1.
PLUTO, the Dutch Anti
Apartheid Movement and Rhodesia
PLUTO,
what Breyten called a “revolutionary action group” catalysed during the student
uprising at the University of Amsterdam in 1969, much the same as had been the
case with ATLAS in Paris a year earlier. PLUTO spawned the Dutch Anti Apartheid
Movement (AABN), a fully-fledged national movement in the Netherlands. Within
PLUTO a position on sanctions as a form of revolutionary solidarity never had
enthusiastic support. But once faced by the expedience of leading a major solidarity
group, sanctions was taken on with a vehemence not witnessed before, either internationally,
with other Anti Apartheid Movements, or with Governments, Commonwealth and
other international organizations.
Aid
and trade with the decolonised countries was important in the adopted strategy.
In the late sixties / early seventies aid was seen by revolutionary militants
as creating debt bondage and tied trade with the poor world to the benefit of
the rich. What was interest-free Marshal Aid for the reconstruction of a war
torn Europe, became repayable loans for the ex-colonial countries. Eventually
these “aid receiving” countries were exporting capital to the rich countries as
debt repayments exceeded further aid. “Busting sanctions busters” gave ample
opportunity to expose these hypocrisies. The US, for example, made a special
exception in its sanctions program to exclude chrome exports from
Rhodesia, but at the same time raking in debt repaments plus interest from poor world countries.
With
these objectives in mind the AABN opted for a very different strategy followed
and propagated by other groups. With most AAMs sanctions actions were based on
consumer boycotts, media and diplomatic action. The AABN, on the other hand,
embarked on working primarily through trade unions. The methods employed
involved low key intelligence backed up by research.
A
task team was assembled made up mainly of the members of the Rhodesia Committee
that had disbanded and its members thrown their lot in with the AABN. Because
of the legal complexity we had an Attorney and an Advocate in the team as well.
Of great benefit were the militants who came from the Rhodesia Committee. They
were all students from the Technical High School. The team was strengthened
considerably by their ingenuity and bold approaches: street wise savvy in
tracing information, like gaining access to buildings, and work with telex
machines.
By
late 1971 the team was ready for action. There were regular meetings once per
week, even though during the first months a plan of action had to be devised
with little or no progress to report on. It was by steadfast determination that
a way was found, and the team gained practical traction in enveloping some sanctions
busters. The team stuck to simple logistics. If sanctions busting was taking
place, then there must be paper chases to follow in the world of banking. The
team’s Attorney, who was research smart, started looking at official statistic
with the Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch Reserve Bank) and came back with a result –
yes, there were Rhodesian Dollars held on the reserve accounts of the Bank. The
amounts were small, but it was a definite indication that these small amounts
were merely the tip of the iceberg.
Requesting
details from the Nederlandsche Bank fell on deaf ears. Writing official letters
also helped nothing. We called on the Economische Controle Dienst (ECD,
“Economic Intelligence Service”) also to no avail. It was clear to us that
without political support at high level there was no way for the team to make
any progress.
Not
to be put out by these first negative responses to what we considered clear
evidence of illicit trade, we called for a meeting with the ECD. The ECD
conceded a meeting that was held in the attic of the Anne Frank House. They
made it clear to us that the fact that we found illicit currency on the books
of the Nederlandsche Bank was no proof at all. We had to produce much harder
evidence for the ECD to work with and start an investigation. This phrase
became one of derision, “hard enough proof to start investigating” or, "there is evidence but no proof". Crime in
the commercial world clearly had a tolerance not afforded to the normal citizen
who could get picked up for not paying parking tickets!
Note
that this meeting was not done as a favour to us by the ECD. It was clear to us
that the publicity surrounding the Bodegraven Action had given a considerable
media hype, and probably they were wary that we were onto something and take
them by surprise, if not in the press but confront them directly with
embarrassing information. But at least contacts had been established as well as
a modus operandi to work with. The next step was to think hard about how to
access the “hard proof” that the ECD needed. An obvious first step was to
continue with the research work as well as intensifying surveillance work in
the harbours, where the team’s trade union mates had regular access to bills of
lading. After a number of weeks of brain storming, a plan was devised that all
members made and inventory of friends or acquaintances they knew who were
working in banks. Week after weekly meeting we drew blank until one week it was
bingo: a contact had been found. Better still, he could tell the team member
that bills of exchange had passed his desk relating to sanctions busting. It
took a while before he was able to hand over some of the incriminating
documents. But the great news was that we had the name of the bank’s client
receiving payment for these bills of exchange, Joba Chemicals!!!
With
these documents the team again called for a meeting with the ECD. And again the
ECD gave not only a negative response, but a threatening one. The information
on itself indeed did indicate a financial transaction, but that was by far not
strong enough to warrant an investigation. Then the ECD fired a shot over the
AABN’s bows with a question: “we need first to investigate how you came in
possession of these documents! Meaning the informant’s identity would have to
be blown and the source of information dry up.
With
this double whammy setback, the fight was on. We knew who the banker was, we
not who the actual sanctions buster was: Joba Chemicals in a posh office
building a hundred meters from Schiphol airport.
The
team at least knew the name of the banker, Bankiers van Lanschot. To the
disappointment of the STT van Lanschot was not listed on the stock exchange. By
asking around it was established that van Lanschot was one of the oldest and
most respected banks in the Netherlands, if not Europe. It only did business
with “special customers”. Our informant could tell us that van Lanschot had
subsidiaries in a number of countries, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Jersey
Island. While the bill of exchange did make mention of a consignment of
children’s toys exported from Japan, through Joba Chemicals as middleman, it
was not only an insignificant transaction, but also could legitimately pass
through the eye of the law. The UN excluded medical and educational material
from sanctions. The fight was on!
2. Joba Chemicals and its
role in the sanctions-busting network
The
number of the team’s information sources kept swelling. As long as the
informant in the bank could be kept in the loop and protected, a steady stream
of documents landed with the team for further analysis and investigation. The
team also was able to locate the kingpin in the sanctions busting network, with
“Etablissement Zephyr” (Zephyr) a shell company working within the official set
up of Joba Chemicals. It seems that a lot of thought went into fixing the name
for this shell company because of its aptness in meaning “west wind” in Greek.
In addition, as most of the business was done by telex, another handy source of
information was found as one of the team members had a contact in the central
post office in Amsterdam, where all telexes coming and going from the outside
world could be monitored. As information was produced, it was puzzled together
and dealt with by the team’s attorney to determine its strength to our case to
be presented to the ECD.
Garnering
information from the office of Joba Chemicals took an own path and soon we had
a full in house garbage sorting establishment working night shifts in the
basement of the Anne Frank House. A first step was to establish whether taking
possession of garbage bags once they were disposed of outside the offices of
Joba Chemicals was legal. This the team’s attorney established in the positive.
Among the team members there were a few born sleuths who went the extra mile to
ensure that everything there was to know, at street level concerning the
offices of Joba, were known and monitored. After weeks of visiting the pavement
outside the premises to take possession of garbage bags, team members doing
surveillance work discovered that these only came out late at night once the
owner of the firm ended his late working day. A few garbage bags would be
placed on the pavement for municipal collection in the morning, but a few were
taken in the boot of his Mercedes Benz.
After
surveillance and accessing of full garbage bags, phase two would commence.
Working late at night the bags were carefully laid out on a basement table at
the Trans National Institute, closely examined and readied for a “post mortem”:
thus carefully cut open so as not to lose or displace loose pieces of torn up
documents. Matching snippets were then collated and placed in neat little
places bags, deodorized, neatly marked by date and numbered, and taken through
to the board room table in the basement of the Anne Frank House. Here a team of
volunteers, mainly elderly women from church clubs, puzzling the snippets
together and patiently gluing together legible documents. These would then be
looked at and pinned documents together as complete replicas of single
commercial transactions.
Over
and above this, and to complete the whole circuit for information gathering, a
team member (nicknamed “Key Finger”), was able to gain access to within
premises with a special knack for locating telex machines. Old, discarded telex
tapes were an invaluable source for information. They were taken through to the
offices of a friendly newspaper journalist who reprocessed these through the
newspapers telex machine, and literally we were eventually able to shoot
transactions down as they were being made and in the sky.
The
process was set off as a well-oiled machine. Apart from the “dirty work” being
done, this by far the least of the process. The gleaning of clean documents
took time to figure out. The documents from the informant often gave links to
other institutions, such as Bank Mees en Hope, a bank closely connected to Rhobank
in Rhodesia, and decisions had to be taken to concentrate the team’s work to
get a legal document ready as soon as we could. And in reality, before the team
did get so far, it was working for over a year and in all secured some 8,000
documents.
There
was also the very critical legal analysis that needed to be done. Eventually we
found the entire network to be extensive and spread over many countries.
Sometimes single transactions were split up and parts of executed in separate
countries. This was done in order to get loop holes in separate jurisdictions
and these all differed from one another. Financial transactions on themselves
were not, for example, a criminal offence in the Netherlands. The team’s
advocate was constantly in a spin, receiving sets of documents handed over with
grand expectations, only to be told by here that they were flawed in the strict
legal sense.
Working
for as long as it took, there were windfalls of information which filled in the
macro picture apart from the micro details of putting together separate
transactions. Interestingly the entire history and business plans of Joba
Chemicals could be figured out. The firm was established in 1948 by two
friends, Schijveschuurder and Schachter, as a private joint venture. By the early
1960s, prior to the imposition of sanctions on Rhodesia by the UNSC, their firm
was prosperous with about 15 people working for it. Before sanctions Joba had
an elaborate client structure in independent African countries including
Rhodesia. Remarkably its supplier structure had one prominent feature in that
it included mainly countries in the East Bloc. Rhodesia and Nigeria were by far
the main client countries. The stock lists covering the period 1966 to 1969
made interesting reading.
The
imposition of sanctions on Rhodesia in 1966 placed Joba in an unenviable
situation. It could have been less greedy and concentrated on chemicals that
could pass as “medical materials” and not included under sanctions. Instead,
maybe Joba had an ingrained streak for doing illicit trade as it earlier had to
appear before a Dutch court for trade with Poland. So, who knows, it went all
out to exploit its options in sanctioned Rhodesia. That Joba was in any case
aware of what it was doing can be gleaned from the elaborate clandestine
international trading network. It could have opted to get out of Rhodesian
trade altogether. Instead it chose to make sanctions look foolish!
Joba
had a number of advantages going for it. There was, for a start, an elaborate
existing network of commercial contacts in Rhodesia. Secondly, it fell under
the radar because its ability to remain camouflaged mainly as a supplier of
medical material. And last but not least, with its extensive trade with East
Bloc countries, and its falling foul of Dutch law in the case of trade with
Poland, it had the needed field experience in being inconspicuous and
circuitous in trading with suspect countries. While there were other firms with
extensive trade with Rhodesia before sanctions, these were highly suspect and easily
traceable while trading as they did before sanctions.
Another
clear advantage that Joba Chemicals had was that there was a loophole in Dutch
law permitting payments for goods trafficking with Rhodesia. It was therefore
no surprise that the first move of the team’s legal experts traced these
payments at the Nederlandsche Bank. But what was first an advantage for Joba
for illicit trade later was cause for its downfall once the AABN released its
report and the ECD commenced with its investigations.
3.
Joba Chemicals at the
Centre of the Zephyr Network
A nagging question for the team during its
investigations was the question whether we had hold of the centre, or merely
the periphery with Joba Chemicals a subsidiary group in a possible huge
conspiracy driving illicit trade with Rhodesia. Once the research was complete
and we were able to glean over the facts, it was clear that Joba was very much
the centre of a well-oiled machine with a number of shell organizations set up
as “Zephyr” in a number of countries. On the Rhodesian side the network was
relatively secure but yet it was found to be advisable to concentrate trading
links in two centres. So we find that all traditional clients of Joba in
Rhodesia fall away and are consolidated in one agent, CAPS (Southerton). A second group concentrating clients of Joba
was AROMEX. The team suspected that both CAPS and AROMEX were involved with
than one trading company in Europe or elsewhere outside of Rhodesia, but this
was not possible to trace. CAPS, as far a Joba Chemicals was concerned, was
responsible to trade via Joba for foreign light and heavy industrial chemicals
and a small amount of medicals, all traditional Joba trade. The AROMEX group of
clients were consistent buyers of a large range of general merchandise,
industrial tools and spares. All trade with Joba, also with AROMEX clients,
worked through CAPS.
Zephyr in Amsterdam was registered with the
Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce, but was in fact merely a shell company within
Joba Chemicals. All Zephyr correspondence was exclusively related to Rhodesian
trade. This was the same with other Zephyr shell companies set up in Vaduz, in
Liechtenstein, And in Lausanne. Setting Zephyrs in Lausanne and Vaduz no doubt
was because of banking secrecy laws in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Zephyr shell companies were set up only in
cases when there was no alternative. For example in Rhodesia there was no
Zephyr, and CAPS and AROMEX became the cornerstones in the overall network
within Rhodesia. The same happened in France where a frim with the name of
SABAL acted as a support group and acted as a forwarding agent working through
the port of Rouen. SABAL in France was set up as a sister group to Zephyr in
Amsterdam. SABAL also had an office in Rotterdam. Goods destined for Rhodesia are handled by
SABAL and forwarded to Beira from where local Rhodesian links kicked in.
Mostly, however, the goods are forwarded to the well-established SCAC, a French
shipping firm. SCAC shipped mainly from Rouen and forwards goods to either
Lourenzo Marques or Beira, and then again forwarded to a final intermediary
located in both of these Mozambique cities.
Instructions to ship goods invariably came
from the Joba office in Amsterdam with explicit reminders that goods “are to be
neutralized”, that is that no reference on the packaging should indicate where
the goods came from and to where they were ultimately headed in Rhodesia. Under
no circumstances are slips allowed whereby either the supplier knows where the
goods are going to, or the client can know where the origin of the goods was.
The original tracing of the Zephyr network
was marked by trial, error and sheer perseverance. Working with a dedicated
team of militants and meeting week-by-week for over a year, there was the final
reward of a report was published and immediately followed up by the government.
The report was published in June 1973.
However this was merely expedient, we needed to get the report out to get the
ECD investigation going. Within a few months the owners of Joba were put on
trial, found guilty and had to pay a hefty fine.
But that was not the end of the sanctions
busting saga, far from it. The team found many links between the Banks in the
Netherlands linked to Rhobank in Rhodesia which led to a massive exposure of
sanctions busting in the tobacco trade a year later. Another offshoot was the
link between Rhobank and Mobil Oil, which produced another massive report in
the US in 1975, published in Washington in 1976.
No comments:
Post a Comment