Kleptocracy is as old as
government. Exotic car broker Michael Sheehan discovered an amazing case nine
years ago when he was invited to purchase rare Ferraris and McLaren F1s from a
Brunei collection. He writes about it in the current issue of Sports Car
Market.
Brunei is a family-owned
oil Sultanate of 400,000 people located on the island of Borneo in southeast
Asia. A brother of the sultan was finance minister until 1997, when the Asian
financial crisis hit Brunei. The Arthur Anderson accounting firm was called in
to audit the books. The accountants found that between 1983 and 1998 $40 billion
had disappeared and that the finance minister himself had personally spent $14.8
billion.
The finance minister had a
collection of 2,500 exotic cars, 500 properties, five yachts, and nine
world-class aircraft. He had managed to spend $900,000,000 in the London jeweler
Asprey, apparently guaranteeing the old age retirements of a number of
attractive women who consort with kleptocrats.
The finance minister was
allowed to keep 500 of the cars, but he had to turn in the rest of his loot --
to no avail as we shall see.
Sheehan went to Brunei to
view the cars. From his general description of the collection, I estimate that
the finance minister had paid six figures for the least expensive car in the
collection. Many cost much more. McLaren F1s cost $1,000,000 new. They are more
valuable now. In October 2008 one sold at a London auction for $4,100,000. Many
of the cars were custom built. Some of the high-speed Ferraris "were coated in
radar-absorbent matt-black coatings and fitted with infrared cameras for night
driving." Easily more than one billion dollars of Brunei's oil revenues had
found their way into the finance minister's car collection.
Sheehan reports that the
cars were stored in about 12 buildings "surrounded by a high wall topped with
razor wire and with a bomb-proof front gate" and patrolled by "armed Gurkhas
with very serious German shepherds." The security was for naught, because "the
air conditioning was off, but the tropical sun was not." Years of heat and
humidity had destroyed the cars. The storage facilities had become a car
tomb.
Sheehan concluded that
most of the cars were in such a state of ruin that only a few of the cars had
sufficiently high inherent values to support commercially viable restorations.
The best use of the rest, Sheehan decided, would be to turn them into an
artificial ocean reef.
The careless waste is
shocking and even more so to car buffs who consider many of the ruined cars to
be artistic masterpieces. This is the kind of opulent waste that we associate
with family-owned countries. But before we Americans start feeling superior,
consider that the U.S. government puts the Brunei finance minister to
shame.
On January 29, 2002, CBS
Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3
trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3
trillion in transactions." "We know it is gone," said Jim Minnery of the
Defense Finance and Accounting Service, "but we don't know what they spent it
on."
Reported thefts from Iraq
and Afghanistan reconstruction aid rival Brunei's missing billions. Pallets of
cash stacked high have been flown out of Afghanistan in plain view. The stories
of corruption and missing funds are so numerous that they are no longer
reported.
The U.S. Congress, at
President Obama's request, recently passed the largest military spending bill of
all time in behalf of the share prices of the military/security complex, while
many of the 50 states teeter on bankruptcy and default on pensions and municipal
bonds and slash education, medical, and other services. For "our" government in
Washington, it is a no-brainer that the profits of the military-security complex
take every precedence over every need of the American people.
If the Brunei finance
minister's billion-dollar car collection becomes an artificial reef, it will
foster marine life. In contrast, Dick Cheney seriously damaged, perhaps for many
years to come, the Gulf of Mexico, because Cheney believed a few extra bucks for
the oil companies were more important than safety standards. The missing safety
standards have cost British Petroleum $20 billion in clean-up and restitution
costs.
U.S. taxpayers are paying
the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security $56,336,000,000 this year
to porno-scan and grope them and otherwise invade their privacy, while millions
of Americans are foreclosed out of their homes.
How are the priorities of
the US. government superior to those of the Brunei finance minister? When it
comes to waste and corruption, lies and deception, the U.S. government has no
equal.
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