Yesterday one of the crooks and grifter who are leading the U.S. got indicted:
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was indicted Friday on allegations that he and his wife accepted bribes from a group of New Jersey businessmen on behalf of interests in Egypt, totaling over $600,000.
Prosecutors allege the senator and his wife accepted cash, gold bars and a luxury car in return for assisting the businessmen. The FBI found nearly $500,000 in cash and more than $100,000 in gold at Menendez’s home in a raid last year, allegedly payment for the bribes.
The senator stepped down from his seat as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee late Friday.
Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey and his wife have been indicted by a federal grand jury, according to court filings unsealed Friday, with prosecutors alleging the couple accepted lavish bribes in exchange for official acts.
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Menendez, 69, and his wife face one count of conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The three New Jersey associates, identified as Wael Hana, Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes, are also named as co-defendants and face two counts. Menendez and his co-defendants are expected to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday morning.Nadine Menendez and Hana were friends for several years before she began dating Menendez, according to the filing. A court-authorized search of Hana's cellphone in November 2019 revealed "thousands" of text messages between him and Nadine Menendez, which prosecutors said were deleted from her phone. Daibes, a longtime fundraiser for Menendez, was charged by the Justice Department in 2018 with obtaining loans under false pretenses from the New Jersey bank he founded, the indictment said.
Menendez vehemently denied the charges, but a chorus of New Jersey Democrats began urging him to step down later Friday. Gov. Phil Murphy said the allegations are "so serious that they compromise the ability of Senator Menendez to effectively represent the people of our state," calling for his "immediate resignation."
A copy of the indictment is here. The case looks solid.
Menendez was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. A previous chairman of the committee, and also a crook and grifter, still sits in the White House.
Wael Hana, Jose Uribe and Fred Daibes seem to have worked for the intelligence service of Egypt. The well bribed Menendez intervened several times to the favor of the Egyptian government.
What is of interest is how the three New Jersey associates got the money they doled out to Menendez, his wife and probably also others. It was a secret tax payed by all Egyptians.
In December 2019 Nada Arafat of Mada Masr wrote a story about it.
How the multi-million dollar business of certifying halal meat imports was monopolized
In Egypt, all imported meat must be certified as “halal,” meaning that it has been procured, stored and shipped in accordance with Islamic law. Obtaining this certificate is a crucial requirement for meat suppliers to be able to access the lucrative Egyptian market.
The Egyptian government licenses a number of “certifiers” around the world whose job it is to ensure that exporting slaughterhouses are complying with halal requirements. And while the certification rules are numerous and complex, they are still tolerable, according to a US-based meat exporter, who said they hadn’t had a problem bringing their products into Egypt.
Or at least that was the case until May 2019, when the Agriculture Ministry abruptly disqualified all halal certifiers eligible to operate in the United States, except for one newly licensed company: IS EG Halal Certified. Five months later, the ministry awarded the same company exclusive certification rights in South America as well, a major source of Egypt’s imported meat.
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IS EG remains an unknown entity for many in the market, including to both importers and exporters, as well as to foreign governments. A May report by FAS Cairo described it as a non-governmental company established in November 2017, with no prior experience in halal certification or pre-existing ties to the American beef industry. IS EG only started operations this past May, immediately after the Agriculture Ministry’s decision, the report said.The company’s first order of business, days after it became the exclusive certifier, was to raise certification fees in North America, translating into millions of dollars of extra revenue, according to calculations made by Mada Masr. The FAS estimates that the price of American beef liver in the Egyptian market rose by about LE13 per kilo (81 cents) following the move.
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Once it was made the sole halal certifier, IS EG immediately raised the fees for its services by an astronomical amount, according to Sherif Ashour, a meat importer who has dealt with the firm and imported several shipments through them. Certification fees for one container (27 metric tons) jumped from US$200 to over $5,000 in the US, and from $250 to $1,500 in South America.
In 2018 the total meat export from Brasil and the U.S. to Egypt summed up to some 230,000 metric tons per years. The extra fees introduce by IS EG monopoly sum up to about $25 million per year.
The Egyptian government gave out an exclusive license. The U.S. company used it to make money and to create a slush fund that was likely under control of a Egyptian intelligence service. The money was paid by all Egyptians who ate meat imported from the U.S. and South America.
From the indictment it seems that the bribing of Menendez was the sole purpose of the scheme but the amount of money the company makes is quite a bit bigger than the million or so that has flown to Menendez.
The owner of the company that ran under this scheme is Wael Hana, one the three New Jersey associates indicted together with Menendez. The bribes to Menendez were paid from the slush fund.
Documents obtained by Mada Masr show that the company’s founders are Wael Hana, an Egyptian immigrant to the US, and Antranig Aslanian, an American attorney. Aslanian represented the Egyptian government in a 2016 lawsuit relating to the renovation of a diplomatic building in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which the government lost.
The IS EG website went online on April 22, just days before the government’s decision to grant it certification. It states that “IS EG is the only authorized agency by the government of Egypt to certify halal products for export from North & South America to Egypt and the Middle East,” though it contains little other information about the company.
The phone number listed on the site is registered to a trucking company called Loundes Express. Documents show that Loundes Express was founded by Wael Hanna in 2015. The company owns only one truck, yet its annual revenue is about $30 million. The company’s address is listed as 1047 Anderson Ave, Fort Lee, NJ, which is the same address listed for IS EG and Aslanian.
Who is this Antranig Aslanian you might ask. I am not sure yet but this seems to be a part of the answer.
Prosecutors say that Nadine Menendez began dating the senator in February 2018. They got engaged in October 2019, and were married the next year.
Shortly after the two began their courtship, the senator's wife, who then went by the name Nadine Arslanian, introduced Menendez to her longtime friend, Hana. Through several meetings and dinners that she arranged but that were paid for by Hana or his associates, Egyptian officials would allegedly raise requests for foreign military sales and financing.
In exchange for Menendez's promise to use his position as senator to push through the sales and aid to Egypt, Hana promised to put the lawmaker's partner on his company's payroll in a job she barely, if at all, had to show up for.
IS EG, the company under Hana and Antranig Aslanian, was founded in 2017. In 2018 Nadine Arslanian, probably a daughter of Antranig Aslanian, started to date Menendez. It is possible that she was at that time working for an Egyptian intelligence agency.
With Menendez asking for more and more bribes Hana had run out of ways to pay those. In May 2019 the Egyptian government introduced the exclusive Halal certifier scheme and the money began to flow again. Menendez and Arslanian got engaged in October 2019 and married the next year.