A conversation arose last night regarding Prince Harry's swastika outfit which led to the following discoveries:
Sir Mark Thatcher: How 'the charmless Mark' pocketed a fortune trading on his mother's name
By Jonathan Brown
26 August 2004
Sir Mark Thatcher once leapt to his mother's defence when questioned over her unflagging opposition to sanctions in South Africa, remarking, "my sympathy is with the struggling white community".*
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The Honourable Sir Mark Thatcher, 2nd Baronet (born August 15, 1953), is the son of Sir Denis Thatcher and Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister. In 1987, Mark Thatcher married Diane Burgdorf, a daughter of a millionaire car dealer. The family moved to South Africa possibly to avoid bad publicity because of allegations of racketeering in a £4 million civil action in 1994.*
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The 51 year-old had his trial postponed until next April, but if found guilty he could be jailed in South Africa or extradited to Guinea for further prosecution. He has been accused of helping to finance the attempted coup against Guinea leader Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has ruled Africa's third biggest oil producer since 1979
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Thatcher bought his slice of paradise, which had four cars parked in the drive yesterday, for the rand equivalent of £500,000 in 1995 and had advertised it for sale at a minimum asking price of £2m when the Scorpions, South Africa's crack anti-fraud unit, asked him to surrender his passport and his air ticket for a flight to Texas, which will depart tomorrow without him.
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Triple A's King Air flew Moto from Spain to the West African country of Mali last March on the eve of the planned coup, allegedly masterminded by former Scots Guards and SAS officer Simon Mann and London-based multi-millionaire oil tycoon Ely Calil, among others.
They were aboard an ageing Boeing 727 that Mann, according to Scorpions sources, had bought from a Kansas company before spending £250,000 to convert it for military purposes.
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The tragicomedy of the botched Equatorial Guinea coup enlisted two prominent cast members last week when Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade commissioner, issued denials of knowing what exactly was afoot. Once again eyes swivelled to a spectre lurking in the wings a stinking-rich oil tycoon nicknamed Smelly who allegedly bankrolled much of the production.
It was Smelly, aka Ely Calil, who offered his west London flat to Mandelson when the then Northern Ireland secretary was embroiled in the scandal over an undisclosed loan from fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson. It forced the sale of his Notting Hill home, so he gratefully moved into Calil s £500,000 one-bedroom flat in Holland Park.
Calil, a 58-year-old Lebanese businessman with an estimated £100m fortune and a £12m Palladian mansion off the Kings Road in Chelsea, could afford to be generous.
He was also known to nurture hopes of joining the British Establishment as a knight or lord now an unlikely prospect as he is being sued by the Equatorial Guinea government in London and is sought by the South African police. **
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more:
The move coincides with pressure on the British Foreign Office to reveal how much it knew in advance about the plan to topple the oil-rich west African state's ruling regime.
The Sunday Times has seen two intelligence reports that are said to have been passed to British diplomats in January, warning of an impending coup.
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Thatcher's American wife, Diane, the daughter of a millionaire Texas car dealer, and their two children drove to Cape Town airport yesterday, for a flight bound for the United States. *
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In 1987 he married Diane Burgdorf, the daughter of a millionaire Texas car dealer he met while working as a salesman for Lotus. Settled in Dallas, he created a complex web of companies, helped along by the contacts he had made through his mother. His ability to alienate people also continued. Neighbours were left aghast at the occasion he stormed into a house across the street and ordered the woman who opened the front door to move her car from outsidehis house. At a get-to-know you party he refused a name tag, saying: "If they they don't know who I am by now they never will."
But he also made friends. Intriguingly,a 1994 newspaper article reported among his powerful Texan allies were one George W Bush Jr, then running for state governorship.
Dallas-based Triton Energy, which has close ties to President George Bush, Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco have together invested more than US$5billion in Equatorial Guinea's burgeoning oil production, predicted soon to provide five percent of US oil needs.
Triton has been an important source of Bush campaign funds:
Commerce Secretary Donald Evans is a key link to many of the Bush money sources. . . . Evans then became Bush's national finance chairman, and from that post organized the pioneers -- a group of more than 100 individuals who pledged to each raise $100,000. In addition to Kenneth Lay, and the Kinders of Enron, the pioneers included executives of First Energy Corp., Texas Oil and Gas, CSX Transportation, Occidental Chemical, Triton Energy Corp., Reliant Energy, the Texas Utilitites Co., Vaughn Petroleum, Sanchez Oil and Gas, and Jerry McCutchin Drilling Co.
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Now let's look at what the Bush Administration has said:
Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanaticism.
- Dick Cheney
We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary.
- Dick Cheney
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Thatcher
* http://www.endevil.com/thatchercoup.html
** http://www.sundayherald.com/44410
** http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=59&num=15346
*** http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11529094%255E2703,00.html
*** http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=798&id=1019212004
****http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000724.html