Beyond the sushi bar, traces of radiation have been detected at several more sites, including Litvinenko's home, a hotel he visited, the offices of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky and the offices of Erinys, a security and risk management company.
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/30/uk.spy.italian.reut/index.html Erinys International Ltd. was established by ex-Apartheid era official Sean Cleary and Jonathan Garratt in 2002, and provides an array of services to the military-corporate-oil-spook-mafia complex.
A UK security firm linked to two of Britain's top ex-SAS men is at the centre of a prisoner 'abuse' row after photographs revealed employees interrogating a terrified Iraqi youth in a garage in Kirkuk. Pictures obtained by The Observer show two employees of Erinys restraining the 16-year-old Iraqi with six car tyres around his body. The photographs, taken last May, show the boy frozen with fear in a room where the wall appeared to be marked by bullet holes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1350866,00.html In Greek mythology, the Erinys were three goddesses, attendants of Hades and Persephone, who guarded the Underworld.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=8328 While the company does not appear in international business directories and is only a year old, its website names five managers and directors, but does not identify its ownership structure: most of whom have been affiliated with Armor Holdings, a Florida-based security company and Defence Systems Limited, a British company which merged with Armor in 1997.
A former British Special Air Services (SAS) officer, director Alastair Morrison was co-founder and CEO of Defence Systems from 1981 to 1999. Morrison is currently affiliated with Armor Holdings, in which he holds $2.1 million worth of stock. Fraser Brown, who directs Erinys' security operations, has worked for DSL/Armor since 1999. Jonathan Garratt, Erinys' managing director, has worked for DSL and Armor since 1992. The two other Erinys officials named on the website have no apparent ties to either company: Sean Cleary is a South African risk management expert while Bill Elder previously worked as Bechtel's corporate security manager.
* Security Services and Consultancy: The security division is directed by former senior members of the UK armed forces with extensive experience in providing security to the private sector with clients such as the UN, US and UK governments, the international petrochemical industry and commerce.
* Emergency Action Planning & Crisis Management: Assessments of potentially damaging scenarios.
* Specialist Manpower: Available for all levels of security, training and project management.
* Site Security: Consultancy, audits, provisions, training, personnel, and equipment
* Guard Force Management
* Transportation and Logistics Security: Extensive experience in airline, rail, sea and overland travel including high value goods and cash in transit.
* Human Resources: Specialist, managed manpower for support operations in remote sites<2>
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erinys_International_Ltd .
Chalabis:
Erinys Iraq
Erinys Iraq Ltd, which won an $80 million contract last August from the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide security for the oil infrastructure in Iraq, has had some powerful alliances in Iraq.
* Erinys set up a Joint Venture with Nour USA Ltd. which was incorporated in America in May '03. Nour's founder is Abul Huda Farouki, a wealthy Jordanian-American who lives in northern Virginia and whose companies have done extensive construction work for the Pentagon. Nour's website describes the company as a collaborative "arrangement" between HAIFinance, a Farouki family company, and a Jordanian venture called the Munir Sukhtan Group
* Farouki's businesses established $12 million of loans from the Petra International Banking Corporation in the 1980s, which was managed at the time by Ahmed Chalabi's nephew, Mohammed Chalabi. The Jordanian government says this was part of a massive embezzlement scheme involving Chalabi and a bank he owned in Jordan.
* A founding partner and the director of Erinys Iraq is Faisal Daghistani. Faisal is the son of Tamara Daghinstani who played a large role in the development of Ahmed Calabi's Iraqi National Congress
* The firm's cousel in Baghdad has been Chalabi's nephew, Salem Chalabi
* Many among the 14,000 guards recruited by Erinys to protect the oil infrastructure came directly from the Iraqi Free Forces, a militia that had been loyal to Chalabi's movement.
http://www.alternet.org/story/18588 /
Erinys Iraq, the subsidiary of Erinys International, was awarded a two-year, $80 million contract in August 2003 to protect 140 Iraqi oil installations. Erinys has been awarded subcontracts to protect American construction contractors, including Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI24Ak01.html According to an article in Newsday in February, the July 25, 2003, CPA solicitation for bids provided no details of what would be required to provide security for Iraq's "multibillion-dollar oil infrastructure". It did, however, ask that the bidder submit "a list of five contracts of the same or similar type to demonstrate previous experience". Yet Erinys had never handled a job as large and complicated as this one, and its partner firm, Nour, has never worked in the security area.
http://www.pacifica.org/programs/reportfromiraq/PacInIraq-20040422.html But while ERINYS's employees toil for low wages, the company's financial health is hardly in doubt. In addition to an 80 million dollar contract to guard Iraq's oil infrastructure, ERINYS has also been hired to guard the petroleum infrastructure in Colombia and much of West Africa. ... It reportedly paid Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmed Chalabi 2 million dollars for his help in securing the Iraq contract.
http://www.sandline.com/hotlinks/Economist-Baghdad.html British companies have been grousing about losing out to the Americans in Iraq. But in one area, British companies excel: security
THE sight of a mob of Iraqi stone-throwers attacking the gates to the Basra palace where the coalition has its southern headquarters is no surprise. What's odd is the identity of the uniformed men holding them off. The single Briton prodding his six Fijians to stand their ground are not British army soldiers but employees of Global Risk Strategies, a London-based security company.
Private military companies (PMCs)—mercenaries, in oldspeak—manning the occupation administration's front lines are now the third-largest contributor to the war effort after the United States and Britain. British ones are popular, largely because of the reputation of the Special Air Service (SAS) regiment whose ex-employees run and man many of the companies. They maintain they have twice as many men on the ground as their American counterparts. According to David Claridge, managing director of Janusian, a London-based security firm, Iraq has boosted British military companies' revenues from £200m ($320m) before the war to over £1 billion, making security by far Britain's most lucrative post-war export to Iraq.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has information on Britain’s role in Iraq. See also the Coalition Provisional Authority.
It's a lucrative business. A four-man ex-SAS team in Baghdad can cost $5,000 a day. Buoyed by their earnings, the comrades-in-arms live in the plushest villas in the plushest quarters of Baghdad. Their crew-cut occupants compare personal automatics, restock the bars and refill the floodlit pools of the former Baathist chiefs.
Established companies have expanded; new ones have sprung up. Control Risks, a consultancy, now provides armed escorts. It has 500 men guarding British civil servants. Global Risk Strategies was a two-man team until the invasion of Afghanistan. Now it has over 1,000 guards in Iraq—more than many of the countries taking part in the occupation—manning the barricades of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Last year it also won a $27m contract to distribute Iraq's new dinar. Erinys, another British firm, was founded by Alastair Morrisson, an ex-SAS officer who emerged from semi-retirement to win a contract with Jordanian and Iraqi partners to protect Iraq's oil installations. CPA officials say the contract is worth over $100m. Erinys now commands a 14,000-strong armed force in Iraq.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=944&Itemid=135Pale Fire and London Fog: Illuminating Outliers in the Death of Alexander Litvinenko
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 01 December 2006
This is an updated version of the piece that appeared yesterday at Truthout.org.
I. The Baron and the Billionaire
Everyone knows that Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation poisoning in London last month. But beyond that bare fact, almost nothing is clear about the case. The truth has disappeared, probably forever, into the shadowlands – that murky confluence of crime, violence, money and politics where so much of the real business of the world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the curiously overlooked aspects of the affair might send at least a few shafts of light into the cloud of unknowing that has enveloped Litvinenko's death.
Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was spoonfed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence. To handle – and generate – the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky called on his old friend, Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush Administration to eviscerate Iraq.
(Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they've found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in CounterPunch back in December 2003, Bush's CPA gave Erinys' Iraqi branch – formed as a joint venture with business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi – $40 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into a much larger stashn, not to mention an armed force of 16,000 men – something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.)
The leaping lord's PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid at the Kremlin's door. Yet another client was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose "miraculous" 1996 election victory – in the face of single-digit approval ratings – was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia's state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this clique – which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years – was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky.
As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs – and soon the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where they'd stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London and environs, there to become Putin's most ferociously outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places – including Neil Bush, George W.'s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil's "educational software" company, which peddles a dumbed-down "interactive teaching" system called COW to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle.
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