The extension of the amicable settlements in April 2011 in Belgium gave rise to two possible explanations. One explanation claims that a trio of Kazakh oligarchs – Patokh Chodiev, Alijan Ibragimov and Alexander Mashkevitch – used their connections to then French President Nicholas Sarkozy to get away with an ongoing criminal investigation in Belgium by… Continue reading
Open source investigations
Georges Gilkinet, the Belgian MP from the Green Party (Ecolo) and the “star” of the so-called Kazakhgate commission, is a man of unpalatable convictions. In late 2009, for instance, he drafted a law that would have forced the banks to publish each year the names of their clients. He didn’t care that such a law,… Continue reading
Recently, the Inquiry Commission of the Belgian Parliament regarding the extension of the criminal transaction in 2011 summoned Jan Jambon, an MP from the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), who was questioned on several issues considered relevant for the investigation. Mr. Jambon declared, among other things, that in the early 2011 there was no pressure from… Continue reading
The former CEO of AWDC, Freddy Hanard was heard by the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on 23 March 2017. As revealed by OSI, he chose to mock and defy the Belgian MPs. And in some ways he was wright. Freddy Hanard was the CEO of the AWDC from May 2006 to December 2010. He was running… Continue reading
Despite early efforts, the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission can no longer ignore the obvious: According to its president, Dirk Van der Maelen, the Commission concluded that the settlement law was drafted by the diamond lobby for the benefit of the diamond dealers involved in fraud investigations. However this conclusion was not based on the testimonies of… Continue reading
In a recent interview in the Belgian magazine HUMO, the president of the so-called Kazakhgate commission, Dirk Van der Maelen (sp.a), said that “the text we voted on March 2, 2011, was not from Carina Van Cauter. It was a copy of the bill of Servais Verherstraeten (CD&V). We have now discovered during the inquiry… Continue reading
OSI offered ample evidence that the law voted on 14 April 2011 in the Belgian Parliament amending the Code of Criminal procedure by allowing prosecuted individuals and companies to enter into transactions with the Public Prosecutor to terminate the public prosecution of offences – the so-called “extended criminal transaction” – was in fact drafted and… Continue reading
