The EBRD is helping Latvia to enter the Euro currency by fraud, take a look at this video “Lettonia”, ‏by Italian journalist Mauro Caterina.

During the global financial crisis, which erupted in 2008, Latvia was on the verge of bankruptcy. In 2009, the country’s second largest bank, Parex banka, was nationalized and Latvia asks the Troika (IMF, World Bank and Eu) a loan of 7.5 billion euro. Even the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) participates in the rescue of Parex banka. Indeed, in 2009 the EBRD decide to buy 136 million euro in shares. This is the story of a fraud which has as protagonists the EBRD, the Latvian government and Parex banka. All this has been publicly denounced by the whistleblower John Christmas, American banker who worked for Parex banka and now accuses the EBRD to have used the money of European taxpayers for financial fraud.

It is a huge Russian Mafia crime in Europe involving the “EBRD” (“BERS” in Italian). The victims include all people of Malta and Italy, because the EBRD is helping Latvia to enter the Euro currency by fraud. This fraud is so large (billions of euros affecting millions of people) that it should be in the “Wall Street Journal” and “Financial Times.” The main challenge in bringing this to public attention is that 99% of journalists cannot understand the fraud.

The fraud is very similar to Enron, except it is in Europe and the victims are taxpayers. Journalists almost never understand the technical details of the Enron fraud, but it got huge media exposure anyway.

Background: EBRD helping Latvia and Lithuania to falsify financial statements

John Christmas is the whistleblower from Parex Bank of Latvia. Parex was a specialist in offshore deposit services for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia. Parex employees discussed links to the KGB and Parex was intermediary in major corruption cases throughout the region. John Christmas has been threatened and exiled since 2005.

The threats and most of the whistleblowing have never been investigated except for a limited investigation by the FBI in 2007. The United States Department of Justice collected a record-breaking settlement from Daimler in 2010, and one of the frauds from my whistleblowing tied in with the case. That fraud is explained on the website www.LawlessLatvia.com and can be confirmed, however Latvian officials did nothing until 2013 when they announced nobody would be prosecuted because the “statute of limitations” expired.

Meanwhile, the Latvian government has worked in cooperation with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to cover-up the truth about Parex. Parex collapsed in late 2008 and got bailed out in 2008 and 2009 by the Latvian government (funded by the IMF and European Union) and EBRD. Evidence indicates that the EBRD transaction was fraudulent – an announced stock “sale” that was reversible with an undisclosed “put option” thus making it effectively a “loan.” Because of this, the financial statements of Latvia are currently fraudulent.

The fraud is explained on three videos on the “LatviavEBRD” Youtube channel. The videos have over a quarter-million views. Also, an independent journalist Mauro Caterina produced the video cited at the top of this blog entry, about the fraud. The EBRD refuses to respond.

John Christmas has a background in banking. He has been employed by commercial banks in the United States and Europe in a variety of functions ranging from commercial lending to capital markets and investment banking. As a self-employed property developer, he initiated the Riga International Business Park project in Latvia. He is a citizen of Latvia, and has been a resident of Malta since 2009. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics at Dartmouth College and a Master of Business Administration degree in Finance at Cornell University. He currently holds positions in Malta and the Cayman Islands. He is a member of the UK CFA Society with an Investment Management Certificate.

John Christmas believes EBRD employees refuse to respond because they want to pretend that they don’t know about the whistleblowing. It is a strategy of maintaining “plausible deniability” for when their actions inevitably blow up in the future. While the EBRD remained silent, it was interesting for John Christmas to receive information about a new similar fraud in Lithuania.

A journalist interviewed him about Parex and the EBRD a few months ago and claimed that senior people told him during interviews that the EBRD’s 2013 bailout of Ukio Bank in Lithuania was similarly fraudulent. He never published the interviews, and he made it clear that he was afraid for his personal safety. A pattern has emerged.

EBRD officials are conspiring with bureaucrats in Eastern Europe to help them to temporarily cover-up frauds so that these countries can sneak into the Eurozone and issue bonds without cracking down on the corruption that
is burning up their tax revenue.

Can the European Central Bank and Eurostat please contact the EBRD and the finance ministries of Latvia and Lithuania to ask them to explain the EBRD bailouts of Parex and Ukio? Are the allegations true that in both situations, the EBRD conducted false/reversible “investments” in worthless assets using money from unknowing taxpayers to protect local oligarchs and falsify national financial statements?

The integrity of the Eurozone is at risk if this problem is ignored. John Christmas fears a repeat of the situation in 2001 when Goldman Sachs helped Greece to hide part of it’s debt so it could enter the Eurozone. The result was disaster for all Europeans including Greeks. This information needs to be distributed to hundreds of relevant people and John Christmas asks all of them to write to the EBRD.