A propos my post below, we in Britain should obviously all pay closer attention to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. On May 20 this year it wrote:
And if like Soros, you make several fortunes from international dealing, what and where is the best information found? The offices and committee rooms of the United Nations in New York and the World Bank Group in Washington. Hence, it was no surprise when, early this month, Soros announced that he was bringing into his organization an old friend who had filled a number of posts over the years, through which it was possible to have contributed to the collection of the Soros billions.
The posts involved deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, chief of Cabinet to the U.N. secretary-general and administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. Earlier posts included vice president for External Affairs at the World Bank and the bank’s director of External Affairs. In preparation for these elite appointments was a 10-year stint with an international consulting group that specialized in advice to reformist and socialist candidates for heads of state in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Each and every one of these posts has been held by a good friend of George Soros, Sir Mark Malloch Brown.
In 2006, ostensibly for his services to Britain, Sir Brown was made a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George — a KCMG — by the queen of England….The son of a South African diplomat, Mark Brown was born and grew up in Zimbabwe (when it was known as Rhodesia), was educated in England at Marlborough College and took a history degree at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
He now lives with his wife, Patricia (‘Trish’ to George Soros and other friends), who is a vice chairman of Refugees International, and their four children in a five-bedroom house on a near-five-acre estate in Katonah, in upstate New York. The estate belongs to George Soros, who charges Mark $10,000 a month rent, some $5,000 less than a previous tenant.
‘Sir’ Mark querulously defends this rent by saying that he pays the utilities. As of now, Brown is ‘interacting’ with Yale University students and faculty at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization as a distinguished visiting fellow. Instead of concentrating on writing a book on globalization, he had been in Washington leading the charge against former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.
Brown told a large audience at World Bank headquarters that the bank’s ‘mission’ was ‘hugely at risk’ as long as Wolfowitz remained; by his very presence, the British knight also was saying: ‘Here I am, ethically pure, eminently qualified and ready — right now to become your leader.’
Too bad Brown has a short memory.
Last year, speaking of the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown insisted, “Not a penny was lost from the organization.” This, after an audit through which it was shown that the United Nations had lost $7 million from overpayments; $61 million was found to have bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million was lost to mismanagement; and $110 million was rated as having “insufficient” justification. This adds up to $260 million out of a $1.6 billion budget.
Naturally, Brown also wants to forget the Oil-for-Food scandals, where he said that his boss at the United Nations, Kofi Annan, had been ‘fully exonerated.’ A totally untrue statement, Brown described calls for Annan’s resignation as ‘inappropriate political assassination.’
Among many other items in his life, which Brown would prefer no longer to be reminded of, is a speech he made at Pace University in 2005. Speaking of the United States, he said: ‘This ungainly giant of a nation that has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy and decency cannot quite accept membership in the global neighborhood association; that it must abide by others’ rules as well as its own.’ He noted that Washington already has set itself apart in its opposition to the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
It is being said that Sir Mark Malloch Brown, vice chairman to George Soros, will be asked to join the Cabinet of Gordon Brown when he becomes Britain’s next prime minister. ‘Sir’ Brown may have found another position that will help his partner, ‘the man who broke the Bank of England,’ just when the pound sterling has become interesting again.
Malloch Brown is indeed more than a friend to Soros. As the Financial Times reported last month:
The question remains. Why was Gordon Brown so keen to get this man into his government that he ennobled him, the time-honoured way of getting unelected favourites in through the back door? And what does this say about our new rock of Prime Ministerial granite, who is such a staunch friend of America, upholder of international integrity and defender of the free world?
