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Posted August 1, 2008
                    
The IDT-Haiti (Jean-Bertrand Aristide) Contract
                                    
By LUCY KOMISAR
                          
Articles I wrote this month about the resignation of IDT CEO James Courter as John McCain’s finance co-chair provoked supporters of former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to noisy denials and personal attacks. My reports appeared in portfolio.com, the website of Condé Nast Portfolio, a major U.S. business magazine. I wrote that Courter had resigned after I reported that the Federal Communications Commission had fined IDT $1.3 million for failing to file its contract with Haiti.

Why would IDT fail to file the contract? Maybe because it shows that in this Aristide-administration deal, payments were below the legal 23 cents a minute set by the FCC (money that would have gone to Haiti) and that IDT payments were ordered sent to a shell company account in the Turks & Caicos instead of to a government account in Haiti. (A shell company is a paper company that does no business other than to move money to hide corrupt deals.) Read the contract.

The contract shows that IDT benefited by getting a cheap deal, paying only 8.75 cents per minute to Haiti According to Turks & Caicos lawyer Adrian Corr, who handled Mont Salem, the shell sent Aristide a 3-cents per minute kickback. Corr now denies to other reporters that he told me this. All he has to do to prove his point is to provide documents of the true ownership and paper trail of Mont Salem’s finances. Here are the Turks & Caicos registration documents of Mont Salem signed by an official of Corr’s law firm, Miller-Simons-O’Sullivan. Let’s follow the money!

Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban of Miami, has been active in denunciation of my articles. He certainly has an interest in the matter. Documents show that Kurzban got at least $10 million working for Aristide, including fees from the corrupt Haiti TeleCo. See these documents. And more. As Kurzban worked for TeleCo, perhaps he can tell us where the money that passed through Mont Salem ended up.

For background, see the eight articles I have written about the IDT-Haiti scam, including for the Haiti Democracy Project (a policy group) and for CorpWatch, Inter Press Service (IPS) and portfolio.com (all media organizations).

RELATED TEXT: Deposed bloodthirsty dictator Aristide secret bank account
                                                                
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