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5.20 pm
Lord James of Blackheath:
My Lords, I hope the minute that that has taken
has not come off my time.
I do not wish noble Lords to get too encouraged
when I start with my conclusions but I will not sit down when I have made
them. I will then give the evidence to support them and, I hope, present the
reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I shall
unfold this afternoon.
I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for
nearly two years and I am no further forward in getting to the truth.
There are three possible conclusions which may come from it.
- First, there
may have been a massive piece of money-laundering committed by a major
Government who should know better. Effectively, it undermined the integrity
of a British bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so.
- The second
possibility is that a major American department has an agency which has gone
rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of
which it is seeking to get at least €50 billion as a pay-off.
- The third
possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud, which has
not been carried out, but which has been prepared to provide a threat to one
Government or more if they do not make a pay-off.
These three possibilities
need an urgent review.
In April and May 2009, the situation started with the alleged transfer of $5
trillion to HSBC in the United Kingdom. Seven days later, another $5
trillion came to HSBC and three weeks later another $5 trillion.
A total of
$15 trillion is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for
onward transit to the
Royal Bank of Scotland.
We need to look to where this
came from and the history of this money. I have been trying to sort out the
sequence by which this money has been created and where it has come from for
a long time.
It starts off apparently as the property of Yohannes Riyadi, who has some
claims to be considered the richest man in the world. He would be if all the
money that was owed to him was paid but I have seen some accounts of his
showing that he owns $36 trillion in a bank. It is a ridiculous sum of
money.
However, $36 trillion would be consistent with the dynasty from which
he comes and the fact that it had been effectively the emperors of
Indo-China in times gone by. A lot of that money has been taken away from
him, with his consent, by the American Treasury over the years for the
specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.
Mr Riyadi has sent me a remarkable document dated February 2006 in which the
American Government have called him to a meeting with the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, which is neither
the Federal Reserve nor a bank. It is a
bit like "Celebrity Big Brother".
It has three names to describe it and none
of them is true. This astonishing document purports to have been a meeting,
which was witnessed by Mr Alan Greenspan, who signed for the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York of which he was chairman, as well as chairman of the real
Federal Reserve in Washington.
It is signed by Mr Timothy Geithner as a
witness on behalf of the
International Monetary Fund. The IMF sent two
witnesses, the other being Mr Yusuke Horiguchi. These gentlemen have signed
as witnesses to the effect
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that this deal is a proper deal. There are a lot of other signatures on the
document. I do not have a photocopy; I have an original version of the
contract.
Under the contract, the American Treasury has apparently got the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York to offer to buy out the bonds issued to Mr Riyadi
to replace the cash which has been taken from him over the previous 10
years. It is giving him $500 million as a cash payment to buy out worthless
bonds. That is all in the agreement and it is very remarkable.
Establishing
whether I have a correct piece of paper is just two phone calls away-one to Mr Geithner and one to Mr Greenspan, both of whom still prosper and live.
They could easily confirm whether they signed it.
Mr Riyadi, by passing
these bonds over, has also put at the disposal of the US Treasury the entire
asset backing which he was alleged to have for the $15 trillion. I have a
letter from the Bank of Indonesia which says that the whole thing was a pack
of lies.
He did not have the 750,000 tonnes of gold which was supposed to be
backing it; he had only 700 tonnes. This is a piece of complete fabrication.
Finally, I have a letter from Mr Riyadi himself, who tells me that he was
put up to do this, that none of it is true, and that he has been robbed of
all his money. I am quite prepared to recognize that one of the
possibilities is that Mr Riyadi is himself putting this together as a
forgery in order to try to win some recovery.
But it gets more complicated
than that because each of the $5 trillion payments that came in has been
acknowledged and receipted by senior executives
at HSBC and again receipted
by senior executives at the Royal Bank of Scotland. I have a set of receipts
for all of this money.
Why would any bank want to file $5 trillion-worth-$15
trillion in total-of receipts if the money did not exist?
The money was
first said to have come from the Riyadi account to the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York and from there it was passed to JP MorganChase in New York for
onward transit to London. The means of sending it was a SWIFT note which, if
it was genuine, ought to have been registered with the Bank of England.
When this came about, I took it to my noble friend Lord
Strathclyde and
asked what we should do with it.
He said,
"Give it to Lord Sassoon. He is
the Treasury".
So I did, and my noble friend Lord Sassoon looked at it and
said immediately,
"This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It would stick
out like a sore thumb and you cannot see it in the Royal Bank of Scotland
accounts".
He went on to say,
"The gold backing it is ridiculous. Only 1,507 tons of gold has been mined in the history of the world, so you cannot
have 750,000 tons".
That is true.
The third thing he said was,
"It is a
scam", and I agree with him.
The problem is that at that point we stopped
looking, but we should have asked what the scam was instead of just nodding
it off.
We have never resolved it.
Today, I have this quite frightening piece of
paper, which is my justification for bringing it into this meeting. It is
available on the internet and I am astonished that it has not already been
unearthed by the Treasury because every alarm bell in the land should be
ringing if it has.
It is from the general audit office of the Federal
Reserve in Washington - the real Federal Reserve - and its audit
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review to the end of July 2010 on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
It
has on it some 20 banks listed to which $16.115 trillion is outstanding in
loans. That is the sore thumb that was being looked for by my noble friend
Lord Sassoon. But more particularly there are two other interesting things.
The first is that Barclays Bank has $868 billion of loan, and the Royal Bank
of Scotland has $541 billion, in which case one has to ask a question,
because they could have earned back in three weeks their entire indebtedness
and could pay off the taxpayers of Britain.
Why have they not done so and
could we please ask them to put a cheque in the post tonight for the whole
$46 billion?
The next thing that is wrong with it is that every bank on this list,
without exception, is an MTN-registered bank, which means that they are
registered to use medium-term notes to move funds between themselves with an
agreed profit-share formula, in which case these banks are investing this
money and, most extraordinarily, not a penny of interest does the Federal
Bank of New York want paid on that vast amount, $16 trillion.
Anyone who
knows what the IMF rules are will immediately smell a rat.
The IMF has very
strict rules for validating dodgy money. There are two ways of doing it. You
either pass it through a major central bank like the Bank of England, which
apparently refused to touch this, or you put it through an MTN-trading bank,
which is then able to use the funds on the overnight European MTN trading
market where they can earn between 1 per cent and 2.5 per cent profit per
night.
The compound interest on that sum is huge. If it is genuine, a vast
profit is being made on this money somewhere.
I believe that this is now such an important issue that I have put
everything that I have got on the subject on to a 104-megabyte memory thumb.
I want the Government to take it all, put it to some suitable investigative
bureau and find out the truth of what is going on here, because something is
very seriously wrong.
Either we have a huge amount of tax uncollected on
profits made or we have a vast amount of money festering away in the
European banking system which is not real money, in which case we need to
take it back.
I ask for an investigation and for noble Lords to support my
plea.
5.30 pm
Lord Lea of Crondall:
My Lords, I am quite happy to believe
everything that the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, has said.
I will be very disappointed if the noble
Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, is unable to explain how this is all a
conspiracy by Brussels. Will the Minister confirm that if you want to
buy up the whole world you need a quadrillion? That is the latest
figure.
This debate began with a presumption that what happened on 9 December
was something of a mystery. It remains a mystery.
In answer to the question posed by the noble
Lord, Lord Kerr, as to why we walked away on that fateful night, I can
only assume, because no other explanation has been offered, that in the
middle of the night David Cameron’s phone was being hacked into by
Rupert Murdoch.
The events of that night provided quite
useful bulldog headlines for the
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following day’s newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph and the Daily
Mail.
The bulldog in question, cited by the
chairman of the 1922 Committee, was, of course, Winston Churchill. It is
worth quoting against that background of bulldogs from volume 3 of
Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he
wrote in the late 1930s although it was published only in 1956.
He said:
“But the Tories were now in one of their
moods of violent reaction from continental intervention”.
That is where we are at the moment.
