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Kaines was a big trading house in London’s West End. Partly owned by Steel Brothers, one of our parent companies. The other shares were held by Mark Rich, an American citizen, a colorful personality in the oil trade, who became a multi millionaire when in 1973/4 he sidestepped the Arab oil embargo by skillful covered up transactions and did deals with Ayatollah Khomeini. As a result he was accused in 1983 of 63 crimes, among them tax evasion, fraud, drug dealing, prostitution, and innumerable other misdeeds, the usual stuff that the CIA hangs on you, when you step out of line. After he got the whiff of it he succeeded in fleeing to Switzerland, where he received asylum and from where he kept up his worldwide business, trapped in the Alpine State. For a time he was one of the FBI’s ten most-wanted persons list, but he was our client and he regularly accepted brokers of our firm in Geneva to discuss his insurance requirements and we obliged.
Lloyd's Brokers were not concerned with political scruples; what was decisive was the size of the business, and every visit set the cash register ringing. Rich had English specialties delivered to him that he could not get in Switzerland. There he stayed trapped in Switzerland that had become a huge jail for him, till 2001 when Bill Clinton gave him a presidential pardon. It is said that a Mossad boss named Shabtai Shavit pushed Clinton, against strong opposition on government level, to do that because Rich routinely allowed Mossad agents to use his offices which were scattered over the whole world as operational basis. All in this world evolves around the question who you know and how much you are worth.
Well, to put it briefly, I immediately paid a visit to a director of Kaines, who carefully studied the papers (after all, we were all family) and found them to be genuine. With that information I went to Peter Duck, the managing director, to get approval for the flight to New York. He was anything but enthusiastic. He put his right index finger along the edge of his upper lip pushed the lip out of the way and his eyes scanned the room ignoring me.
Finally John said :
"Well,....well..... if you think there is something in it for heavens sake go."
But I should make sure, that I would look up AIG and an American co-broker by the name of Douglas Weltz - he had come up with a new concept of "residual value insurance" for aircraft and I should check this one out, he said; Obviously he did not really believe in the whole thing.
oOo
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