WANTED BY INTERPOL – AMDI PETERSEN, FOUNDER OF HUMANA PEOPLE TO PEOPLE, PLANET AID AND USAGAIN THE BOSS OF AN INTERNATIONAL ‘CHARITY-BUSINESS’ RACKET AND A CULT DRIVEN BY MONEY AND GREED THE TEN SUPPOSED ‘CHARITIES’ AND ‘GOOD CAUSES’ WE INVESTIGATE ON THIS SITE ARE ALL RUN AS A CO-ORDINATED FINANCIAL SCAM BY A CULT CALLED ‘THE TVIND TEACHERS GROUP’, THROUGH OFFSHORE COMPANIES IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS, JERSEY, BELIZE, DELAWARE AND SWITZERLAND. THE BOSS OF THIS CULT, MOGENS AMDI PETERSEN, ALONG WITH COLLEAGUES HAS JUST BEEN PLACED ON THE INTERPOL ‘MOST WANTED’ LIST. WHY? TO FACE ACCUSATIONS OF AGGRAVATED EMBEZZLEMENT AND TAX FRAUD IN HIS HOME COUNTRY, DENMARK. WE BELIEVE THAT OVER 30 YEARS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS MAY HAVE PASSED UNDETECTED FROM HIS SUPPOSED ‘HUMANITARIAN’ PROJECTS TO BUSINESSES AND TRADING COMPANIES IN HIS OFFSHORE NETWORK, ENRICHING HIM AND HIS FELLOWS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE POOR AND NEEDY IN THE THIRD WORLD. MONEY DONATED IN GOOD FAITH TO CHARITY, WE CAN SHOW, HAS ‘DISAPPEARED’ INTO PROPERTY DEALS, LUXURY GOODS AND BUSINESS INVESTMENTS. FACT FILE: HOT MONEY AND THE TVIND TEACHERS GROUP The Teachers Group, which runs Humana People-to-People, Planet Aid and a host of other supposed charities, is a large and uniquely profitable ‘offshore corporation’. Here we examine the story of TG ‘Hot Money’. It all started as a dream of a more equal world. But by the 1980s the trail of ‘hot money’ was already under way. The first offshore account was in Grand Cayman. In around 1983, a small group of Danish nationals arrived on the Caribbean island, 150 miles south of Cuba, weighted down with cash. They were seen carrying suitcases of dollars into a local bank, on a tax haven island already notorious for illegal ‘hot money’. Within months, there was enough cash to buy a farm and a luxury beachside villa, with a swimming pool, a fleet of Mercedes cars parked outside, and boats at anchor in the bay. Who were these wealthy Danes? Where did the money come from? They were not in business – in fact they were self-styled left-wing revolutionaries. They were among the founders of an ‘educational’ movement with global ambitions – which has since become Humana People-to-People. The small group included left-wing activist Amdi Petersen, who had recently ‘resigned’ from the Danish Tvind schools collective, his girlfriend Kirsten Larsen, and Henning Bjornlund, their young ‘chief accountant’. Back in Europe, they controlled a small but growing suite of ‘humanitarian’ initiatives – schools, a teacher training college, a charity that collected money and sent volunteers to work camps in the Third World – all supposedly run by a collective with a few hundred supporters, and financed by donations. The money the Danish travellers brought to Grand Cayman can only have come from one source – the private, tax-free trust funds where the collective kept its money. The young idealists called their collective ‘The Teachers Group’, and it was supposed to be democratically administered by the members themselves. But the reality was very different. The people really running the show were a small, self-selected Humana People-to-People ‘inner circle’ – including the Danes spending so lavishly on property, cars and boats. To this day, many of the same Danes who arrived laden with cash in Grand Cayman in 1983 remain in control of the Teachers Group, and are still firmly associated with Humana People to People. They stand accused of exploiting their own supporters, charities and the developing world. And several of them are wanted by police. Land grab Unknown to their supporters and financial backers back in Europe, the small ‘inner circle’ living in Grand Cayman then set out on a huge shopping expedition. Between 1983 and the mid-1990s they spent millions of pounds of the Teachers Group’s and Humana People-to-People’s ‘humanitarian’ funds on land and property. They laid the foundations of a commercial empire, beginning in the Caribbean. It is an empire that endures today. At the direction of Henning Bjornlund, they bought mango, banana and citrus plantations in Grand Cayman, St Lucia, St Vincent and Belize. Money for the purchases was transferred secretly from Europe through offshore accounts in Jersey and Guernsey. Many of these accounts today form the backbone of a covert modern agribusiness. Soon, the Teachers Group extended into Central America, buying land in Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela and Brazil. In 1996, a Danish newspaper reported they owned 24 plantations worth far more than £30 million. The offshore companies used – in Grand Cayman, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Belize, the British Virgin Isles, Netherlands Antilles and in the City of London – are mostly still there, and today own and manage a big portfolio of Humana’s property and agricultural businesses : FCL Ltd, Argyll Smith, Caribbean Farming, Tropical Produce, Bahia Farming, Atlantic Farming. A ranch in Brazil – police prosecute The biggest prize of all was Fazenda Jatobà, a 92,000 hectare agricultural estate in Brazil bought secretly by the Humana People-to-People ‘inner circle’ from Shell for $12 million in 1994. The circumstances of this purchase were studied by police investigating alleged money laundering in 2000-2001. The police reported that the property had been bought through a trail of offshore nominee accounts and fake charities (including two with accommodation addresses in the Champs Elysee in Paris), using money diverted from a ‘humanitarian fund’. One of the participants is today a senior manager at Humana’s US charity, Planet Aid. Since 2001, the purchase of Fazenda Jatobà has been at the heart of a criminal fraud case against Amdi Petersen and members of his ‘inner circle’, which is still on-going. Today Fazenda Jatobà is still owned by the Teachers Group and is run in close association with Humana People-to-People, as a commercial plantation exporting wood, fruit and vegetables to Europe, China and the United States. The offshore maze gets bigger Meanwhile, back in Europe, the ‘inner circle’ began to look for ever more inventive ways to exploit its covert offshore network. Dozens more nominee companies were opened in Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Hong Kong. Amdi Petersen was quoted as declaring he wanted to create a financial maze so complex no outsider would ever understand it. The Teachers Group opened scores more schools, charities and philanthropic initiatives – Humana charities all over Europe, DAPP in the Third World, Planet Aid and Gaia in the USA, U’SAgain (not a charity, but a commercial company that has been widely accused of misleading the public with charity messaging), ‘special’ schools and more private colleges. But behind every apparent humanitarian endeavour, there is almost always a chain of businesses finally leading to an offshore company, used to milk profits away from the charity sector, out of the sight of charity regulators, governments, and the general public. In early examples, Humana in Britain started paying large fees to a Jersey-registered company, Goliath Services, to provide the wooden boxes it used to collect clothes from the public. But Goliath was not an independent firm. It was a nominee company owned by the Teachers Group – which charged Humana whatever it could get away with. Although Goliath has long closed, we have evidence to suggest the organisation is playing the same trick through subsidiary companies in China and Hong Kong. In 1988, the Teachers Group gave $5 million to a Jersey offshore company called Talata, to buy property. In the same year the Dutch branch of Humana transferred $75,000 to firms in the Caribbean. By 1990, a Swedish firm of accountants estimated that the Humana People-to-People group was so good at exploiting tax havens that only two per cent of the money it raised ever went outside the Teachers Group organisation to independent charitable work. All the rest, it kept. But the stakes were about to get much bigger. Schools pay rent offshore In a round 1984, as the ‘inner circle’ was enjoying the pool-side lifestyle on Grand Cayman, the Teachers Group opened a ‘small school’ at Buxton, in Norfolk, eastern Britain. It was a ‘special school’ for troubled adolescents, financed by English local authorities which paid £700 a week for each boarding pupil. It was one of several special schools opened by the Teachers Group – another was at Winestead, near Hull – run by volunteers and untrained ‘collective’ members.. Red House School was a charity and exempt from tax. But in the mid-1990s, the UK Charity Commission became suspicious and started an investigation. They uncovered a financial relationship between both schools and a Jersey-registered company, Argyll Smith & Co, together with a raft of unorthodox financial practises. In 1998, the Charity Commission closed both schools down. The schools in Norfolk and Hull were paying rent to the Jersey-registered company – and at much inflated rates. Argyll Smith is a Teachers Group offshore nominee company. At the same time, ‘staff’ at the two schools – all members of the TG collective – were being ‘paid’ large salaries, but were not being allowed to keep the money – it was transferred back to the inner circle’s accounts. Very little of what local authorities paid was going towards upkeep of the school or paying for staff, but was disappearing into foreign bank accounts. Argyll Smith remains to this day a registered Jersey company operated by the TG, and owns many of buildings run by or associated with Humana People-to-People in Britain, the United States, South Africa and Mexico. Argyll Smith itself is a subsidiary of a key Teachers Group Jersey-registered property companies, FCL Ltd. Humana used clothes charities and ‘transfer pricing’ Humana People-to-People has also long used offshore nominee companies to strip profits out of its ‘humanitarian’ used-clothes charities. We know this because of details passed by an informant, corroborated by official information in the Netherlands. The system the Teachers Group has employed is known as ‘transfer pricing’, a commonly used money laundering technique. In a transfer pricing scheme, a business uses a chain of linked companies in different countries to manipulate prices and profits and avoid tax, so that very little profit is posted in a high-tax country, but large profits are made in a low-tax country or offshore tax haven. Between 1990 and 2000, the Teachers Group used a company in Amsterdam, Textile Transformation EC Trading, and nominee companies in Gibraltar and Eastern Europe to launder profits from all the Humana People-to-People charities all over Europe. We know this because of a written deposition by a whistle-blower describing many irregularities and illegal acts. In this case, transfer pricing meant the charities that actually collected the clothes made very little money, while the real profits were made by Teachers Group commercial businesses further down the chain in Poland or offshore in Gibraltar or Jersey. These profits didn’t go to charities at all. Textile Transformation EC Trading went broke and filed for bankruptcy in 2000, while police in the Netherlands and Hungary searched for the directors. Today, Humana charities in Europe appear to sell their clothes to a TG company in Bulgaria, while in the United States the charity Planet Aid has a similar commercial arrangement with a Teachers Group broker, Garson and Shaw– leading us to suspect that transfer pricing is still going on.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 14:57:39 +0000
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