Page 47 - Carbon Frauds and Corruption

Corruption of Bribery

Chapter 6 : Corruption in the “Carbon World”

European political leaders, who do not fluoresce with unbounded eagerness to reduce taxes or cut back on red
tape, had to admit that the fraudsters were “unstoppable” in the systems as designed. They had to remove VAT
on carbon credits. As a closing Chapter to this sad episode the French tax authorities are demanding that
BlueNext (the exchange that handled many of the trades) pays compensation of €505 million

If 90% of transactions on a regulated market were fraudulent, what chances are there for
voluntary exchanges? Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, effectively the European Union’s
elite police force, stated:

"These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union's Emissions Trading System and lead to
the loss of significant tax revenues for governments"

In February 2009, Police in Italy arrested Oreste Vigorito, the head of both the Italian Vento Power Corporation
(IVPC) and the “Associazione Nazionale Energia del Vento”, (The Italian National Association of Wind Energy),
Vito Martino, a politician with the ruling “People of Freedom Party”, Vico Nicastri a Sicilian businessman and a
number of others in an operation named “Aelos” after the ancient Greek God of winds.
The prosecution alleged that the Mafia connected conspirators bribed politicians with luxury cars and cash in
return for lucrative contracts to build and operate multi‐million Euro wind farms throughout Southern Italy and
Sicily.

An earlier phase of the investigation resulted in the blocking of public subsidies worth €9.4 million and the
confiscation of seven wind farms with 185 turbines. Some of these, although fully funded by public authorities
were never commissioned but were none‐the‐less sold to foreign investors.
In July 2008, the New York Attorney General launched an investigation into two companies that were alleged to
have improperly obtained land‐use agreements for wind farms by offering benefits to citizens and public officials.
The investigation simply concluded in a code of conduct for wind energy companies operating in New York. An
oversight task force was created to manage any improper relationships between development companies and
local government officials.

The above cases represent the tip of an iceberg. Peter Younger, Interpol’s Environmental Crime
Specialist, said:

“The carbon market would be irresistible to criminal gangs”

PRINCIPLE
The carbon market is irresistible to criminal gangs

7.3 Riddled with Conflicts of Interest
Many of the most prominent supporters of the “global warming” story have a personal financial
interests in doing so. This starts at the scientific level ‐ where funding is denied unless increasingly
desperate scenarios are portrayed ‐ and runs through the range to project developers, carbon
brokers and hardware suppliers where the benefits of mitigation measures are inflated:

The British Wind Energy Association (the trade association representing turbine suppliers) originally promoted a
the idea that the UK National Grid had an emissions factor of 860 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gig watt hour,
thereby proving that wind turbines were extremely effective. However, after the figure was questioned, the factor

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