ARE ARTURS ‘CLONES’ OF 1988 BROTHERS? HOW MAGHARIANS BROUGHT DOWN A MINISTER
Kenya Times, Kenya
April 22 2007
INVESTIGATIVE KENYAN journalists, Police and Intelligence agents will
be interested to hear of (or be reminded about) the very heavily
documented case of a second set of Armenian brothers bearing the
surname Magharian who as long ago as 1988 precipitated the biggest
corruption, drugs, gold and gunrunning money-laundering scandal in
Switzerland’s post-World War II history and in the process caused the
downfall of the then Swiss Minister for Justice, Police and Customs,
Mrs Elisabeth Kopp.
Barkev Magharian was 35 and his brother Jean 44 in 1988 – which would
make them 54 and 63 years old respectively today – when they were
arrested and jailed and Mrs Kopp, aged 52 at the time and scheduled
to succeed to the Swiss Presidency in 1990, lost her job.
Artur Margaryan (note the difference in the spelling of the surname)
and Artur Sargasyan are the two Armenian brothers whose antics in Kenya
have not dissimilarly been linked to underworld activity, including
massive amounts of unaccounted-for cash, weapons caches, paramilitary
gear and raids and sensational allegations that touch on the integrity
and reputations of a number of high ranking personalities, including
Cabinet ministers.
The Arturs claim to be aged 33 and 36 this year and so would have
been 14 and 17 in 1988.
It would be interesting to find out whether the Magharians and the
Margaryans have known each other and, or are related in any way. Also
intriguing is the very real possibility that the younger set of alleged
Armenian brothers in fact merely apes the international exploits of
the 1980s of Barkev and Jean – to the point of impersonating them
and offering their legendary services to unsuspecting "clients".
Emerging evidence would seem to point at the probability that whoever
brought the Margaryans to Kenya for whatever reason – good, bad,
mad or dangerous – was massively hoodwinked into thinking that he or
she was retaining the world-famous services of the Magharian brothers.
For the two Arturs do not feature anywhere on the radar of open-source
Intelligence, police, media or Internet resources, including the
Google search engine’s more than eight billion pages of data, images
and graphics, before they turned up in Runda, Nairobi, Kenya.
It would also be instructive to find out whether international
confidence tricksters from Armenia, a wretchedly poor country of only
3 million people which has a Diaspora (4 million) that is larger than
the homeland population, specialise in passing themselves off as pairs
of brothers in much the same way that Nigerians, for instance, are
known to have patented some scams. Two sets of Armenian brothers with
echo-chamber surnames 20 years apart specialising in what looks like
an underworld template perfected in their Diaspora, right down to a
fondness for highly controversial special arrangements at international
airports, is too much of a coincidence.
It will be interesting to hear from the voluble Arturs on the
subject of Barkev and Jean Magharian, especially why there are so
many parallels in their sagas.
Intensive research into the large literature on economic crime, drug
dealing, gunrunning and money laundering, both print and online,
comes up with no mention of the Margaryans – before they came to
this country – who have so mesmerised sections of the Kenyan media
and consumers of their content.
However, a single reference in the formidably well-researched 1999
book Patriots & Profiteers, subtitled On Economic Warfare, Embargo
Busting and State-Sponsored Crime, by R. T. Naylor, is hugely
intriguing and may in fact provide the key to the seeming mystery
of the two Arturs and their antics in Kenya. It is about the truly
extraordinary exploits of almost 20 years ago of the second set of
Armenian brothers named Magharian.
In Part Six, Chapter 16, under the heading "Trouble on Oiled Waters,
Arms and the Ayatollah", on pages 235 and 236 of the paperback
McClelland & Stewart Inc (M&S), the Canadian publisher’s edition,
Naylor narrates:
". . . A year before that arrest, an Armenian from Turkey had
purchased a ticket on a Pan Am flight from Los Angeles to Europe and
attempted to check in two large suitcases, only to face a demand for
overweight luggage charges. After a brief altercation, the man agreed
to pay. But his belligerence had stamped his face in the ticket agent’s
memory. When she saw him, a few minutes later, buying a ticket for
a Europe-bound KLM flight, she was alarmed. However, in his checked
luggage police found not a bomb but $2 million in small bills from
the local cocaine trade. The courier confessed that the money was
destined for a Zurich money-changing firm run by two Armenian brothers.
When, the next year, the police at the Italian-Swiss border arrested
. . . traffickers with [a] truckload of morphine and heroin, they
found a business card bearing the same names.
The Magharian brothers had begun business in Aleppo , moved to Beirut
because of Syrian exchange controls, then shifted during the Lebanese
civil war to Switzerland . There they came under the sponsorship of
Mohammed Sharkachi, whose firm of bullion and exchange dealers had
four marks of distinction. It had created a small gold bar especially
popular among Middle Eastern smugglers; it had sold the CIA at least 25
million Swiss francs worth of Afghan and Palestinian currency at black
market prices to make its Afghan war budget go further; it had briefly
welcomed as a client a Turk who later fled Switzerland just ahead of
an arrest warrant for heroin trafficking in the Pizza Connection case;
and it had a prominent, politically connected vice-president who had
intervened to get the firm’s bank accounts unfrozen after the identity
of that client had been revealed.
Mohammed Sharkachi was also a man with a conscience when it came to
assisting fellow refugees in Lebanon . He had lent the Magharians
use of his courier network, which had direct access to the tarmac at
Zurich airport without passing Customs; gave them a start-up loan;
and provided introductions to the big Swiss banks. It was more than a
labour of love. The Magharians were the largest Swiss recipient of the
masses of banknotes smuggled via Bulgaria from Istanbul’s ‘Takhatele
Central Bank’, while Sharkachi’s firm was one of the main suppliers
of the gold being smuggled back into Turkey along the same route.
When news of the investigation reached the Swiss Minister of Justice
and Police, she telephoned her husband, the vide-president of the
Sharkachi firm, to advise him to resign in a hurry, precipitating
the greatest political scandal in Switzerland’s post-war history and
costing her her job."
It would be intriguing to find out whether the very definitely
Big League Magharian brothers who brought so much scandal to First
World Switzerland are related in any way, even merely as members
of the same mob, to the Armenian brothers who now style themselves
Margaryan and have brought such an embarrassing circus to Kenya. What
is most likely the case is that the Arturs have based themselves on
the Magharian brothers and probably pass themselves off as that Big
League pair to unsuspecting "clients". If this is indeed the case,
then a number of very high ranking and well-connected Kenyans who
failed to do their international homework have been taken on a huge
ride. And the tragedy of it all is that the con continues. . .
Meanwhile, the following are a selection of contemporary news and news
analysis reports of the late 1980s scandal of the Magharian brothers
and the Swiss Cabinet minister. A New York Times report datelined
December 18, 1988, and headlined "Out of the Cabinet" observed:
"In Switzerland, where women were not granted the right to vote in
national elections until 1971, Elisabeth Kopp has been a pioneer. She
was the first woman to enter the seven-person Swiss Executive, known
as the Federal Cabinet, in 1984. A recent poll named her the most
popular Cabinet member, and under the country’s rotating executive
system, she was to become Vice President in February and President in
1990. But last week the 52-year-old Mrs. Kopp resigned as the Minister
of Justice and the Police. The reason: She had advised her husband,
Hans, to resign from a company that was later disclosed to be involved
in a money-laundering investigation. Attributing her resignation to
‘unbearable pressure’, Mrs. Kopp said, ‘I wouldn’t like one to think
that I could have committed or tolerated wrongdoing.’~R
Seyyed Mehdi Sahraeean, an Iranian scholar from Shiraz once popular
among the young generation of Iranian elites and students, alleged
that an independent investigation of the Magharian-Kopp scandal
indicated that 80 per cent of the judges of the Swiss Supreme Court
were on the payroll of the Medelin and Cali cocaine cartels.
Time, the global weekly newsmagazine, in its Monday, April 24, 1989,
story on the Swiss scam, headlined "Crackdown on the Swiss Laundry",
by Christine Gorman, said: "Behind every successful drug syndicate
lies a complex mechanism for recycling bundles of tainted cash
into respectable assets. But until two years ago, when Los Angeles
narcotics officers seized three Zurich-bound suitcases stuffed with
$2 million in currency, there was little hard evidence to implicate
the venerable granite-walled banks of Switzerland in such schemes.
Since then Swiss banks have been chastened by the disclosure that their
accounts were used in a billion-dollar money-laundering operation. The
resulting political scandal, in which the Justice Minister was forced
to resign, ranks as the worst in modern Swiss history.
In response, the Swiss government has promised to draft tough
anti-laundering legislation by mid-May. Last week the federal banking
commission announced that it will introduce stiff regulations on
bank-note trading to prevent drug traffickers and other criminals from
using the country’s famed secret bank accounts. The commission also
published a 28-page report that faulted Credit Suisse, which handled
the bulk of the money in the billion-dollar scheme, for inadequately
supervising its accounts.
Money laundering is not a crime in Switzerland unless it can be
shown that the cash flows from criminal activities. Yet Switzerland
is a magnet for money launderers because of its legitimate
multibillion-dollar trade in foreign bank notes. As much as 3,000
lbs. of foreign currency arrives daily at Zurich’s Kloten airport.
Much of the cash represents earnings from tourism, which each country’s
banks exchange for local currency. Swiss authorities are investigating
charges that Lebanese currency dealer Barkev Magharian, 35, and his
brother Jean, 44, both of whom are now in custody, took advantage
of that market by laundering around $1 billion, a sum that allegedly
included drug profits. At least some of the proceeds were reportedly
sent back to drug kingpins in Los Angeles.
In a report last year on the money-laundering affair, Swiss Federal
Prosecutor Dick Marty mentioned the Zurich currency-dealing firm
Sharkarchi Trading. The company denies any involvement in money
laundering. Shortly before publication of the prosecutor’s report,
Hans Kopp, a prominent Zurich lawyer and husband of Justice Minister
Elisabeth Kopp, resigned his positions as a director and vice-chairman
of Sharkarchi. Mrs. Kopp later resigned after admitting that she had
warned her husband of the impending scandal. A criminal probe will
determine whether she violated official strictures of secrecy. The
laundering affair has focused attention on the need for other Swiss
banking reforms. One possible target: the absence of requirements
for full, consolidated financial statements.
Most Swiss banks use evasive but perfectly legal bookkeeping
thateliminates disclosures about the performance of parts of their
holdings. What remains to be seen is how vigorously the banks will
defend themselves against the reform wave and whether their reputation
for probity and prudence will survive the fray.
The August 16, 2002, issue of Executive Intelligence Review tied Mrs
Kopp’s husband to, among other things, the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International affair, an international scandal that also impacted on
Kenya, where BCCI had branches, when it observed:
"… On GeoPol’s board sits Elizabeth Kopp (nee Ikle, a cousin
to Pentagon eminence grise Fred Ikle), former Justice Minister of
Switzerland. She was forced to resign in 1988 after she was caught
tipping off her husband, Hans W. Kopp, to an ongoing Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) narcotics money-laundering investigation targeting
the company Shakarchi Trading, on whose board Hans Kopp sat. Kopp,
with Alfred Hartmann of the Swiss branch of the London Rothschild
banking house, was also implicated in the scandals of the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and BNL. Both BCCI and BNL
were involved in massive illicit arms trade, drug money-laundering,
financing of terrorism, and Intelligence operations."
For those who may be interested in further research, Mr Naylor has
the following reference-packed footnote:
Pierre Auchlin and Frank Garbely, Contra-Equete, Lausanne: 1990,
Chapter 2; Le Hebdo,11/11/88, 15, 29/12/88, 19/1/89, 2,16/3/89,
Le Monde, 21, 26/2/90; Daniel Zuberbuhler, Enquete de la commission
federale des banques dans l’affaire Magharian/blanchissage d’argent
"Libanon Connection", Bern: Weltwache, 1989; Catherine Duttweiler,
Kopp & Kopp: Aufsteig und Fall der ersten Bundesratin, Zurich: 1990.
The minister [Mrs Elisabeth Kopp] was fully absolved (Le Monde,
2/2/92, 5/5/92).