Jail
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Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Dancila delivers a speech during a debate on the priorities of the Romanian presidency of the E.U. for the next six months, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, January 15, 2019. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler
April 3, 2019
BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Twelve Western nations urged Romania on Wednesday to scrap two planned emergency decrees altering judicial legislation, in a rare joint intervention that underlined U.S. and EU alarm over the threat to the rule of law in the former communist nation.
The embassies’ joint statement coincided with a warning from the European Commission in Brussels saying it would take swift action against Romania if it failed to address its concerns over the independence of the judiciary.
Romania’s ruling Social Democrats want to reduce the statute of limitations covering several offences, a move which would automatically shut down a number of ongoing corruption cases.
They have also backed a second decree that would allow politicians and others convicted of graft since 2014 to retroactively challenge the verdicts handed down by the supreme court.
“The expected changes carry the risk of breaching common values,” the embassies of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United States said in their joint statement.
“Furthermore, they might have a lasting negative effect on the country´s economic development.”
The decrees “apparently under discussion have the potential to impact on the independence of Romania’s judiciary, which would undermine Romanians’ and partners’ trust in the justice system, and in Romania’s government as well”, they said.
The decrees would benefit several high-level politicians, including Social Democrat leader Liviu Dragnea, who was unable to become prime minister due to a 2015 suspended jail term imposed in a vote-rigging case.
His appeal against a second conviction for inciting others to commit abuse of office in a separate case is nearing an end, with the next court date scheduled for April 15.
The decrees would be a culmination of a series of legislative and personnel changes the Social Democrats have made since they took power two years ago that are seen as threats to judicial independence and could further heighten EU concerns about democratic values in some of its eastern states.
Responding to the ambassadors’ appeal, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila said: “I would like to remind [them] that I have a direct dialogue with my counterparts. Ambassadors don’t make the prime minister’s agenda in … any state.”
Transparency International ranks Romania among the European Union’s most corrupt states and Brussels, which keeps its justice system under special monitoring, has praised magistrates for their efforts to curb graft.
(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Source: OANN
Mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot clinches her fists as she speaks during her election night celebration after defeating her challenger Toni Preckwinkle in a runoff election in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., April 2, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua Lott
April 3, 2019
By Brendan O’Brien
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago, known for its machine politics and corruption, woke up Wednesday to voters choosing an anti-establishment candidate who may shake up a city that made history by electing its first African-American woman for mayor.
Voters in the third-largest U.S. city on Tuesday elected Lori Lightfoot, who has never held office, in a runoff election. She easily defeated long-time local politician and a fellow black woman, Toni Preckwinkle, 72, to become the city’s 56th mayor.
Chicago has now become the largest American city to elect a black woman as its mayor, and an openly gay woman as well.
The 56-year-old Lightfoot is also the latest in a wave of political newcomers to win major elections around the globe as voters upend the status quo, propelling anti-establishment candidates to power. She will now take over a city where politics is a blood sport and where corruption has swirled in and around City Hall for generations.
But Chicagoans are ready for a change, Lightfoot said on the campaign trail, promising to support mayoral term limits, reforms that would ban elected officials from profiting from their governmental positions and strengthen worker compensation oversight.
“They want a break from the corrupt political machine that has held back the aspirations of so many people,” Lightfoot said during a debate last week. “They want a government that is responsive to them and that has integrity.”
The city got its reputation as a well-oiled political machine from the way Richard J. Daley, one of the last big-city “bosses,” ran the city from 1955 to 1976 with help from armies of patronage workers and crooked city council members.
Thirteen years later, his son Richard M. Daley became mayor and for the next 22 years, he ran the city as the powerful political machinery churned in the background.
“It’s refreshing to see somebody who is different, hopefully,” said Andrew Tabor, 61, a consultant who has lived in Chicago his entire life.
Tabor recalled an incident from “years ago” when the so-called machine allegedly sent a message to a childhood friend’s father who had political connections.
“They blew up his car. I don’t know who he was not playing nice with, but someone blew up his car. That’s the machine right there,” Tabor said sitting in the living room of his home on the north side days before the historic vote.
NOT PROGRESSIVE ENOUGH?
Lightfoot has held several positions in and out of government. She was an assistant United States attorney, a senior equity partner at Mayer Brown LLP and, most notably, the president of the Chicago Police Board, an independent civilian panel.
Some on the left, including Preckwinkle, criticized her as not being progressive enough, noting she made millions as a corporate lawyer representing corporate clients.
She and Preckwinckle earned spots on the runoff ballot after they garnered the most votes among 14 candidates, including Richard M. Daley’s younger brother Bill, in a February election. Lightfoot will replace Rahm Emanuel, who announced in September he was not seeking a third term as mayor.
Voters saw Lightfoot as the anti-establishment choice compared with Preckwinkle, who was a city council member, or alderman, for almost 20 years before becoming Cook County board president in 2010.
“Lightfoot will bring more change because Preckwinkle is connected to the old-boys club, the establishment,” said retired mailman Gary Muckle, 77, after voting for Lightfoot this weekend at a polling place on the city’s north side.
“We will have to see what happens now. Lightfoot is not beholden to anyone,” he said.
Lightfoot will also face a raft of thorny problems such as reforms to the police department, rampant gangs and violent crime and a spiraling budget deficit fueled by escalating pensions.
Emanuel leaves as corruption continues to seep throughout city hall. Just this year, Alderman Ed Burke, a long-time political powerhouse in Chicago, was charged with extortion, Alderman Willie Cochran pleaded guilty to wire fraud and it was revealed Alderman Danny Solis was recently under investigation for corruption.
Burke, who has been an alderman for 50 years, won re-election in February.
In all, federal prosecutors racked up 246 public corruption convictions in the Northern Illinois District, which includes Chicago, from 2010 to 2017. That is 80 percent more than in the Southern District of New York, located in Manhattan, according to a report from the Department of Political Science at University of Illinois at Chicago.
“The race turned on reform of Chicago politics and moving towards a new Chicago,” said Dick Simpson, a professor in the department, who studies Chicago politics, noting that 33 city council members have gone to jail over the last four decades.
“There seems to be a desire to make reforms so that the continuing pattern of corruption … would change permanently,” said Simpson, a former city council member.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; editing by Bill Tarrant and Lisa Shumaker)
Source: OANN
Though our media these days loves to complain about alleged injustices in our justice system, they’re absolutely giddy that Martin Shkreli is reportedly being locked up in solitary confinement.
From New York Daily News:
“Pharmo Bro” Martin Shkreli won’t be doing much shot-calling anymore.
He was reportedly tossed into solitary confinement following a report last month that claimed he was still running his business from behind bars, according to a Forbes report Monday.
The Wall Street Journal described in early March how Shkreli used a contraband cell phone to make decisions at Phoenixus AG, including firing his handpicked chief executive, Kevin Mulleady. Shkreli later allegedly agreed to make it a suspension.
His alleged infraction is trying to run his business from prison.
What a menace to society!
What next, is he going to file his own taxes?!
Solitary confinement is a form of torture. While no one generally cares about murderers or violent criminals being subject to it, putting non-violent criminals in solitary confinement is sickening.
The only reason Shkreli was locked up in the first place is because our overlords wanted some pleb to use as a scapegoat to atone for the sins of Big Pharma.
Shkreli was hounded for raising the price of a rare drug (which insurance companies had to pay for) in order to fund research on developing a better drug. He gave away the drug at a discount or for free to people who couldn’t afford it.
[Embed begins at 1:48:20 with Shkreli giving his side of the story.]
He ran a small company, considering the industry, and this affected relatively few people.
He was later brought up on totally unrelated charges, convicted of “fraud” and sentenced to seven years in prison. Even though none of his investors lost money, he was forced to issue a mea culpa and browbeat himself as though he was before a Soviet show trial.
Meanwhile, the Sackler family reportedly knowingly lied about the addictiveness of their drug Oxycontin to get millions of Americans hooked on synthetic heroin for profit.
“The Sackler family, who made tens of billions of dollars by getting Americans hooked on OxyContin, also looked to profit off treating the addicts they created.”
Can left and right unite in putting these people in jail for what they’ve done?https://t.co/BGJYTYwZct
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 1, 2019
They made billions of dollars in the process and yet they’re all sitting pretty and are reportedly exploring bankruptcy in order to keep themselves from having to pay off the millions of families whose lives they’ve ruined.
As 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said last week on the Jimmy Dore show, this family belongs in jail.
This is why Yang is great #YangGang pic.twitter.com/YMtKM670HG
— Pepi (@pepipop) March 30, 2019
While Martin Shkreli is being tortured in prison through solitary confinement the Sacklers are living free.
Source: InfoWars
FILE PHOTO: Brazil’s former President Michel Temer arrives at his home in Sao Paulo, Brazil March 25, 2019. REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli/File Photo
April 2, 2019
By Rodrigo Viga Gaier
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Former Brazilian President Michel Temer was indicted on Tuesday on corruption charges brought by prosecutors who said he took part in a bribery scheme related to the Angra 3 nuclear power plant complex on the coast near Rio de Janeiro.
The case is part of Operation Car Wash, Brazil’s largest corruption investigation, which has put dozens of businessmen and politicians in jail since 2014.
Federal Judge Marcelo Bretas accepted charges of corruption and money laundering against Temer, his former energy minister, Wellington Moreira Franco, and six other close aides.
Temer, who left the presidency just three months ago, was arrested with the others on March 21 and released four days later. They all deny any wrongdoing.
Prosecutors said the graft at Angra was one action of a “criminal organization” that Temer had run during his four decades in public life, which they alleged received or arranged upward of 1.8 billion reais ($462.5 million) in bribes.
The investigation into kickbacks on the nuclear plant’s construction contract involves the Brazilian subsidiary of Swedish consulting firm AF Poyry, along with Brazilian engineering firms Engevix and Argeplan.
The Swedish company declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. Engevix and Argeplan did not reply to requests for comment.
Temer, 78, faces charges in another corruption investigation in which prosecutors accuse him of using a middleman to procure a suitcase full of cash from JBS SA, the controlling shareholders of the world’s largest meatpacker.
In 2017, his aide Rodrigo da Rocha Loures was caught on video by security cameras running out of a Sao Paulo restaurant carrying a bag with 500,000 reais ($128,165) in cash that prosecutors said was a bribe from the owners of JBS.
Temer denies the allegation. Rocha Loures, who has also denied the charges, is awaiting trial.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier; Additional reporting by Eduardo Simoes; Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell addresses their Special Bargaining Convention held at COBO Hall in Detroit, Michigan March 25, 2015. REUTERS/Jeff Kowalsky/File Photo
April 2, 2019
By Nick Carey
DETROIT (Reuters) – A former top United Auto Workers official in charge of the union’s relations with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA) pleaded guilty on Tuesday in a U.S. federal court in Detroit to misusing the automaker’s funds for lavish spending on UAW officials.
As part of a plea agreement, Norwood Jewell, who headed the UAW’s FCA department from 2014 until his retirement in January 2018, pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiring to violate the Labor Relations Management Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years and a fine of up to $250,000.
Jewell is the highest-ranking former UAW official charged so far in a wide-ranging investigation into illegal payoffs to UAW officials by FCA. To date, seven people linked to the union and the automaker have been sentenced in the government’s corruption investigation.
Jewell’s court appearance comes at a sensitive time for the UAW, which faces contract talks later this year with FCA, General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co.
Prosecutors say FCA officials conspired to divert to UAW officials more than $4.5 million in training center funds intended to pay for training for union members.
Both the UAW and FCA have repeatedly said that only a few individuals were involved and that this did not affect contract talks between the two in 2015.
Dressed in a black suit, charcoal gray shirt and a black-and-blue striped tie, Jewell told the court he failed to properly apportion funds between his two roles at the UAW and the National Training Center funded by the FCA to train workers.
“I own up to what I did and I am taking responsibility for my actions,” Jewell said.
Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of 12 months to 18 months.
According to court documents, Jewell used the FCA’s National Training Center credit card and approved the use of the credit cards by other UAW officials to make more than $40,000 worth of charges for items such as travel and meals.
Defense attorney Michael Manley told reporters the corrupt practices preceded Jewell’s appointment in 2014, that he had worked to halt those practices and “that he did not take anything for personal gain.”
“My hope is that he will not go to jail,” Manley said.
(Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
Source: OANN
Headquarters of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, is pictured in Beijing, China September 28, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee
April 2, 2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s central bank is seeking a police investigation into the circulation last week on social media of what it called false information saying it had announced a cut in a key bank reserve ratio.
On Friday, private chat groups on China’s popular social media platform WeChat shared what appeared to be a paragraph pasted from a story by the official Xinhua news agency saying that the People’s Bank of China had announced a cut in the reserve requirement ratio (RRR), to take effect on April 1.
No such move had been announced.
Both Xinhua and Tencent Holdings Ltd, which operates WeChat, did not have immediate comment.
“The central bank has officially sent a letter to the police for investigating the case and punishing those who have published false information,” the Finance News, a PBOC publication, said in a commentary on Tuesday that was reposted on the central bank’s official Weibo account.
The commentary said monetary policy moves are “by no means a trivial matter”, stressing even if the false information was intended as an April Fool’s joke, those who started it would face legal consequences.
“Although the rumours of an RRR cut have lost traction, we believe this does not mean that the relevant rumor-mongers can go unpunished,” it said.
China has been stepping up efforts to police potentially destabilizing content on its already stringently censored internet.
China has announced five RRR cuts in the past year to free up more cash for banks to boost lending to private firms, and further cuts are widely expected.
The central bank publication cited criminal laws that could see punishment of up to five years in jail for those who caused “serious consequences” by fabricating and disseminating false information affecting securities and futures trading.
“This kind of irresponsible behavior should not be tolerated, otherwise the rumours will continue to make waves in the market or become more daring,” it added.
(Reporting by Yawen Chen and Cate Cadell; Editing by Tony Munroe & Kim Coghill)
Source: OANN
French telecom group Orange CEO Stephane Richard arrives for a trial over a disputed state payment at the Paris courthouse, France, April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
April 1, 2019
PARIS (Reuters) – A French prosecutor on Monday told judges Orange chief executive Stephane Richard should face three years in jail for his alleged involvement in a disputed compensation payment made in 2008 by the state to tycoon Bernard Tapie.
The prosecutor said 18 months of the sentence should be suspended, and that Richard should be barred from working in the public service for five years.
Richard has denied the allegations, saying he was doing his job and only played a secondary role in the arbitration process in which Tapie was awarded 403 million euros ($452 million) in the state-funded settlement.
Tapie is locked in a fight over the sale of his stake in sportswear firm Adidas in 1993 to Credit Lyonnais, then government-owned, and the compensation he won over the transaction 15 years later.
Richard is accused of complicity over the disputed payment. He was working as chief of staff to then-finance minister Christine Lagarde when it was made.
The prosecutor is also seeking a five-year jail term for Tapie. ($1 = 0.8923 euros)
(Reporting by Emmanuel Jarry, Writing by Richard Lough and Bate Felix, Editing by Catherine Evans and John Stonestreet)
Source: OANN
FILE PHOTO: Banker Colin Bermingham leaves Westminster Magistrates court in London, Britain, January 11, 2016. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls/File Photo
April 1, 2019
By Kirstin Ridley
LONDON (Reuters) – Two former Barclays bankers were sentenced on Monday to a total of nine years in jail after they were convicted by a London jury of conspiring to rig the Euribor global interest rate benchmark.
Colin Bermingham, 62, a British former cash market expert and senior rate submitter, was sentenced to five years while Anglo-Italian Carlo Palombo, a 40-year-old former derivatives trader, received a four-year term.
A “devastated” Palombo and his family needed time to come to terms with the decision while considering any appeal, his lawyer John Hartley, of Hodge Jones & Allen, said in an email, while Bermingham’s legal team had no immediate comment.
Bermingham and Palombo had both denied any wrongdoing.
Sisse Bohart, a Danish junior Barclays trader and submitter, 41, was acquitted last week. The three had faced a re-trial after a previous jury was last year unable to reach a verdict.
The men were convicted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court in the sixth rate-rigging prosecution brought by the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) after a near seven year criminal investigation. It is the second re-trial after a hung jury, underlining the tricky nature of the financial fraud cases.
Prosecutors alleged the defendants conspired to defraud by dishonestly manipulating Euribor (the euro interbank offered rate) – a benchmark that helps determine rates on an estimated $150 trillion to $180 trillion of financial contracts and loans worldwide – between January 2005 and December 2009.
Eleven banks and brokerages have been fined a total of $9 billion to settle rate-rigging allegations in a global investigation. Barclays paid a $453 million penalty in 2012, sparking a backlash that forced out former CEO Bob Diamond, the British fraud inquiry and an overhaul of rate-setting rules.
The sentences are a welcome fillip for the SFO, which has prosecuted five men and one woman over Euribor rigging to date and secured four convictions, including former Deutsche Bank star trader Christian Bittar and one-time Barclays trader Phillipe Moryoussef in 2018.
“These men deliberately undermined the integrity of the financial system to line their pockets and advance the interests of their employers,” said Lisa Osofsky, the head of the SFO.
“We are committed to tracking down and bringing to justice those who defraud others and abuse the system.”
JAILED
Bittar, one of the world’s best-paid traders who earned more than 57 million pounds ($74 million) over the indictment period, was sentenced to five years and four months after pleading guilty.
Moryoussef, tried in absentia after fleeing to France when Bittar’s plea was made public, was handed an eight-year term. He remains in France.
Prosecutors said that traders cheated counterparties by requesting rates from colleagues that would benefit their trading positions – and that submitters then entered false or misleading numbers by nudging them up or down accordingly.
Brussels-based Euribor, like its Libor (London interbank offered rate) counterpart, is designed to reflect the cost of borrowing between banks and is set after submitters at a panel of major banks report their estimated costs of borrowing over various periods to an administrator, who calculates an average.
Palombo, who joined the bank in his early twenties, said he had been trained by Moryoussef and had thought it “perfectly legitimate practice” to ask submitters for preferential rates until Barclays banned the practice in 2009 as a U.S. inquiry into rate-rigging allegations gathered steam.
Bermingham, who joined Barclays at 18, said he did not believe he had ever submitted a rate that was not justified by real flows of cash in the money market. He said he had not known that Moryoussef sometimes made rate requests on Bittar’s behalf but would have reported this, because Deutsche Bank was a rival.
Nine men have been convicted and 10 acquitted in London over rate-rigging to date. The SFO says other lines of enquiry in the investigation remain open.
(Additional reporting by Lawrence White; Editing by Alexander Smith)
Source: OANN
A Colorado sheriff is vowing to go to jail rather than enforce a gun-control bill that is currently in the state’s legislature, and more than half of Colorado’s 64 counties agree, CNN reported.
The “red flag” bill seeks to seize guns from people deemed a threat to themselves or others, and Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams will not enforce a bill he feels would violate the Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens, according to the report.
“It’s a matter of doing what’s right,” he told CNN.
“. . . I’ve explained that time and time again. I’m not bluffing.”
After passing the Colorado state Senate on partisan lines – no Republican voted for the measure – the state’s House is expected to pass it this week, according to CNN.
The law holds a sheriff in contempt, permitting a judge to fine them or send them to jail to force them to comply.
Already 32 counties have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, while another three might soon follow, according to the report.
Source: NewsMax America
Former Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy predicted Sunday that the U.S. intelligence community might stop providing information to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff because he leaks “like a screen door on a submarine.”
Gowdy was asked to weigh in on Republicans’ decision Thursday to call on Schiff to step down as chairman of the House panel.
“Never seen that before,” said Gowdy, who served on the intelligence panel before leaving Congress in January. “We never voted to remove or ask a chairperson to step down.”
“Adam is a deeply partisan person. He did everything he could to make sure Hillary Clinton became president. And he’s done everything he could to keep a cloud over the Trump presidency,” Gowdy said of Schiff.
Gowdy suggested House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could potentially remove Schiff as chairman of the committee. He also said the CIA and other intelligence community agencies could withhold intelligence from Schiff.
“The next thing that’s going to happen is the … different intelligence entities are going to say, ‘You know what, Chairman Schiff, if you don’t believe the information we provide to you … if you have the president of the United States, not just indicted but in jail and you continue to leak like a screen door on a submarine, we’re going to quit giving you information,’” said Gowdy.
“That’s when Pelosi will replace Adam Schiff with someone like [Connecticut Rep.] Jim Himes, who is someone who is a smarter and a lot more reasonable.”
Schiff was a leading voice among Democrats accusing President Donald Trump and his associates of colluding with Russians to influence the 2016 election. In May 2017, he said he had seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion.
Special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have seen different evidence. In a report delivered to the Justice Department on March 22, Mueller said prosecutors “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Schiff has long been accused of leaking information to the media regarding the Russia probe.
Donald Trump Jr. has accused the Democrat of leaking an inaccurate story about him in December 2017. During Trump Jr.’s private testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, CNN broke a story that Trump Jr. had received an email Sept. 4, 2016, that included a link to WikiLeaks materials.
The story was a bombshell at the time because it suggested Trump Jr. received WikiLeaks documents before they were released to the public. But CNN’s sources turned out to be wrong. The email was actually dated Sept. 14, 2016, a day after the information was published.
Now that the Mueller report has been completed, those that pushed the false narrative of Russian collusion have been exposed. Alex breaks down the massive lies used for more than 2 years to divide America.
Source: InfoWars
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