From ENRON to Armenia - The Inhuman Network: Part 4

The Armenian Diaspora is thriving in Cyprus, but not so much when it comes to the music industry. You could say it’s non-existent. So this company, that had just acquired one of the most prestigious plots of land in the capital, must surely have a pretty good revenue stream to afford something worth millions of Euros. If there isn’t much money to be made in sales of Armenian folklore music, either home or abroad, what else does the company do?

Looking into the files at my disposal, this little shiny gem of a company immediately turned opaque. Institutions such as ‘Ernst & Young’, ‘KPMG’, were mentioned, but there was nothing seemingly unusual in this. As an employee, I had every right to know if the IRS or any kind of ‘agency’ was about to knock on the door, didn’t I?

The company appeared not to be involved in anything other than DVD and CD production, with an odd concert tour now and then. Those must be pretty expensive CDs, and the tickets for concerts must sell for a pretty penny? Well not so. I knew that the Armenian music we sold was cheap, and concert tickets, as evidenced by a recent tour of Syria, changed hands for mere peanuts.

Does anyone have an idea what it takes to ship over 400 people, and concert equipment, and filming equipment, hundreds of miles to the Middle East, in the middle of July? Especially from Lebanon into a country like Syria, where you need a visa to walk from point A to point B at the airport? Seriously, it’s as crazy as going hiking in Iran. You just don’t do it. Not for a concert ticket with the face value of twelve dollars.

When equipment brakes down in the middle of a public performance, how is it possible to get new equipment shipped into the country overnight, crossing border checkpoints and custom clearance agents to reach the stage by 2.pm the following day? So quick and easy, no questions asked.

Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, interesting countries with plenty of connections to Cyprus no doubt. It’s reasonable to assume that the revenue stream must originate from one of these areas.

The Lebanese Connection

Before ENRON, there was a financial accounting scandal that rocked the upper echelons of the corporate finance world, and caused many high-flyers to literally jump out of the penthouse window, but it’s all forgotten now. Lost under a deep pile of mud, I was caused to dig it up one day while curiosity got the better of me again. I discovered something quite bizarre in the process.

To get back to the original question of who or what this company really is? To understand this you have to ask another question. Who is this Client? It’s relatively easy in the digital age, where the Internet speeds the access to information. Not like the old days of quiet libraries and dusty old parchment. There is a wealth of information at our fingertips and you don’t have to be a research scientist to decipher it anymore.

Reading through some online newspaper articles penned by reputable investigative journalists, and some tedious court papers, and US government documents, a picture began to emerge. Coupling this with the ‘chatter’ on various web forums, I picked up on some unflattering things being said about him. I won’t repeat them here nor will I mention his name. There are a lot of sources of information which make for interesting reading (see end of article).

Apart from being the Godfather of my old boss, he is the CEO of a myriad of companies based in Lebanon and Armenia. He’s involved in diverse industries like carpet manufacturing to hot water boilers, and imports and exports for various industries. He owns a few hotels, and a couple of restaurants. He is 100% shareholder of the company I use to work for, and has links to the USA, Canada, France, and Singapore. He started out, together with his brother, inheriting their father’s business interests, and slowly building a quiet empire in the middle-east, a post-1982 Beirut as his command centre.

On reading the articles and court papers things started to click into place, but in a most unexpected way. In my fervent search for more information I stumbled upon an article over at whatdoesitmean.com on April 9th, 2009, not the most reliable site I will admit, outlining among other things, news about the world’s elite controllers in the process of building underground bunkers to protect themselves from the coming destruction.

Did I hear someone say conspiracy theorists? That maybe so but stick with me… I remembered the approximate date (around January 2009) when building started on our expensive underground recording studio in Armenia. Work was abruptly halted in May when, strangely enough, noise problems from an underground (metro) tube connection were detected. Apparently nobody thought to test the noise level from the nearby trains before giving permission to build a ‘sound studio’ below. Incompetence or something more sinister?

I knew we bought expensive recording and editing suites, we hired freelancers to travel from Germany to test our systems, and we commissioned world renowned music producers to film our concerts. The boss would travel to France and Germany, to London and back, to Lebanon and back, all in the name of Armenian folklore music.

I read an e-mail that was freely available to me in my inbox where the client had filed a law suit in a California court to recover monies lost from a past concert tour organiser. The lawyer for the defendant mentioned ‘all that stuff on the Internet about you’. What could he mean? Like a ‘no trespassing sign’, I had to take a look. This is where things get really weird.

The client, our benefactor, was also embroiled in the Lernout & Hauspie scandal of 1996 as a private investor. It was the biggest fraud case pre-ENRON, where KPMG were accused of ‘creative accounting’. His name is mentioned along with the unflattering term ‘money-laundering’, on blogs and news articles surrounding the scandal. In brief, he made a 36 million dollar bank transfer on behalf of the speech recognition company.

Now it gets really really weird. The sloppy accounting led to further investigation. It has since emerged Lernout & Hauspie’s revolutionary listening, recording and deciphering technology (some of which has been used by Microsoft) was developed primarily for German Intelligence to spy on the Middle East – a story that was broken by the Belgium newspaper De Standaard in 2001.

Accountants had made a mistake trying to hide the huge sums of money moving around front companies. Nobody thought anyone would notice the link between the Western intelligence agencies and a new tech company like Lernout & Hauspie.

I began to wonder if the crazy underground recording studio that my boss was building was actually a secret bunker, or even a government listening/deciphering station. Had I seen too many movies and this was just another one of those strange coincidences? Why was the recording studio big enough to house ten large families? What was really under that raised access parquet floor?

It was Christmas 2009, and shortly after discovering the link between our Client and German intelligence I was ‘made redundant’. Another coincidence? One can only speculate. How do I get myself into these situations? Why does my curiosity get the better of me every time? I continually find myself drawn into strange circumstances by accident or design.

Now my career direction has taken a different turn, and I work for a ‘family clinic’ which regularly carries out abortions. Yet again, no one asks questions, everything is done matter-of-factly; no one is looking or saying much, as babies are vacuumed, or scooped up, and put in a green bag to be collected on Monday mornings. Just like the empty suitcases at the old job, no one touches them nor looks inside, nobody asks questions. It’s obvious they’re destined for some other place far far away. I wonder… is anyone listening?


Online Sources/Links:

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/4/4607/1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20060420133237/http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/how_high.htm
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2004.1265626
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/business/08audit.html?_r=1
http://www.the10b-5daily.com/archives/000311.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB107930245364754839-search.html?collection=autowire%252F30day&vql_string=lernout%253Cin%253E%2528article%252Dbody%2529
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/pdf.opinions/03-2704-01A.pdf
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr17782.htm
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp17782.htm
http://www.coursehero.com/file/2891046/2003819f01c0311566/