Total silence of Lord Alexander of Weedon for Genocide in Burma
(part-3)
Source : The Rangoon Post
Lookingback, Alexander was smart to get out of NatWest when he did, in April 1999, a few months before the raid by the Bank of Scotland. At the same time, Mr.Desmarestİs board was secretly preparing plans to take over the Elfİs oil and gas empire. After ten years at the helm, the bank had a sullen reputation as Britain's worst, with falling profits, failed strategies, and a dismal record of losing three billions of pounds of shareholder value.
When he first joined the bank, one of his first responsabilities was liquidating £ 6 billion in bad loans. Pressure mounted as disgruntled shareholders threatened a revolt, setting the tone for the Bank of Scotland attack last September. In both deals, the lawyer-banker Lord walked away handsomely with his pockets full of millions of pounds in options, bonuses and shareholder profits.
When Alexander finally was forced to step aside, it was all too late for the crippled bank to recover and bounce back.
Like in Burma, the damage was severe but all was not lost. Alexander could admit a record profit before tax of £2.1 billion , up 120 % compared with the losses of 1997. Before the NatWest merger ranked 13th in the world, and the Royal Bank of Scotland 31st, with a pretax profit of £ 1 billion for 1998 and a foreign exchange dealing profits estimated at £107.2 million.
NatWest boasted profits on foreign exchange from the subsidiary Global Financial Markets (GFM ), ranked among the world's top ten, active in over 60 currencies, amounted to £317 million, up 33% on the previous year, while the foreign exchange dealing profits of the Group as a whole amounted to £363 million.
In total, GFM made a pre-tax profit of £393 million, up 61% and a return on equity of 40.3% in 1998. According to a NatWest report, GFM "has been a consistent contributor to shareholder value averaging a return of over 30% for the last three years ". This, at a time when up to 20 % adult population in Great Britain is without a bank account.
Ironically, it is this endless and insatiable drive for increasing shareholder value, with financial companies raking in hundreds of millions of pounds, fortified with promises to stream line costs and increase performance yield that finally destroyed Weedon's ten year tenure at the bank, and changed the way banking and business is done in the city so that it will never be the same.
That same drive for shareholder value, pushed by Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and other powerful investment banks, has also fired up a storm in every shareholder meeting of the oil and gas companies in Burma, and throughout the world, to the extent that the investors have become obsessed with increasing profits, howling and shouting down anyone who dares to challenge them.
Allies of the Burmese general
To witness one of their recent shareholders meetings is to confront a pathos and see how terribly mad they are driven by greed. Its lends explanation to the staged blindness of the company directors to the human atrocities and their refusal to accept moral responsability.
For they too are caught up in the logic of a general syndrome of the global economy and they feel themselves to be the newborn masters, invincible and impossible to stop without the looming threat of a severe reversal of fortune. Don't overlook that the NatWest staff costs increased by 39%. The incentive for making more profits has its rewards down to the average salary of the GFM staff , well over £150,000.
Just a small part of the cake. While the Lord of Weedon received a salary of £720,000 from the scandal-ridden institution, including performance-related bonuses, and stood to gain £90,000 on exercising share options granted in 1998, he held another 40,000 ordinary shares of £1 at the end of the year, and 113,540 shares as part of a medium-term equity plan.
Further, he was granted 16,455 share options the year before he was sacked and replaced his boardroom colleague Lord Blyth, the chairman of Boots. And at the end of 1998 possessed 99,139 share options at a weighted price of 501 pence (market price of shares averaged 1159 pence in 1998). Driven by market forces and their eager financial advisors, todayİs corporate board directors will do anything to increase shareholder value.
Another shareholder windfall for the Lord was also in the cards, this time across the channel. Is that why Lord Weedon remains on the board of Total? Odd, that the UK press not make a big stink about the Lord's ship going down off the Atlantic coast, and truly not too far to be indifferent about oil washing up the English and Irish shoreline ?
Perhaps it would not have been taken too kindly, in the middle of the battle for NatWest. Not fair play and all that good form that belongs to the era of gentlemen, long since gone. Yet, after all, the Lord is also a government shipping expert having led an investigation into how unjustly the island's shrunken industry is taxed. The pipeline investment in Burma, is that " fair play " ? Surely it is not.
So how is it heavenly possible that Alexander, not only was untouched by the NatWest takeover that created Europe's 8th largest bank and ended 342 years of independence, but rather had everything to gain, transferred far from the front line to Exeter, all while he watched from afar the sad fate of his ship sinking off-shore.
You might say that at Total, Alexander is still broadening his horizons, surrounded by a lot of very influential people like Paul Desmarais, the self-made billionaire of Power Corp of Canada, Baron Albert FrÜre, the richest man in Belgium, Serge Tchuruk, the CEO of Alcatel, the french telecommunications and defense industry giant, as well as an entire world-class network of French, German, Belgium and Swiss Banks.
Incidently, most of these banks all have offices which opened offices around 1995, in Rangoon, where drug money laundering from the opium, heroin and amphetamine production,and a legal no-questions 25% commission to the generals is standard business. Surely the students of Exeter have good reason to question their Chancellor on the how the banks do business in Burma, the world's second largest producer of opium, after Afganistan. They may even wish to invite Keith Hellawell, the Governmentİs "drug czar", or publish their names and passport numbers, along with the black list for assets seizure and visa ban, recently made public by the European Union, of the junta generals.
In fact, the NatWest mergers that sent millions into the pockets of the banks top executives and outside financial firms, after five months of a roller-coster ride in reality, hardly pushed up their market shares. It will still take several years before it proves to be profitable if ever.
But the prospect of earning an easy billion for shareholders and driving an out-moded and diverted economy is far too appealing an attraction than helping a foreign nation on the road to democracy, especially when its easier to make a profitable deal with a dictator, and protected by international law in the hands of the high and mighty.
The real takers were the banks financial advisers at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Warburg along with the public relations firms and lawyers, at least half a billion pounds. With so much money in the game, the clamor for human rights is drawfed in comparison. Unless of course, your honor cannot be bought or sold in the bidder's frenzy, and for whom the bottom line is saving lives, and restoring the democratic rights of a legitimate political party. As Pierre SanŬ, of Amnesty International has said, "Human dignity is not quoted on the stock market." Truly, that is something for Alexander to think about as he prepares to reconcile moral values with corporate profits to younger generation on campus.
There are so many questions that are raised over the Burma investment problem, and remain unanswered. Until now, why has the British press not taken up the fact that Weedon has been on the board since 1996? Would it have been too much to have informed the 6.5m NatWest customers, that their chairman was directly linked to the pipeline and death railway in a former British colony ? Unfortunately, the crisis has worsened. Massacres, especially of the Karen and Shan population, are going on daily, along with systematic rape and torture by the Burmese army.
Total, Premier and Alexander have blood on their hands. He has a lot of explaining to do about his role in the Burma genocide.
A timely occasion would have been last June, in a celebrity revue at the Royal Court to honour the birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi who had prepared a special video to address the gathering. " Her bravery and stubborn refusal to use violence against the Burmese military regime in the fight for democracy have earned her only harassment, intimidation and personal tragedy, " Glenda Jackson wrote eloquently of her in the "Times". She added, "Yet hers is not a unique situation, as she has emphatically pointed out.
Burmese families have been ripped apart as a result of internal displacement through ethnic-cleansing campaigns, the detention and torture of at least 1,500 political prisoners and the forced labour or 8-10 million people, threatened with torture, rape and murder.
A democratically elected Government has been denied power by a military regime. Aung San Suu Kyi has long called for the international community to impose full economic sanctions on Burma. The regime is in desperate need of foreign currency, and investment sanctions will help to cut off one source of revenue. The economy is the military's Achilles' heel, and unlike other cases, sanctions will have little effect on the population as foreign investment has done more damage than good." Without effective economic sanctions, it is clear that the international community has betrayed the Burmese democrats and their leaders.
Worse, the upcoming US elections and a possible Republican victory would mean a return to business as usual in Burma ; Dick Cheney, the vice-president nominee is the former chairman of the oil company, Halliburton, with a long record of investment in Burma.
Encouraged by a recent debate in the House, Ms. Jackson urged an end to the pipeline business with the generals, and wrote, "Any company in the EU already in Burma should disinvest and not consider any future investment. We, as consumers, are quite prepared not to buy products from companies that we believe are investing in illegal and unethical regimes. We have reached a point in history where governments should be able to harness the energy and commitment of people around the world who play their part as consumers to help to reduce the power of regimes such as that in Burma. "
Having been the son of a petrol station proprietor in Stoke-on-Trent, educated in Brighton, then at Cambridge, and graduating in English and Law, Alexander has gone far. Perhaps, too far. Ambition can often lead a man astray like the ill-fated Total ship, lost at sea. He remains a Trustee of the " Economist ", and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as Total informs its shareholders, Alexander sits on the management committee of the Prince of Wales Summer School on the Environment.
Earthrights has described damage caused by the two pipelines to the Burma-Thai ecosystem and environment as imminently " monumental " with severe threat to endangered animal species including half the mammal population and forests. Total claims its a lie.
There is no mistake. Total, Premier and the Burmese army keep the people poor and living like animals born to fight, hunt and work as slaves. Total needs the natural gas to increase the company's reserves, along with oil, its only capital though it is heavily invested in the nuclear sector as well.
As a result, Total makes a mockery of human rights violations and prefers publicly to ignore them because it harms its illustrous high-profile as Europe's leading energy company, and diminishes its responsibility. All it wants is the gas, a high return on shareholder investment and increased dividends for them and the generals against the rest of the people. The military regime's revenues from the Yadana gas field, according to a study by the energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, and published by ERI, will amount to $2.8 billion, and from Yetagun, another $823m.
The Thai company, PTT, partner in the Yadana deal, has already paid the junta $50m, and is currently holding off payment on another $280m on a " take or pay " contract for the gas, which it says it no longer wants, nor needs, after the 1997 asian currency crisis and economic recession.
What has been happening in Burma, and elsewhere, from the City, to Paris, has its roots also in all the financial centers of the world of a global economy struggling to keep its balance, between, on one side an unrestrained race for shareholder profits, stock options, giant corporate bonuses, and lay-offs, and on the other, a reasonable and just consumerism where trade restrictions,and economic sanctions have a place to save lives and reduce unwanted suffering.
Total chairman Mr. Desmarest, speaking on behalf of Alexander and his fellow directors, publicly ignores his company's role in the organised crime and genocide of the Burmese narco-economy funded by money laundering and heroin trafic. Burma is the world's second largest producer of opium and heroin. To this day, Total prefers to praise the achievement of constructive engagement and the development of the pipeline region !
The oil and gas energy companies, as well as their proxy generals, know that there is no good will that their weapon of wealth cannot buy ten times over. The corruption has deep roots in the corridors of power like the tunnels bored thousands of meters into the earth powerless to conceal its treasure now keeping the band of thieves in Rangoon entrenched in power. One can only wonder how long Alexander is prepared to play along with Total to deceive the world.
Meanwhile, more religious groups and NGOs are reaching out to help the Burmese win their struggle against the oil companies and friends of the junta. Jubilee Campaign UK has taken up the case of James Mawdsley, the courageous human rights teacher of Karen refugees and devoted Christian, now serving a 17-year sentence in northern Burma. James was teaching Karen refugees, in Thailand, who lost their homes because of the pipeline.
The Burmese Army then came and burned down the school. Indeed, Burma is very far away, and God is very high above. Recently, his mother, Diana Mawdsley, wrote to the "Guardian", how James is forced to live " in solitary confinement and foul conditions. His "crime" was to peacefully express his concern for the suffering of the Burmese people. " She added, "Mr Jamieson of Premier Oil denies any accountability for the ethnic cleansing required to keep the oil pipeline. James met him last year and received the same answer as your newspaper - "he is unaware of any abuse". There are none so blind as those who will not see. And this includes the noble Lord Alexander of Weedon.