Nancy Drew Job

We need Nancy Drew.

When I was growing up in northern Manhattan, my parents had a journalist friend, perhaps a role model for me. John Kayston worked for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.Today the JTA in Buenos Aires published an important update to the investigation of the AMIA Jewish center there:

Argentine judicial officials made public the 300-page criminal complaint that details evidence linking Argentina;s senior political echelon to a deal to hide Iran's role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center.

The complaint prepared by Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was to be presented this week to Argentina's congress, but Nisman was found dead in his home late Sundya with a gunshot wound to his head.

Pres.Cristian Fernandez initially called his death a suicide but backtracked Thursday following large protests and the widespread perception that Nisman [had been] murdered.

Nisman's criminal complaint, based on intelligence intercepts, accuses Kirchner of 'deciding, negotiating, and arranging the imputnity of the Iranian fugitives in aht AMIA case.” The pres​i​dent and Argentina's foreign minister, Hector Timerman, 'took the criminal decision of inventing Iran's i​n​ nocence to satisfy commercial, political, and geopolitical interests of the Argentine Republic,” the complaint says.

The deal... exonerated Iranian officials in their role in the bombing, which killed 85 people, in exchange for Iranian oil and weapons sales, according to the complaint. The secret deal, the complaint says, was negotiated two years before Iran and Argentina signed a public memorandum of understanding in 2013 to establish a joint investigation of the AMIA bombing, a agreement critics derided as a farce and which later was derailed by Argentine cournts. In the decade Nisman spent purs​u​ing the AMIA case, he uncovered evidence showing aht Iran sponsored the bombing and had Hezbollah, its proxy militia in Lebanon, carry it out. Interpol, the international police agency, eventually issued arrest warrants from several Iranian officials in the case. The arrests have never been carried out.

Under the terms of the secret deal, the Interpol arrest warrants would have been canceled and culpability for the bombing … redirected toward 'invented defendants,' the complaint said. But despite​ the efforts of Argentin​e​ officials, according to the complaint, Interpol refused to play ball and the arrest warrants stand.

There is more, but you can see why Nisman was killed. Apparently both Nisman and foreign minister Timerman are Jewish, I learned from JTA.

Denmark's central bank is challenging currency speculators to test its ability to keep its peg to the euro, which may be un pari stupide, a bad bet for either the CB or the speculators. It came just a week after Switzerland dropped its similar efforts. The Danish CB signaled that it has “plenty of kroner” and can use interest rate policy and interventions to keep the currency from rising. What may help the Danes is that Copenhagen is not a global banking center nor the home of many multinational companies. But when offered a crack at proving a CB wrong, the heirs of George Soros may just decide to try it.

Poor Yingluck Shinwatra is not lucky. The military junta which deposed her now has gotten the tame legislature to impeach her and ban her from politics for 5 years because of her stupid program of open-ended purchases of Thai rice at a high fixed price to subsidize farmers. This cost Thailand several billion dollars and was intended to boost the family's popularity in the north where the red shirts came from. Now the yellow shirts also want to put her in jail for 10 years over the alleged corruption which marked the rice-buying program. With ailing King Bhumibol, 87, the likely next long-time ruler coming to the end of his life, and with a much more fraught succession than Saudi Arabia managed, the Shinawatra clan, led from outside the country by Yingluck's billionaire ​brother ​Thaksin, is rumored to be close to Maha Vajiralongkorn, 62, the unpopular crown prince. Maha has 5 sons but has disowned the wives who bore them and is trying to get the newborn son of his mistress recognized and to marry her.

China plans to tax Mainland Chinese on their income even if they are non-residents, following in the extra-territorial tax system applied until now only by the USA. The latest victim of the Internal Revenue Service is London Mayor Boris Johnson, who is paying up some $40,000 in capital gains on a house he sold in London a decade ago. Only that stands between the American-born mayor and his renouncing his US nationality, acquired by being born in the US. Mayor Johnson needs to clear the decks with the IRS to be able to visit the US next month to tell Americans about the appeal of London as a financial center, as planned. His Honor left the US aged about 12 or 13 in order to attend Eton.

France and Austria want to impose a lower but broader “Tobin” tax on financial transactions by listed companies, intermediaries, buyers, or sellers of their securities (stocks, bonds, and derivatives). The EU is moving away from this plan.

Swiss bank UBS managed to get a US court to rule against the heirs of a former politician, UN official. and diplomat, Adam Malik Batubara, an Indonesian, who died over 20 years ago. He had $5 mn in secret Swiss bank accounts which the heirs tried to get their hands on via a Bahamas trust. The two banks, now both owned by UBS, used bank secrecy rules to stop the heirs collecting on the Malik estate. We offer on our website a report on the dangers of Swiss bank accounts. This is a new one.