But former French finance minister, who faced potentially one year in jail, will not face any punishment
Peter WalkerMonday 19 December 2016 15:15 – INDEPENDENT
International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has been convicted over her role in a controversial €400m (£355m) payment to a businessman.
French judges found Ms Lagarde guilty of negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The 60-year-old, following a week-long trial in Paris, was not given any sentence and will not be punished.
The Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal for ministers, could have given Ms Lagarde up to one-year in prison and a €13,000 fine.
The ruling, however, risks triggering a new leadership crisis at the IMF after Ms Lagarde’s predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned in 2011 over a sex assault scandal.
Ms Lagarde, who was French finance minister at the time of the payment in 2008, has denied the negligence charges.
Sarkozy uses state visit to praise Britain
Her lawyer said immediately after the ruling that his team would look into appealing the decision.
On Friday she told the court: “These five days [of trial] put an end to a five-year ordeal for my partner, my sons, my brothers, who are here in this courtroom.
“In this case, like in all the other cases, I acted with trust and with a clear conscience with the only intention of defending the public interest.”
The case surrounded the decision to allow a dispute over Bernard Tapie’s sale of Adidas to Crédit Lyonnais bank to be resolved by a rarely-used private arbitration panel – instead of the courts.
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/rKyN0QYq-9ygSIn9G.html
IMF Chief Lagarde on Brexit
Investigators suspected the payment to 73-year-old Mr Tapie was the result of a behind closed doors agreement with then-President Mr Sarkozy in return for election support.
IMF managing director Ms Lagarde was suspected of rubber stamping a deal to effectively buy off the business magnate with taxpayers’ money.
Civil courts have since quashed the unusually generous award, declared the arbitration process and deal fraudulent, and ordered Mr Tapie to pay the money back.
Today’s result was unexpected.
Even the trial’s chief prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin said the accusation was “very weak” and warned of confusion between “criminal negligence” and a “bad political decision”.
At the start of proceedings, the £355,000-a-year boss, of the global Washington-based institution, said: “I would like to show you that I am in no way guilty of negligence, but rather that I acted in good faith with only the public interest in mind.
“Was I negligent? No. And I will strive to convince you allegation by allegation.”
Her lawyer Patrick Maisonneuve said on Europe-1 radio that Ms Lagarde was just following instructions from her administration and did not have time to read all 15 years of legal files on the case.https://players.brightcove.net/624246174001/BJXA5Px6f_default/index.html?amp=1&videoId=4887940128001&customAdData=&brandColour=%23EC1A2E&playsinline=true
IMF says refugees could boost German economy
Ms Lagarde was only the fifth to be held before the Cour de Justice de la République since its inception in 1993.
IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said after Monday’s verdict that its executive board would meet soon “to consider the most recent developments”.
Another former IMF head, Rodrigo Rato of Spain, is standing trial on charges of misusing funds when he was boss of the Spanish lender Bankia.
More about
Christine LagardeInternational Monetary Fund
———————-
I.M.F. Stands by Christine Lagarde, Convicted of Negligence
I.M.F. Chief’s Lawyer on Conviction
Christine Lagarde, the managing director for the International Monetary Fund, was found guilty on Monday of criminal charges linked to the misuse of public funds. Her lawyer, Patrick Maisonneuve, speaks on the verdict.
The International Monetary Fund threw its support behind its leader, Christine Lagarde, on Monday despite her conviction in a French court on charges of misusing public funds.
With international elites and their institutions facing populist criticism amid political and social change in the United States and Europe, the 24 directors of the fund decided that this was not the time to leave the I.M.F. rudderless.
The New York Times – Excerpt
By Landon Thomas Jr., Liz Alderman and Aurelien Breeden
Subscribe to The Times……
——————
Davos 2023: Fragmenting the World
By Rick Thomas
Global Research, March 05, 2023
Theme: Intelligence, Police State & Civil Rights, US NATO War Agenda
First published on January 15, 2023
The annual Davos Boys Club (it’s also open to girls as long as they know their place) is meeting Jan 16 – 20 in the Swiss Alps. The uber wealthy technocrats will discuss how to fix the fragmented world they broke. The promo for the event says it all, no need to dig for a hidden agenda:
Canadian Deputy Crime Minister Chystia Freeland will be there sniffing and twitching like she just fell off the bus on East Hastings. The usual suspects will attend, basking in the glow of their mutual sociopathy. Hopefully, they will squeeze in some skiing, and maybe cruise by the elementary school for future prospects. Epstein sightings are predicted.
The meeting will bring together 2700 members including 52 heads of state, 600 CEO’s, 160 young globalists and 125 experts from the world’s leading universities, research institutions, and think tanks. From the United States: the likes of FBI director Chris Wray, the CEOs of Amazon, BlackRock, and Pfizer, top officials at the Gates Foundation and in the Soros network, and the Publisher of The New York Times, to name a few. Special guests include:
- John F. Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate of the United States of America
- Avril Haines, US Director of National Intelligence
- Martin J. Walsh, Secretary of Labor of the United States
- Katherine Tai, United States Trade Representative
- Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Canada
- Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky will speak at the annual World Economic Forum conference in January 2023, and he will be featured on a panel with Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. The panel will be called “Restoring Security and Peace,” which is Orwellian Newspeak for “How do we Balkanise Russia after we Destroy Ukraine.”
Conspicuously absent, there will be no Russian delegation this year.
In a recent Globe and Mail article, WEF managing director Adrian Monck complains that trolls are wrecking all of Klaus Schwab’s beautiful wickedness, by spreading far-right disinfo and stuff. He rattles on trying to prove the WEF are nice guys and would never plot world takeover or pull the wings off butterflies: “A pandemic was raging, and the World Economic Forum launched The Great Reset, promoting the idea of building back better so that economies could emerge greener and fairer out of the pandemic,” he says without blinking.
He continues on with the usual scripted propaganda that anti-semitic, far-right extremists, conspiracy-theorists, white-supremacists, neo-nazis, other-non-conformists are-misbehaving on the internet.
Why can’t they just drink the koolaid and do what they’re told like everybody else?
He is simply astonished that one website claimed the Great Reset was a “response to the coronavirus faked crisis” and would usher in “global communism” to ensure “no one will be able to own anything.” Wow, imagine that.
And yet, straight out of the horse’s mouth, the WEF itself suggests that a globalised world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organisations, which it expresses through initiatives like the Great Reset and the Global Redesign.
The main themes for 2023 will include: [translations provided by the author]
- Energy and Food Crises in the context of a New System for Energy, Climate and Nature [how to starve the plebs into submission]
- High Inflation, Low Growth, High Debt Economy in the context of a New System for Investment, Trade and Infrastructure [how to bankrupt the plebs into submission]
- Industry Headwinds in the context of a New System for Harnessing Frontier Technologies for Private Sector Innovation and Resilience [how to create the Borg]
- Social Vulnerabilities in the context of a New System for Work, Skills and Care [how to exploit the crisis they created]
- Geopolitical Risks in the context of a New System for Dialogue and Cooperation in a Multipolar World [how to exploit the war in Ukraine and/or how to exploit the crises they made without blowing themselves up in the process]
During the annual meeting the population of Davos explodes to well over 100,000, including participants, media, security, and support staff. About 2,500 in that surge are WEF delegates and the remainder comprise their entourage and security necessary for the delegates’ appearances, about 40 staff members per delegate.
Becoming an official member of WEF is expensive to say the least. You must be either in the billionaire crowd or a world leader whose tax payers foot the bill.
It costs $19,000 per person to attend.
Unfortunately, you cannot do so unless your organisation is also a WEF member. That costs between $60,000 and $600,000 a year, depending on your “partner” status. Doing the math, it costs minimum $79,000 per delegate to attend plus the additional cost for flights, accomodation and meals for their private entourages.
Doing more math: Schwab and the WEF are raking in a minimum of $213,000,000 and that would be the most conservative estimate. No doubt, the WEF gets a cut from all the hotels and other services, and so it would not be out of line to estimate at least a billion dollars per year in income.
Fortunately, the Swiss Army will be there, armed with their Swiss Army Knives, to keep all the nasty conspiracy theorists from crashing the party and spoiling all the fun. The Swiss government announced:
“For the use of the army in the form of support services on the occasion of the WEF from 10 to 26 January, the Federal Parliament has set an upper limit of 5,000 military personnel … With armed fighter jets on permanent patrol duty during the conference period, ground-to-air defence, additional radars, enhanced airspace surveillance and 24-hour air police service (throughout Switzerland).”
Though the WEF meets in Davos every year, it is actually headquartered in the tiny town of Cologny, outside of Geneva, 265 miles west.
One of Cologny’s claims to fame is that a group of Romantic poets and writers spent the summer there in 1816: Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Due to the poor weather, the guests spent days indoors telling each other horror stories. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, were the result of these fireplace sessions. Frankenstein is the story of a mad scientist who creates a monster out of used body parts, and The Vampyre is the story of a blood-sucking aristocrat who preys upon society. Sweet.
Despite the downplaying of regular attendees like Bono, who smirks that Davos is a herd of “fat cows in the snow,” the reality is that the WEF is increasingly becoming the centre of global decision-making. The United Nations did not become the forum that the elites could use to create their global corporate empire, simply because there is too much red tape and policies within the United Nations’ constitution that cannot be over-riden.
Secondly, the United Nations is built on the nation-state model, something the WEF wants to do away with.
The WEF is the future world government, plain and simple. Schwab is already its first president, and arguably the unacknowledged and unofficial CEO of the world.
All that has to happen next, through their planned series of forthcoming mega-crisis, is for the world to acknowledge the WEF’s conquest of all nation states and submit to its supreme authority.
The pandemic was the first stage towards the WEF’s endgame.
The World Health Organisation successfully enlisted 194 nations into a global coup d’etat without firing a shot.
There are three things the WEF needs to destroy in order to consolidate their power: national sovereignty, civil rights and faith in our Creator. Only the first one can be destroyed.
They can take away the power of nations on the world stage. Sovereignty has been undergoing a gradual degradation for decades. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “Canada is the world’s first post-national state,” referring to the fact that his cabinet is infiltrated by WEF members.
[Here is a complete list of Canadian elected officials who are WEF members.]
Civil rights and faith are impossible to destroy, and as history has shown, violating either results in an increase. Civil rights are the outward political expression of the inner spiritual path. Those who are on a spiritual journey, or those who value their freedom are boldly indignant when injustice occurs, especially when people’s right to basic human existence is threatened. The universe reveals that good is more powerful than evil. For all the evil that is done under the sun, the good that it produces is a hundred times greater.
The seed of destruction is planted in every totalitarian regime because tyranny is ultimately suicidal for all involved. We can, therefore, stand firm and say in confidence, “Bring it on, Schwab, bring it on.”
Rick Thomas is a musician, activist and the author of How to Defeat the New World Order. For social activism: VictoryCanada.today and for all articles: Substack.
All images in this article are from the author
The original source of this article is Global Research
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 