 1980 after fleeing the late Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Started a lawsuit in early 2007 against France’s Elf, accusing its former directors of fraud and of entangling his name in their criminal acts. Daughter Luma one of 9 pharma execs facing charges of conspiracy to defraud Britain’s National Health Service out of many millions of pounds by inflating the price of some of Britain’s most commonly prescribed medicines.
Although Rezko’s lawyers “said the $3.5 million was a loan primarily provided to pay legal fees and family expenses”, the defense said the loan “was to be repaid in a debt restructuring involving the 62-acre development.” St. Eve said Rezko had “repeatedly promised that he had no access to overseas funds or assets that he could pull free from the troubled development.”
Some of the $3.5 million went to pay off certain Rezko debts, while $20,000 went to the family of Alber Najjar, who also had extensive connections with Rezko’s food companies but became a federal fugitive in 2004 when he fled to Lebanon following his indictment on bookmaking charges, prosecutors said.
An additional $50,000 was wired to an account controlled by Dr. Robert R. Simon, chief of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services … With so much money being moved behind the scenes, prosecutor Schar said, any promise Rezko might give to “stick around” for trial “simply cannot be trusted.”
The Chicago Sun-Times reported January 29, 2008:
A small portion of the hundreds of thousands of dollars Rezko is accused of obtaining through one of his schemes — $10,000 — wound up being donated to [Sen. Barack] Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign,” as reported January 19, 2008, by the Chicago Sun-Times “Obama, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, announced that same day he was donating more than $40,000 in Rezko-related contributions to charity. That was on top of about $44,000 he already gave away amid questions about links to Rezko. …
On Monday, [January 28, 2008,] prosecutors said that, in 2005, Rezko “directly appealed to the State Department” and, “it appears, asked certain Illinois government officials” to let Iraqi-born billionaire Nadhmi Auchi enter this country. At the time, Auchi was “unable to enter the United States” because of a criminal conviction in France. His sentence “was suspended as long as Auchi committed no new crimes.”
Aides to Obama and [Illinois Gov. Rod] Blagojevich said Monday that Rezko never requested — nor did they deliver — any help to Auchi, whose business empire includes 62 acres in the South Loop that Rezko’s development company once owned.
Regarding the money transfers, the Chicago Sun-Times added that on April 4, 2007, “Auchi’s firm, General Mediterranean Holding (GMH SA), transferred $3.5 million to a bank account held by the law firm Freeborn & Peters on behalf of Rezko, according to prosecutors. The next day, more than $1.3 million of that was paid to a Rezko-controlled business, three family bank accounts — including $700,000 to his wife Rita’s bank account, which previously had a balance of $4,000 — and to creditors. Among them was Dr. Robert Simon, head of Cook County’s $1 billion hospital system, who got $50,000.”
Updates:
The Chicago Tribune has more about the Freeborn & Peters involvement here.
Via ABC News comes a link to an April 22, 2004, article [now webscrubbed; see related article] in MiddleEastOnline that shows Nadhmi Auchi in Illinois with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Emile Johns Jr. [i.e. Emil Jones], then the State’s Senate President. “The Web site says Auchi met with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, another politician close to Rezko, along with ‘businessmen and Congressmen also present in the dinner held in his honor’,” ABC News reported, but the Congressmen are not named. **More about this in later articles.**
See the May 7, 2003, Guardian Unlimited (UK) article “Oil scandal billionaire tells French court of bribes” about the oil scandal involving Nadhmi Auchi and others who were “accused of being involved in France’s biggest postwar financial scandal in which the oil firm, now TotalFinaElf, allegedly paid out huge sums in bribes and backhanders to expand its empire.”
Endnotes: 1 – Nick Cohen, The politics of sleaze, The Observer (UK), November 16, 2003. This article has been webscrubbed and can only be found in the internet archive.
Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.--Thomas Jefferson.
No wonder BHO was against the war in 2002. It derailed the Rezko/Auchi gravy train.
I wonder how much in straw donations Auchi has contributed to the Obama campaign, I don’t think he’s going to sit this one out. He’s going to want to come back to the U.S., and the only one that can make that possible is Barack. The potential to make money with President Obama is too great for Auchi to pass up. If God forbid, Obama does win, Auchi will get the first invitation to the inaugural ball.