Jew World Order

Reserve Bank of Australia – Securency International Pty Ltd

The Greens are calling for the Reserve Bank governor to appear before a Senate committee to answer bribery allegations made against a company half-owned by the RBA.

Tonight’s Four Corners program airs the corruption allegations against Securency, a company set up to sell Australia’s polymer banknote technology.

Greens Leader Bob Brown says he has asked the Senate economics committee to call on RBA governor Glenn Stevens to appear before a hearing next week.

“These are extraordinarily serious allegations on the front page of Australian newspapers yet again,” Mr Brown said.

“Parliament cannot simply put its hand out and say the Reserve Bank and its subsidiaries are beyond parliamentary scrutiny.”

The allegations are made by a former Securency employee turned federal police witness who has said the firm was willing to supply prostitutes and pay bribes to foreign officials to win banknote supply contracts.

The witness has told the investigation by Nick McKenzie for The Age and Four Corners that a middleman hired by Securency to win contracts from foreign governments told him he intended to bribe a central bank governor from an Asian country.

The witness has given investigators his diary in which he recorded the middleman telling him in 2007 that the “governor would be very happy if the commission [payment] was increased”.

Regarding the request to get a prostitute, the witness has revealed one of the most senior Securency managers told him to arrange an Asian prostitute for a deputy governor of a foreign central bank.

“Next time this official was in town, [I was told] that I was to procure him a bodyguard and with raised eyebrows and a wink … a particular type of bodyguard being an Asian woman,” the witness told Four Corners.

“He was suggesting I might like to procure a prostitute for one of the central bank officials on his visit to Melbourne.”

The witness says he did not act on the request although he believed other employees had arranged prostitutes for officials.

In a 2008 diary entry, the witness recorded a consultant employed in Asia by Australia’s overseas trade agency Austrade told him that to win contracts Securency needed to hire someone to bribe officials or “to pass white envelopes for you”.

Austrade this week confirmed the Securency employee did report the comment to an Australian ambassador in the Asian country where it was made in 2008, but says it had never been brought specifically to Austrade’s attention.

Austrade also stressed it has never endorsed bribery by Australian businesses.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/24/2907815.htm

http://www.theage.com.au/business/sex-bribes-in-banknote-deals-20100523-w3yx.html

According to The Age, the Australian newspaper that first broke the story of the bribery scandal, after the success in Vietnam, the company proceeded to begin talks to establish business in Nigeria, another country similar to Vietnam in corruption tolerance status. Vietnam and Nigeria both occupy the 121st position on the Transparency International’s 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index. 

For Securrency, which is being investigated for allegedly bribing Nigerian officials, this twin revelation that it offered bribe to secure its Vietnam contract, and that once this was concluded it immediately commenced negotiations to penetrate the Nigerian market is bound to come as a setback. 

Bribery in Vietnam 

A middle man, to whom bribes were paid in Vietnam, has now been named; Anh Ngoc Luong, recieved payment disguised as commissions but much higher than the expected rate. Mr. Luong, with his company, Company for Technology and Development (CFTD), allegedly received about $12million for onward payment into secretive accounts in Switzerland. 

“Securency hired Mr. Luong because of his high-level government connections, and he has been Securency’s man on the ground and chief government liaison in Vietnam for several years,” the paper, published today, said. 

In a manner typical to the case in Nigeria, after the payments into the accounts in tax havens, the country announced a change in its bank note substrate. 

“In 2002…Vietnam’s central bank formally announced the switch to polymer money.” 

In 2007, when investigations began into the Securency-Vietnam case, Securency, which is part owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), attempted to explain the payments away as payments for translation services. 

“A lot of the [CFTD’s] roles in the early stages were to do with interpreting and translating… so that is the primary role they play. So it is the liaison between the state bank,” Securency managing director Myles Curtis said in an interview with The Age in 2007. 

Bribery in Nigeria 

In Nigeria, the bribery process is yet to be established as at least 3 government bodies including the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) are still investigating the matter. The EFCC has also asked that people with helpful clues on the matter could send same to the anti-graft agency. 

Last week, the House of Representatives and the Nigerian Senate made moves to begin investigations into the affair. 

Halims Agoda, one of the legislators said a committee has been set up: 

“To ascertain the veracity or otherwise of the widely reported claims by the local and international media that a company, Securency, is believed to have paid millions of dollars in bribe money to Nigerian officials to secure the contract to print Nigeria’s new bank notes.” 

Securency has been accused of using two U.K based business men, Benoy Berry and Mike Harding, who allegedly are influential in the Nigerian market, to pay bribes to staff of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and government officials during the tenure of the former governor of the CBN, Chukwuma Soludo.