US ports sold to corrupted US insurer . . . UAE profits
Mon Dec 11, 2006 at 11:47:23 PM PDT
The corrupted USA-based insurer is AIG. UAE is going to realize a profit through their ownership of DP World, which currently holds the USA port operations contracts in question.
The sale from DP World to a US-based business - which was primarily "forced" by the enabling will of an unusually resistant Republican Congress to President Bush's desired deal - is reportedly worth over $1B.
The reason I specifically mention UAE in this diary is due to the evolving and swirling controversies related to their association with DP World when reports of this relatively silent deal came to light earlier in the year - it seemed a significant aspect of interest to many folks in the blogosphere at the time, so I desired to explicitly note their involvement within the context of this deal . . . and the resulting irony of their making a profit from the whole ports affair.
So, all that prior speculation and debate being kept in context, I suppose this might just come down to the following observation of Bush Republican politics:
Step 1: Create controversy
Step 2: . . .
Step 3: Profit
AIG, American International Group, is supposedly the tenth largest company in the USA. They also happened to settle in a corruption investigation brought by then-NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer earlier this year, for over 1.6 BILLION dollars. Since Spitzer's allegations were made public, AIG supposedly turned out their Executives who were possibly related to, or responsible for, their found wrongdoings that led to the eventual settlement. Some former employees are still being investigated aside from this particular case against AIG, actually.
You may recall that there was considerable debate on the prospect of a United Arab Emerates(UAE)-based company, Dubai Ports World (DP World or DPW), being granted the operations contracts by CFIUS and the US Treasury Department in November, 2005 for a handful of USA-based container ports. Senator Chuck Schumer(D) was one of the first Legislators to make a stink about this in public, after being tipped off by concerned lobbyist Joe Muldoon, who supposedly wrote a white paper on his view of security implications concerning the DPW buyout of P&0 - the British firm which owned operations for the US ports in question. Senator Schumer took it from there, to much outcry from various perspectives.
President Bush was all for this sale to a Dubai-owned company, supposedly espousing the need to deal more fairly in trade with "moderate Arab nations" to help find eventual success in his War On Terror - he even criticized those Legislators who might desire to scrutinize and/or not let the deal go through.
There were often-heated debates on all political sides concerning issues of:
Yet, the unmistakable conclusion to all that drama is that a UAE-owned corporation, DP World, has reportedly made a significant profit from a sale which Republican Legislators "forced" to happen, in a rare show of public defiance to President Bush . . . yet, this profit is only being realized now because the Bush Administation "decided" that the sale to DP World should happen in the first place.
Should speculation on behind-the-scenes contractual manipulations by BushCo lead us into tinfoil hat territory? Or, maybe just a recognition of business the way we expect it from Bush Republicans: in one manner or another, Bush friends will come away from USA government-enabled deals making some money.
