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Intro­duc­tion: Tak­ing an inves­tiga­tive look into the deep­est, most secure “vaults” of inter­na­tional finance and intrigue, this pro­gram sets forth the chill­ing odyssey of indi­vid­u­als who have run afoul of insti­tu­tions secret­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in gold looted by the Axis in World War II. The “Bot­tom Line”–no gam­bit goes unused, and no prin­ci­ples or statutes go unbro­ken in the ongo­ing, suc­cess­ful quest to keep this vast wealth under the con­trol of the pri­vate and gov­ern­men­tal inter­ests that con­trol it, and con­tinue to profit from its possession.

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est for our pur­poses are the Union Bank of Switzer­land and Citibank, both recip­i­ents of bil­lions of dol­lars in U.S. tax­payer bailouts, despite the kingly sums of “Black Gold” from WWII con­trolled by those institutions.

The pro­gram opens with analy­sis of the rela­tion­ship between Union Bank of Switzer­land, the Nazi I.G. Far­ben chem­i­cal car­tel and the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work, eco­nomic com­po­nent of a Third Reich gone under­ground and per­pet­u­ated Mafia-like through its con­nec­tions to deci­sively pow­er­ful eco­nomic and polit­i­cal inter­ests.

Note that UBS has helped cap­i­tal­ize the Thyssen indus­trial group with pro­found his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial links to the Bush fam­ily, as well as the Under­ground Reich.

After not­ing a major Swiss bank’s advice to its clients to sell off all U.S. assets, the pro­gram reviews the fact that UBS has been a pri­mary focal point of U.S. efforts to effect trans­parency for the pur­pose of track­ing tax cheaters with accounts in that bank.

The bal­ance of the pro­gram derives from the remark­able book Gold War­riors by Ster­ling and Peggy Sea­grave.

Much of the pro­gram focuses on attempts by the heirs of OSS and CIA offi­cer Sev­erino Santa Romana to recover bil­lions of dol­lars from accounts that he had set up pri­vately and in con­junc­tion with the CIA and other gov­ern­ment agen­cies. Draw­ing on vast sums of gold secreted by the Japan­ese in the Philip­pines dur­ing World War II and recov­ered by U.S. mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence inter­ests after the war, these astro­nom­i­cal accounts were used to finance covert oper­a­tions dur­ing the Cold War, as well as to buy and sus­tain polit­i­cal favors through­out much of the world’s power structure.

Jour­nal­is­tic and polit­i­cal illu­mi­na­tion of the dynam­ics of the clan­des­tine power deriv­ing from these accounts would shake the world to its foun­da­tions. Pre­vent­ing the light of day from pen­e­trat­ing the “Dark­ness in the Vaults” man­dated the unnerv­ing machi­na­tions used to pre­serve the secrecy sur­round­ing these enor­mous fonts of eco­nomic and polit­i­cal power.

When attempt­ing to recover an account at UBS val­ued at $192 bil­lion (when gold was $300 hun­dred dol­lars an ounce!), Santa Romana’s heirs were warned that UBS and/or the Swiss gov­ern­ment might well have them killed!

Con­fronted with irrefutable evi­dence of many bil­lions in Santa Romana’s gold in its cof­fers, Citibank (again, like UBS and other ben­e­fi­cia­ries of looted war gold accounts, the recip­i­ent of U.S. bailout funds), Citibank sim­ply trans­ferred the funds off­shore, where they were beyond the legal reach of Santy’s heirs and their attorneys!

In appo­si­tion to the story of the threats deliv­ered to Santy’s heirs, the authors cite the har­row­ing expe­ri­ence of UBS employee Christophe Meili, who broke the story of Holo­caust vic­tims’ unclaimed funds in Swiss bank accounts. Meili and his fam­ily got numer­ous death threats, and he was labeled the tool of a “Jew­ish Con­spir­acy” by the head of UBS, his employer!

Ter­ri­fy­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties also befell Aus­tralian bro­ker Peter John­ston and W.R. “Cot­ton” Jones, both of whom under­took inves­ti­ga­tions of gold cer­tifi­cates held by oth­ers. John­ston was arrested on the grounds that a UBS gold cer­tifi­cate of which he held a pho­to­copy might be a fake!

“Cot­ton” Jones was con­fronted and threat­ened by three Secret Ser­vice Agents when he pur­sued a law­ful inves­ti­ga­tion of a UBS finan­cial instru­ment on behalf of a client!

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The var­i­ous devices by which banks dis­guise the gen­uine nature of gold cer­tifi­cates and other finan­cial instru­ments so that they can be selec­tively labeled as fraud­u­lent; the kid­nap­ping and ter­ror­iz­ing of Ben Aragones, the client on whose behalf Jones under­took his inves­ti­ga­tion; review of the role of “off­shore” in pre­serv­ing bank­ing and cor­po­rate secrecy and ille­gal­ity; review of the gen­e­sis of Santa Romana’s gold recov­er­ies and the ori­gins of Golden Lily, the Black Eagle Trust and other finan­cial enti­ties deriv­ing from looted WWII gold.

1. The pro­gram opens with analy­sis of the rela­tion­ship between Union Bank of Switzer­land, the Nazi I.G. Far­ben chem­i­cal car­tel and the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work, eco­nomic com­po­nent of a Third Reich gone under­ground and per­pet­u­ated Mafia-like through its con­nec­tions to deci­sively pow­er­ful eco­nomic and polit­i­cal inter­ests.

Note that UBS has helped cap­i­tal­ize the Thyssen indus­trial group with pro­found his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial links to the Bush fam­ily, as well as the Under­ground Reich.

In 1948 a suit was to be filed by cer­tain minor­ity stock­hold­ers of Inter­han­del against the attor­ney gen­eral of the United States, as suc­ces­sor to the wartime Alien Prop­erty Cus­to­dian, and the U.S. Trea­sury, for the return of 89 per­cent of GAF, of a value of $100 mil­lion plus $1.8 mil­lion seized in cash in 1942. Inter­han­del, through its Amer­i­can attor­neys, first filed an admin­is­tra­tive claim, which was denied. The suit then went to the Dis­trict Court for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, then to the Supreme Court, and back to Dis­trict Court. The Swiss claim was based
on the argu­ment that Inter­han­del was a Swiss cor­po­ra­tion, that it was not nor had it ever been an enemy of the United States, and that it owned the shares in ques­tion. The Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment rebut­tal was that Inter­han­del was the result of a con­spir­acy between the pri­vate bank of H. Sturzeneg­ger, for­merly E.Greutert & Cie., and I.G. Far­benin­dus­trie of Ger­many and oth­ers “to con­ceal, cam­ou­flage, and cloak the own­er­ship, con­trol, and com­bi­na­tion by I.G. Far­ben of prop­er­ties and inter­ests in many coun­tries of the world, includ­ing the U.S.”

As the case dragged through the U.S. courts, Schmitz would have Inter­han­del cos­meti­cized even more. Charles de Loes, past pres­i­dent of the Swiss Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion, would be elected chair­man, and the gen­eral man­ager of each of the Big Three banks would be appointed to the board. They would agree to this because the honor of Swiss bank­ing and its prin­ci­ple of bank­ing secrecy would be at stake. In addi­tion, 25 per­cent of Inter­han­del stock would be reg­is­tered in the name of Union Bank, whose man­ager, Dr. Alfred Schae­fer, was of known integrity. The Swiss believed the asso­ci­a­tion of such a man of high bank­ing repute at Inter­han­del would impress Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment author­i­ties. But the Ger­man con­nec­tion would still be there. Not only Her­mann Schmitz, but also the bank­ing con­nec­tion of Union Bank of Switzer­land, Dr. Schaefer’s bank, and Deutsche Bank, which acted in con­cert on so many deals involv­ing not only I.G. Far­ben but also big Ruhr indus­tri­al­ists such as Thyssen A.G., the largest steel­maker in Ger­many. In Jan­u­ary 1978 these two lead banks, act­ing through the UBS-DBCorporation, an Amer­i­can firm of the Union Bank of Switzer­land and the Deutsche Bank of Ger­many, would be the finan­cial advi­sors for Thyssen A.G. in its $275 mil­lion cash takeover of the Budd Com­pany of Troy, Michi­gan, a lead­ing U.S. man­u­fac­turer of auto com­po­nents, truck trail­ers, and rail cars. UBSDB Cor­po­ra­tion would also say that the West Ger­man com­pa­nies it rep­re­sented were show­ing a “very sub­stan­tial inter­est in all sorts of Amer­i­can ven­tures, includ­ing merg­ers and acquisition.” . . .

(Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; pp. 160–161.)

2. A major Swiss bank has instructed its clients to sell U.S. assets or leave the bank.

Wegelin & Co., Switzerland’s old­est bank, is telling wealthy clients to sell their U.S. assets, or switch banks, because of con­cerns new rules will sad­dle investors with tax oblig­a­tions in the world’s biggest economy.

U.S. pro­pos­als to extend report­ing require­ments for banks whose clients buy Amer­i­can stocks and bonds cou­pled with estate tax lia­bil­i­ties that may be inher­ited by the heirs of peo­ple who have such hold­ings prompted the advice from the St. Gallen, Switzerland-based bank, said Man­ag­ing Part­ner Kon­rad Hummler.

“We came to the con­clu­sion that it’s a threat to our clients,” Humm­ler, who is also pres­i­dent of the Swiss Pri­vate Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion, said in an inter­view yes­ter­day dur­ing a con­fer­ence in Zurich. “It’s also a threat to us as a bank because as a cus­to­dian we are an execu­tor to the estate. We find this aspect dis­com­fort­ing, so we rec­om­mend sell­ing all Amer­i­can secu­ri­ties whatsoever.”

Humm­ler said he plans to raise the sub­ject today at a meet­ing of the Pri­vate Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion, which counts Pictet & Cie., Lom­bard Odier & Cie. and Mirabaud & Cie. among its mem­bers. Swiss banks, which man­age $2 tril­lion, or 27 per­cent, of the world’s pri­vately held off­shore wealth, are strug­gling to pro­tect bank secrecy after the gov­ern­ment agreed to hand over the names of 4,450 UBS AG clients to U.S. tax authorities.

Humm­ler said he wouldn’t ask other asso­ci­a­tion mem­bers to fol­low Wegelin’s lead. Wegelin, founded in 1741, man­ages more than 20 bil­lion Swiss francs ($18.7 bil­lion) in client assets.

“Every mem­ber is free to decide and act on their own,” he said.

HSBC Stud­ies

Alexan­dre Zeller, head of HSBC Hold­ings Plc’s pri­vate bank in Switzer­land, said his com­pany is still study­ing the new rules for qual­i­fied inter­me­di­aries and will do every­thing it can to com­ply with them.

“Often in these agree­ments you have to under­stand how this will be applied, and it would be pre­ma­ture, espe­cially for an inter­na­tional bank, to take such a deci­sion,” he said today, refer­ring to Wegelin’s posi­tion. “It’s not on the agenda for the moment.”

The U.S. has pro­posed increas­ing report­ing and over­sight require­ments for so-called qual­i­fied inter­me­di­aries — for­eign banks that with­hold taxes on behalf of the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice. In addi­tion, new rules may mean that peo­ple who spend lim­ited peri­ods of time in the U.S. acquire tax oblig­a­tions, includ­ing estate taxes, cre­at­ing an unac­cept­able risk for Wegelin’s clients, Humm­ler said.

If a client decides to keep his U.S. invest­ments, “then finally he has to change banks,” Humm­ler said.

“We’re talk­ing about prob­a­bil­i­ties,” Humm­ler said. “My respon­si­bil­ity toward clients has to include any kind of prob­a­bil­ity, and if I see a real threat then we have to act.”

U.S. Alter­na­tives

Wegelin is find­ing alter­na­tive ways of invest­ing in the U.S. that won’t impose report­ing require­ments on the bank or tax lia­bil­i­ties on clients, Humm­ler said.

“The good thing is that in today’s world you can build up U.S. expo­sure in equi­ties and as well in bonds through deriv­a­tives and index funds and so on, so we are switch­ing to a European-made Amer­i­can exposure.”

Ger­many and France have also sought to weaken Swiss secrecy laws as they crack down on tax evaders.

The French gov­ern­ment, which signed a double-taxation treaty with Switzer­land on Aug. 27, obtained the names of 3,000 peo­ple sus­pected of tax fraud and hold­ing accounts at three Swiss banks, French Bud­get Min­is­ter Eric Woerth, said Aug. 30 in an inter­view with the news­pa­per Jour­nal du Dimanche.

“It’s not cred­i­ble,” Humm­ler said. “The U.S. had a hard time get­ting these 4,450 names, then the French come and say we have 3,000? I can­not believe it, but they’re try­ing it on.”

“Old­est Swiss Bank Tells Clients to Sell U.S. Assets or Leave” by War­ren Giles; www.bloomberg.com; 9/2/2009.

3. UBS has been the pri­mary focal point of U.S. efforts to effect trans­parency for the pur­pose of track­ing tax cheaters with accounts in that bank.

The United States is to con­tinue its law­suit against Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, to try to force it to iden­tify thou­sands of US clients with con­fi­den­tial UBS accounts.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment said in a brief filed with a Miami court on Tues­day that it was press­ing ahead with its case to reveal infor­ma­tion about 52,000 Amer­i­cans sus­pected of using the bank to hide nearly $15 bil­lion (SFr16.3 bil­lion) in assets and evade US taxes.

It rejected argu­ments from UBS and the Swiss gov­ern­ment that had tried to have the case dis­missed. A court hear­ing is sched­uled for July 13.

Despite media spec­u­la­tion about a pos­si­ble set­tle­ment of the five-month-old case, the Jus­tice Depart­ment said it was seek­ing to enforce tax com­pli­ance with the full weight of US law.

“The United States has a strong national inter­est in mak­ing sure that all US tax­pay­ers com­ply with the tax laws, includ­ing dis­clos­ing their off­shore accounts, and pay­ing all the taxes they owe,” the depart­ment said in the brief.

“The United States has proven its case for enforce­ment. The court should order UBS to com­ply in full,” it added.

UBS has con­sis­tently said that enforce­ment of the US sum­mons would require the bank to vio­late Swiss leg­is­la­tion on bank­ing secrecy and was incon­sis­tent with US-Swiss treaties.

The Swiss author­i­ties have also said the US case vio­lated the sov­er­eignty of another state and should there­fore not be pursued.

UBS spokes­woman Karina Byrne said the bank was “open to an appro­pri­ate solu­tion” to avoid going to court, but said no set­tle­ment had yet been reached.

Both lawyers and ana­lysts have been scep­ti­cal about reports that the US would drop the case against UBS with­out major Swiss con­ces­sions, in view of the cur­rent momen­tum against tax havens.

“Based on our rep­re­sen­ta­tion of many UBS cases, it is clear in our minds that the gov­ern­ment is going to pur­sue vig­or­ously its objec­tives of trans­parency and lim­it­ing tax haven abuse,” lawyer William Sharp, who rep­re­sents US clients of UBS told the Reuters news agency.

UBS and Bern have argued that any exchange of infor­ma­tion should be han­dled through exist­ing legal treaties rather than in the courts.

But the Jus­tice Depart­ment has appeared unrelenting.

“Although Swiss inter­ests in bank secrecy may also be impor­tant, the court must con­sider those inter­ests in the con­text of UBS’s con­duct, where for at least seven years the bank actively helped tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans break US laws and evade hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in US taxes,” the depart­ment said.

“The vital national inter­est of the United States in fight­ing attempts by US tax­pay­ers to avoid and evade their tax oblig­a­tions out­weighs the gen­eral Swiss inter­est in main­tain­ing the secrecy of its bank­ing rela­tion­ships, espe­cially for those for­eign law­break­ers,” it added.

In its brief, the Jus­tice Depart­ment said that UBS had acknowl­edged that its bankers com­mit­ted “very seri­ous crimes on US soil” and had there­fore sub­jected the bank to the full juris­dic­tion of US law.

“Swiss bank­ing secrecy is not an impen­e­tra­ble wall,” the doc­u­ment said.

In a posi­tion paper on the case on Wednes­day, the Swiss Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion (SBA) said it was “dis­ap­pointed” that the US gov­ern­ment had failed to address spe­cific argu­ments deliv­ered by the SBA and other orga­ni­za­tions in a brief deliv­ered in May.

The brief had argued that when the US and another coun­try entered a treaty that estab­lished an agreed process for obtain­ing admin­is­tra­tive assis­tance in tax mat­ters, the treaty process should be hon­oured, par­tic­u­larly if the alter­na­tive was, as in the present case, to impose US law on a Swiss bank in a way that would require the bank to vio­late Swiss law.

The SBA said it con­tin­ued to believe the dis­pute should be resolved through government-to-government nego­ti­a­tions and not through litigation.

In another reac­tion, Swiss Finance Min­is­ter Hans-Rudolf Merz said the US deci­sion to pur­sue the case came as no sur­prise. How­ever, he told jour­nal­ists in Bern that he did not rule out an out-of-court set­tle­ment between the parties.

“U.S. Demands UBS Com­ply in Tax Eva­sion Case”; www.swissinfo.ch; 7/1/2009.

4. Much of the pro­gram focuses on attempts by the heirs of Sev­erino Santa Romana to recover bil­lions of dol­lars from accounts that he had set up pri­vately and in con­junc­tion with the CIA and other gov­ern­ment agencies.

” . . .When he died, Santy left to four­teen heirs a for­tune esti­mated by their attor­neys to be worth over $50-billion. All their efforts to recover his assets from banks have been blocked or, more often, evaded.

The three main heirs were Santy’s cor­po­rate accoun­tant, Tar­ciana Rodriguez, act­ing for the estate; his common-law wife, Luz Ram­bano; and his adult daugh­ter, Flordeliza. After a few false starts, they turned for help to the famous San Fran­cisco lawyer Melvin Belli, New York attor­ney Eleanor Jack­son Piel, for­mer CIA deputy direc­tor Ray Cline, and one of America’s best-known bankers, Citibank CEO John Reed. Also engaged in these efforts were Florida lob­by­ist George Depon­tis, for­mer Bahamas supreme court jus­tice Sir Leonard Knowles, and Wash­ing­ton attor­ney Robert A. Ackerman.

Because of the size of Santy’s estate, and its secre­tive nature, Luz, Tar­ciana, and Flordeliza seem to have had every con­ceiv­able obsta­cle put in their path. The U.S. gov­ern­ment, and Amer­i­can banks, would like Santy’s assets to remain where they are. So would the Swiss gov­ern­ment and Swiss banks, banks in Hong Kong, and in other finan­cial cen­ters. In a few more years, every­body con­nected to Santy will be dead, so cus­tody of his cash and bul­lion will remain in the banks, like Holo­caust gold.

For Wash­ing­ton, stonewalling is imper­a­tive not only because of the gigan­tic assets involved, but to block attor­neys from pur­su­ing dis­cov­ery (as in the Schlei case), which could reveal far more than Santy’s finan­cial data. Poten­tially, dis­cov­ery could result in dis­clo­sure of the whole sub­ject of covert war-gold recov­er­ies, the Black Eagle Trust, diver­sion to cor­rupt pur­poses of secret funds like the M-Fund. This could dam­age rep­u­ta­tions and careers, and make unavoid­able an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Gen­eral Account­ing Office of Con­gress. Pres­i­dent Ford had addressed a sim­i­lar prob­lem in 1975 when he set up the Rock­e­feller Com­mis­sion to pacify inter­est in the CIA Fam­ily Jew­els affair, remark­ing that he did not want infor­ma­tion get­ting out that could blacken the rep­u­ta­tion of every U.S. pres­i­dent since Truman.

Iron­i­cally, Santy’s heirs were only inter­ested in end­ing their poverty, not in expos­ing cor­rup­tion, so it would have made sense to pla­cate them with gen­er­ous set­tle­ments in return for signed agree­ments never to raise the mat­ter again. Yet both banks and gov­ern­ments have remained doggedly opaque and obsti­nate in block­ing the heirs-a sure sign that they have much to hide.

Although the three prin­ci­pal heirs showed these banks pro­bated wills, pass­books, bank state­ments, receipts, all the nec­es­sary pass­words, code-words, and secret account num­bers, pro­vided to them by Santy, the response was the same. With four excep­tions, the banks flatly denied hav­ing such accounts, whether the account in ques­tion was a sage-deposit box, or a huge gold bul­lion deposit. . . .

(Gold Warriors-America’s Secret Recov­ery of Yamashita’s Gold; by Ster­ling Sea­grave and Peggy Sea­grave; Verso [HC]; Copy­right 2003 by Ster­ling Sea­grave and Peggy Sea­grave; ISBN 1–85984-542–8; p. 222.)

5. Note that UBS was among the banks that actively rebuffed the law­ful efforts of Santa Roman’s heirs to recover his estate.

For exam­ple, accord­ing to the Union Banque Suisse doc­u­ments repro­duced on our CDs, Santy’s biggest sin­gle account there was 20,000 met­ric tons of gold bul­lion. This is the account on which the title-holder was mag­i­cally changed at the moment of Santy’s death, from his Crown Com­mod­ity Hold­ings to Major Gen­eral Edward G. Lands­dale [sic], bear­ing in mind that spelling errors made by Swiss banks are part of delib­er­ate authen­tic­ity codes. One pos­si­bil­ity is that on this mon­ster account Santy was merely a straw man, being replaced by another straw man: Lans­dale. We might ask, who else but a gov­ern­ment would have suf­fi­cient lever­age to make such a change at the biggest bank in Switzer­land? Had UBS alone made the change, they are unlikely to have cho­sen the eccen­tric Lans­dale as the new title­holder. How­ever, by 1974, Lans­dale had been out of gov­ern­ment for a decade, and was one of the found­ing fathers of The Enter­prise net­work, and an inti­mate col­league of some of America’s wealth­i­est con­ser­v­a­tive moguls. If Lans­dale and Santy always had shared con­trol of this big UBS account, Lans­dale might have been able to have UBS trans­fer title to his name, where­after it could be accessed by his cir­cle. The U.S. gov­ern­ment may not have been involved.

At $300 an ounce, this account would be worth $192-billion dol­lars, a lot more than the net worth of Bill Gates. Is this sum believ­able? Yes, if it is a covert U.S. Gov­ern­ment account con­tain­ing a mass of black gold. Just as no seri­ous coun­ter­feiter makes silly spelling mis­takes, no con­man in his right mind would dream up an account so big. Recall that the jury in the Roxas Gold Bud­dha case saw con­vinc­ing evi­dence that $1.63-trillion in gold was sold by Mar­cos through his Aus­tralian brokers.

Doc­u­ments we repro­duce on our CDs bear­ing the sig­na­tures of a num­ber of top Swiss bankers show that UBS has other accounts, includ­ing gold bul­lion and plat­inum, which are even larger. Such giant accounts are not out of the ques­tion for immensely wealthy men like King Fahd of Saudi Ara­bia, whose fam­ily have been bank­ing bul­lion in Switzer­land for decades. Accord­ing to Gem­ini Con­sult­ing world­wide pri­vate bank assets were $4.3 tril­lion in 1986, and were clos­ing in on $14-trillion in 2000. So this account at UBS is not impossible.

UBS doc­u­ments show that Crown Com­mod­ity Hold­ings was a sub­sidiary of Santy’s Crown Enter­prises. The group rep­re­sen­ta­tive was Alfredo P. Ramos, an exec­u­tive of Santy’s com­pany Diaz & Poir­rotte Enter­prises, reg­is­tered in Monaco. Ramos states in an affi­davit that ‘I know the late Don Sev­erino Gar­cia Sta. Romana, Romana Poir­rotte or Jose Anto­nio Diaz, under the code ‘From Father My Old Man . . .  that once the work has begun, don’t leave until it’s done, be labor great or small, do it well or not at all’,” This homily, as we’ve seen, is one that Santy learned from Lans­dale in 1945. It is the same homily Santy quoted in his holo­graphic will. It is used as a code phrase con­sis­tently in Santy’s bank accounts. Such recur­rences, over half a cen­tury, are not accidental. . . .

Ibid.; pp. 222–223.

6. Many of the largest and most impor­tant banks were repos­i­to­ries of Santa Romana gold accounts and these banks all rebuffed Santa Romana’s heirs.

Note that, at the afore­men­tioned UBS (like Citibank, a recip­i­ent of U.S. bailout funds after the finan­cial col­lapse of 2008), a vice-president of the insti­tu­tion warned Santa Roman’s daugh­ter that the bank and/or the Swiss gov­ern­ment itself might have her killed if she pressed her case.

. . . Accord­ing to video­taped inter­views with Tar­ciana, imme­di­ately after Santy’s death Lans­dale also was involved in the mys­te­ri­ous move­ment of gold bul­lion from Santy’s accounts at Citibank Manila to Citibank New York, pos­si­bly done to get the assets out of the Philip­pines before Mar­cos could attach them. Because the accounts were in Santy’s names, such trans­fers would appear to be ille­gal with­out autho­riza­tion form a rec­og­nized trustee of his estate, or some­one hold­ing his power of attor­ney, for whom was Lans­dale acting?

Once these assets left the Philip­pines, they joined other bul­lion and cash accounts that doc­u­ments show Santy already had in Amer­ica at Citibank, Chase, Wells Fargo, Hanover Bank, and other banks.

Soon after his death, Santy’s holo­graphic will was pro­bated in Manila, and Tar­ciana, Luz and Flo­re­deliza were named by the court as legit­i­mate heirs. Luz went to Amer­ica hop­ing to gain access to the accounts at Citibank in Man­hat­tan. There she enlisted the help of attor­ney Eleanor Jack­son Piel, giv­ing her Let­ters of Admin­is­tra­tion issued by the Philip­pine court. These had to be rec­og­nized by New York courts. Piel pro­ceeded in Surrogate’s Court for the issuance of Ancil­lary Let­ters of Admin­is­tra­tion, which would give Luz right of access to his accounts at Citibank, Chase, and Hanover. This took time.

While Luz pressed her case else­where, Piel wrote let­ters to the head offices of all the banks con­cerned, ask­ing about the Santa Romana accounts. Not a sin­gle bank replied.

Luz flew to Switzer­land, vis­it­ing UBS in Geneva with two Amer­i­can friends. Accord­ing to one of the Amer­i­cans, Jim Brown: “I sat with Luz and another Amer­i­can . . . while she gave a vice-president then told Luz “he wouldn’t rec­om­mend her try­ing to claim this account rep­re­sented, they would not be beyond hav­ing her killed first. He also went to tell her, that he wouldn’t rec­om­mend hir­ing any Swiss attor­neys, because the bank would sim­ply buy them off.”

Ibid.; pp. 223–224.

7. In appo­si­tion to the story of the threats deliv­ered to Santy’s heirs, the authors cite the har­row­ing expe­ri­ence of UBS employee Christophe Meili, who broke the story of Holo­caust vic­tims’ unclaimed funds in Swiss bank accounts.

We might scoff at the notion that a UBS vice pres­i­dent would make mur­der threats, but what of Christophe Meili? A stu­dent work­ing nights as a secu­rity guard at UBS in Zurich, in Jan­u­ary 1997 he dis­cov­ered very old doc­u­ments and books wait­ing to be shred­ded. They con­cerned assets of depos­i­tors who died in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps. ordered banks not to destroy archival mate­r­ial. He took some doc­u­ments and gave them to the Hebrew Con­gre­ga­tion of Zurich. When asked later why he did it, Meili replied that he had recently seen the movie Schindler’s List.

“I knew I had to do something.”

A month later, when the doc­u­ments were made pub­lic by oth­ers, Meili was fired from his $18,000 job at UBS. Robert Studer, Pres­i­dent of UBS, insin­u­ated that Meili was financed by an inter­na­tional Jew­ish con­spir­acy. “This issue of so-called unclaimed Jew­ish money in Swiss banks rears its head again and again. For us, it is no issue at all. The prob­lem was thor­oughly dis­cussed after the Sec­ond World War and we con­sci­en­tiously inves­ti­gated then what money in our bank might have belonged to Holo­caust vic­tims because we wanted to set­tle the ques­tion once and for all. For us the case is closed.”

Much as the State Depart­ment insists the 1951 San Fran­cisco Peace Treaty closed the door on com­pen­sa­tion and repa­ra­tions for Japan’s war vic­tims. Much as Wash­ing­ton and the Mar­coses insisted the Yamashita Gold story was only a myth.

UBS passed off the shred­der inci­dent as ‘unfor­tu­nate’ say­ing, “no one in our senior man­age­ment would ever have approved such a deci­sion.” Robert Studer was removed from all offi­cial duties, but remained the bank’s Hon­orary Chair­man. Meili received over ‘100 death threats, and threats to his wife and chil­dren. They fled to Amer­ica, where they were given asy­lum. Meili tes­ti­fied before U.S. Con­gres­sional com­mit­tees inves­ti­gat­ing the hid­ing of Nazi assets by Swiss banks. Sen­a­tor Anthony D-Amato called Christophe Meili an inter­na­tional hero. “The crim­i­nals are the ones who ordered the shred­ding of the documents.”

Ibid.; pp. 224–225.

8. Ulti­mately Santy’s daugh­ter Flordeliza was com­pletely rebufed by UBS and the wiz­ards of Swiss finance.

Scared and deflated, Luz returned to the Philip­pines. Three years later she and Brown went back to Switzer­land to approach a dif­fer­ent bank. This time, Brown told us they were suc­cess­ful in recov­er­ing the accu­mu­lated inter­est from one of Santy’s accounts, but the bank would not release the bul­lion itself. Another source told us Luz kept this recov­ery secret, feel­ing that she had been stonewalled so long that it would be absurd to for­feit any of it in taxes.

Mean­while, Tar­ciana, Santy’s cor­po­rate treasurer-tried to access his accounts at HSBC in Hong Kong. Fol­low­ing the advice of attor­ney Artemio Lobrin who had been Santy’s tax con­sul­tant, she asked HSBC to ver­ify the exis­tence of the accounts men­tioned in Santy’s holo­graphic will. After show­ing them all the nec­es­sary codes, pass­words, and doc­u­ments, a bank offi­cer told her the accounts had not matured, were there­fore inac­ces­si­ble, and to come back in 1988.

In turn, Flordeliza sought access to Santy’s accounts at the Hong Kong branch of Sanwa Bank. She had a pass­book show­ing large cash deposits to that branch in March 1973. At first Sanwa denied it has a branch in Hong Kong in 1973. Then, despite all the doc­u­men­ta­tion, they claimed they had no client called Santa Romana or any of his pseudonyms.

When Cory Aquino became pres­i­dent, her staff asked Aus­tralian finan­cial expert Peter Nel­son for help. He was shown com­puter sheets and forty pass­ports bear­ing Santy’s photo. “The pass­ports matched details on the numer­ous bank accounts. . . Most trans­fers had orig­i­nated in Hong Kong before being moved to other parts of the world. I added up the amounts men­tally as I went along and lost count at around forty bil­lion dol­lars! I was shown pho­tos of crates and some of these were open. I of course could not vouch for this bul­lion but there were cer­tifi­cates to match.”

The Aquino aides explained that Santy had left the major­ity of his estate to his daugh­ter, which would make Flordeliza one of the rich­est women on earth, but when she tried to present the pro­bated will to banks, she was told to prove that the man in the photo on all the pass­ports with all the dif­fer­ent names was in fact her father.

Mean­while the banks would sit prof­itably on the money.

Nel­son said: ” I told my Fil­ipino friends there was a way out. If [Flordeliza] agreed to hand the money back to the gov­ern­ment in the Philip­pines for a finder’s fee of say give per­cent, that would give her more money than [she] could spend in a life­time and the gov­ern­ment would lend their weight in push­ing for its return. They thanked me and I flew back to Syd­ney.” Noth­ing came of it, and Flordeliza stayed poor.

Ibid.; p.225.

9. Citibank was among the most promi­nent of the banks that frus­trated Santy’s heirs. After being con­fronted with irrefutable evi­dence of the pres­ence of bil­lions of dol­lars in gold in its accounts, Citibank trans­ferred the gold off­shore, where it could not be touched. (For more about the insid­i­ous oper­a­tions of “off­shore finance,” exam­ine the work of the remark­able Lucy Komisar.)

Note, in this con­text, that Citibank was the recip­i­ent of bil­lions in bailout funds fol­low­ing the finan­cial col­lapse of 2008, as were UBS and other banks involved in the insid­i­ous machi­na­tions that denied Santy’s heirs his estate.

Ulti­mately, all efforts fixed on Citibank, where John Reed was chair­man and CEO. Under Reed’s direc­tion, Citibank became richly involved in off­shore pri­vate bank­ing. With off­shore deposits worth over $100-billion it was ranked third after UBS and with $580-billion and Credit Suisse with $292-billion. By shift­ing money from coun­try to coun­try, off­shore assets are pro­tected from lit­i­ga­tion by cred­i­tors, ex-spouses, or heirs. Except for cases involv­ing money laun­der­ing, secu­ri­ties fraud or nar­cotics, most for­eign courts will not rec­og­nize a U.S. court order. So a claimant must fight for access through courts in a nation where the account is held, only to dis­cover the money already has been moved to another juris­dic­tion. This is key to what follows.

In Decem­ber 1990, Tar­ciana went to Citibank’s head office in Man­hat­tan, with a friend act­ing as finan­cial advi­sor and wit­ness. “We were taken in to see John Reed,’ her friend said. “When we showed him our doc­u­ments, pass­words and code-phrases, the mag­ni­tude of it sud­denly hit Reed. He went white, and pan­icked. You could see it in his face. He left the con­fer­ence room in a hurry. A few min­utes later he returned with sev­eral Citibank lawyers.” They told Tar­ciana to come back the fol­low­ing day.

“When we walked into the con­fer­ence room the next day,” Tarciana’s friend recounted, “we found Reed sit­ting there with twenty lawyers. They told us these accounts did not exist.”

Again Tar­ciana and her friend went away. On inspi­ra­tion, they flew to Albany where they vis­ited the New York State Tax Office. In its pub­lic records archive, they obtained a list of all the accounts Santy had at Citibank and other banks in New York State under his own name and aliases, and his com­pany names. (Repro­duced on our CDs.) They also dis­cov­ered that all state and fed­eral taxes had been waived on inter­est gen­er­ated by these very big accounts, a curi­ous exemption.

Return­ing to Citibank, they were con­fronted once again by Reed and his pha­lanx of attor­neys. Tar­ciana and her friend showed them a copy of the New York State tax records list, demon­strat­ing that the bank had lied, and the accounts did exist. Accord­ing to Santy’s own records and doc­u­ments Tar­ciana had with her, Citibank held 4,700 met­ric tons of gold bul­lion belong­ing to Santy’s estate. No longer deny­ing they had the accounts, the attor­neys’ blandly told the two women to bring in ‘the real party’. They refused to iden­tify whom they meant-possibly Santy’s corpse. They also said Tar­ciana needed ‘legal’ papers, which she already had shown them. They said Citibank wanted a state­ment from the Philip­pine gov­ern­ment that it would not hold them respon­si­ble for releas­ing the money (again implic­itly acknowl­edg­ing the bank did hold the assets.) This inferred that the funds might be claimed by Manila as gold stolen by Mar­cos, although the accounts were set up by Santy long before Mar­cos came to power. The attor­neys also said they wanted a waiver from Imelda Mar­cos, imply­ing that the Mar­cos fam­ily might make claims (real or imag­i­nary) to some of Santy’s assets. Finally, they said they also needed a waiver from the U.S. Embassy in Manila, appar­ently mean­ing a waiver from the U.S. Gov­ern­ment. All this dou­bletalk was clearly to fend off Tar­ciana while the bank decided what to do next. That did not take long.

The solu­tion was sim­ple: Citibank would move all Santy’s assets off­shore, from Citibank New York to Cititrust in the Bahamas. This would have the effect of putting the bul­lion out­side the juris­dic­tion of New York courts, block­ing any law­suits con­tem­plated by the heirs. Legally, such assets could not be moved out of New York juris­dic­tion with­out autho­riza­tion of the account holder or his heirs, or assigns (mean­ing Tar­ciana as cor­po­rate trea­surer). But if the gold were moved off­shore with­out the knowl­edge of the account holder or his heirs, the bur­den would be upon them to recover it. Large ship­ments of gold bul­lion also can­not take place with­out the knowl­edge and approval of the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment and the Fed­eral Reserve. Nor could the bul­lion enter Nas­sau with­out approval of the Bahamian author­i­ties. But there appear to have been ways to get around such obsta­cles, per­haps by attribut­ing own­er­ship of the gold to Citibank itself, which some attor­neys might argue qual­i­fies as ‘wrong­ful conversion.’ . . .

Ibid.; pp. 225–227.

10. Man­i­fest­ing a fright­en­ing sim­i­lar­ity to the gam­bits used to frus­trate Santy’s heirs is the expe­ri­ence of Aus­tralian bro­ker Peter John­ston, who also attempted to nego­ti­ate a UBS gold certificate.

Take the bizarre case of Aus­tralian bro­ker Peter John­ston, who was asked by a client to nego­ti­ate a UBS gold cer­tifi­cate in Europe. While trav­el­ing, John­ston did not want to carry the cer­tifi­cate, so he left it in ‘safe Cus­tody’ with the Lon­don branch of Australia’s West­pac Bank. He often lodged such cer­tifi­cates with West­pac to attest to its being gen­uine. Yet the branch man­ager felt ‘uneasy,’ and with­out ask­ing John­ston faxed copies to UBS in Switzer­land, ask­ing if it was gen­uine. With­out ever exam­in­ing the orig­i­nal, UBS ‘infor­mally’ declared it a forgery. It is UBS pol­icy to call all such doc­u­ments forg­eries but to avoid doing so for­mally by Tested Telex because that is equiv­a­lent to sworn tes­ti­mony in a court of law. An infor­mal opin­ion casts doubt, while avoid­ing lia­bil­ity. UBS does that to rou­tinely scare away peo­ple hop­ing to nego­ti­ate gold cer­tifi­cates. Nor­mally the City of Lon­don Fraud Squad would refuse to pur­sue a charge based on an infor­mal opin­ion, but this time the Fraud Squad set up a sting, and when John­son walked in to the West­pac office on March 6, 1995, he was arrested and charged with attempted fraud-because the cer­tifi­cate might be phony and John­ston might try in the future to nego­ti­ate it. Amaz­ingly, John­ston was con­victed on this spe­cious charge and lan­guished in prison for 18 months. At no time did UBS actu­ally estab­lish that the cer­tifi­cate was a forgery, only say­ing it was not issued by UBS in Zurich. This was a bla­tant dodge, because UBS gold bul­lion deals are not done in Zurich but by their sub­sidiary, War­burg Dil­lion Read, at Glat­tburg near Zurich air­port. In short, John­ston appears to have been falsely impris­oned on false tes­ti­mony, for some­thing he did not attempt to do. There are many sim­i­lar­i­ties to the Schlei case.

Ibid.; pp. 231–232.

11. Next, the broad­cast sets forth some of the ways in which finan­cial insti­tu­tions and gov­ern­ments col­lab­o­rate devise ways of dis­cred­it­ing own­ers of finan­cial instru­ments held by those who are “not insid­ers” and can be thus intim­i­dated or worse.

An expert on gold cer­tifi­cates, Wolf­gang Jentsch, explains that these instru­ments “may take many forms and quite pos­si­bly will not be in the bank­ing form. They are by their very nature pri­vate bank­ing doc­u­ments, and will not be in the pub­lic domain. . . the larger the amount con­cerned, the closer becomes the cir­cle of those who know. . . it is rare that the main struc­ture of the bank itself would ever know of their exis­tence. . . The owner of the funds . . . would be given a num­ber of other doc­u­ments in order to secure the cer­tifi­cate. He would be given a let­ter which would pro­vide the details of only those per­sons who would be able to ver­ify the exis­tence of the cer­tifi­cates and he would be given coded secu­rity num­bers.” Jentsch said cod­ing typ­i­cally includes “what would appear to be severe spelling or gram­mat­i­cal errors . . .” Such errors enable the bank, when it wishes, to denounce the cer­tifi­cate as counterfeit.

In this chap­ter, we have seen how Santy’s heirs pre­sented all the nec­es­sary doc­u­men­ta­tion and codes, but still were stonewalled. We saw in Chap­ter Nine that Japan’s Min­istry of Finance delib­er­ately con­trived the “57s” to look dif­fer­ent from ordi­nary Japan­ese gov­ern­ment bonds so they could be denounced as forg­eries, allow­ing the Min­istry to dodge pay­ment. That UBS, Citibank and other banks might do the same must come as no sur­prise. When a client dies, it mat­ters lit­tle whether he was an inmate at Buchen­wald or pres­i­dent of Indonesia-the bank will do all it can to retain the gold. Here is an exam­ple of what John Ken­neth Gal­braith meant when he said, “The study of money, above all other fields in eco­nom­ics, is one in which com­plex­ity is used to dis­guise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”

Ibid.; p. 232.

12. Also ter­ri­fy­ingly instruc­tive is the case of W.R. “Cot­ton” Jones, whose efforts at aid­ing with the nego­ti­a­tion of gold cer­tifi­cates resulted in his being threat­ened by the U.S. Secret Service.

Against this back­ground, it is reveal­ing to see how quickly the U.S. Secret Ser­vice rushes to the aide of a Swiss bank, when a cus­tomer walks in ask­ing if a gold cer­tifi­cate is genuine.

In march 1996, Fil­ipino attor­ney Ben Aragones met retired Wall Street bro­ker W.R. ‘Cot­ton Jones.’ Aragones told Cot­ton how he had been arrested by Swiss author­i­ties for try­ing to nego­ti­ate a gold cer­tifi­cate, spent three months in jail, and was for­bid­den to return. On another trip to Zurich, he said he and his wife were kid­napped and ter­ror­ized. He was told that UBS did this to scare him off forever.

Cot­ton, being a roman­tic, offered to test the water by see­ing if the New York branch of Swiss Bank Cor­po­ra­tion would tell him whether one of Ben’s cer­tifi­cates was real. Cot­ton would not try to nego­ti­ate the ‘cert’, which could be dan­ger­ous. If he only took a nota­rized pho­to­copy, the orig­i­nal would not be con­fis­cated. To be cau­tious, he chose the cert with the small­est denom­i­na­tion, only $25-million.

“On March 20, 1886,” he told us, “I walked into the Swiss Bank Cor­po­ra­tion in New York City and asked that the bank ver­ify and authen­ti­cate a $25-million Cer­tifi­cate of Deposit issued by their bank and bear­ing the Fed­eral Reserve Seal.” They asked him to leave it for exam­i­na­tion and come back in two days. When he returned on March 22, three men pos­ing as bank offi­cers demanded the orig­i­nal and made threat­en­ing noises. When Cot­ton tried to snatch his pho­to­copy back, all three men jumped and iden­ti­fied them­selves as U.S. Secret Ser­vice Agents, dis­play­ing badges and ID cards. They blocked his way and said if he forced the issue he would be assault­ing a Fed­eral Agent.

“I kept deny­ing and still deny that I ever knew whether the doc­u­ments were valid or not. They told me I would be in jail twenty-two years . . . that I had bet­ter coop­er­ate with them so it would go eas­ier on me.”

After ninety min­utes of bul­ly­ing, Cot­ton was taken down­town and issued two U.S. Dis­trict Court Grand Jury sub­poe­nas and ordered to be in Secret Ser­vice Agent Tom Atkinson’s office at 10 a.m. Mon­day. When Cot­ton appeared, he suf­fered more brow­beat­ing. Yet not once did any­one call the cer­tifi­cate false. He was told to appear before the Grand Jury the next day.

Cot­ton arrived on time, only to be informed that his pres­ence was unnecessary....”

Ibid.; pp. 231–233.