Thread by @StringwallApp

https://twitter.com/loonyberg/status/1083219079626981376

“I never knew until after he passed that he was close friends with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel.”

Peter Thiel worked as a derivatives trader for Credit Suisse, before starting Thiel Capital Management in 1996.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

“The 37-year-old president of $270 million hedge fund Clarium Capital Management LLC started as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group (CSR ) in 1993.”

In 2008, Credit Suisse paid a €172.5 million settlement to an Italian food/dairy conglomerate who was at the center of massive investment fraud starting in the mid 1990s.

reuters.com/article/parmal…

“Credit Suisse will pay 172.5 million euros to the Italian dairy group.
Parmalat..,chief executive, turnaround specialist Enrico Bondi, has accused some 50 defendants of helping prior Parmalat management hide debt and inflate results.”

One of the mechanisms that Credit Suisse and other banks used to help Pamalat defraud investors included a derivative product called a CLN, or credit linked note.

economist.com/finance-and-ec…

“Then there are complex derivatives, another juicy investment-banking niche. Parmalat seems to have used a lot of these. One type, called “self-referenced credit-linked notes” (CLNs), in which Parmalat invested $30m, was essentially an insurance policy written on itself.”

Thanks to the help of several different banks, the fraud was worth billions.
“The vast bulk of the more than $10 billion in public and private debt placed by Parmalat since 1997 was arranged by big banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.”

But here is where it gets really interesting: In 2009, an Opus Dei banker connected to the Parmalat fraud was murdered.

independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…

“Gianmario Roveraro…was discovered cut to pieces…some two weeks after…returning home from a meeting of the conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei…Roveraro had been questioned by investigators in connection with the spectacular €14bn collapse of the Parmalat food empire”

So to summarize:
1. Peter Thiel (who’s homosexuality is not approved by Opus Dei) was “close friends” at Stanford with Father Arne Parnula, an Opus Dei priest who ran the Opus Dei house at Stanford.
2. After leaving Stanford, Thiel became a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse.

3. Thiel was with Credit Suisse between 1993-1996.
4. Credit Suisse was sued and paid a settlement for their part in helping Italian food producer Parmalat defraud investors beginning in 1997.
5. The fraud involved the sale of CNL derivatives.

6. In 2009, an Opus Dei banker who was talking to investigators about the Parmalat fraud was kidnapped, murdered, cut into pieces, and left to be found beneath a highway overpass.

Oh, and after Stanford, Father Arne ended up running the Catholic Information Center, an Opus Dei influence operation in Washington DC.

crisismagazine.com/2018/the-final…

“Father Arne ran a bookstore in downtown Washington DC…the Catholic Information Center (CIC) is…the pulsing heart of the Church in downtown Washington. The CIC chapel—which packs in youngsters for the noon Mass—houses the Eucharist less than half a mile from the Oval Office.”

The same Catholic Information Center that was attended by convicted Russian spy Robert Hanssen.

catholicherald.com/News/Opus_Dei_…

“During the 15 years he was allegedly working for the Kremlin, Hanssen was a devout member of Opus Dei”

newsweek.com/washingtons-qu…

Billy Barr also served on the Catholic Information Center board - along with Leonard Leo of Federalist Society infamy.

thenation.com/article/archiv…

“As recently as 2017, [Barr] was on the board of directors of the DC-based Catholic Information Center, led by the ultraright and secretive group Opus Dei…Its board includes the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone”

Father Arne replaced Father John McCloskey at the Catholic Information Center, after McCloskey was booted from a sexual misconduct scandal.

washingtonpost.com/local/quite-a-…

Now from here, we could talk about how Billy Barr and his crop of DOJ attorneys who helped quash the Mueller probe had formerly worked for Alfa Bank, when they were with Kirkland and Ellis.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1388569071780864002

We could talk about how the Steele dossier alleged that Alfa Bank was conspiring to interfere in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1388734851952652288

Or how it sort of looks like Alfa Bank could have possibly done that by orchestrating a Khawaja-alleged scheme to make disguised campaign donations with fake Russian funded gift cards beneath the $200 reporting threshold.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1388558718279770116

But I think we should go back to 1996, when Thiel used the money he made selling sketchy derivatives to found Thiel Capital Management and to invest in PayPal.

PayPal was started by Max Levchin. Levchin, Thiel, Elon Musk, and many of the other PayPal alums who went to influence the tech world are known as the “PayPal Mafia”. Interesting choice of words, no? 🤷‍♂️

businessinsider.com/tech-companies…

Anyway, I find it really interesting that, like Google’s Sergey Brin, Levchin was born and learned to code in the Soviet Union. And his mother worked for the govt Institute of Food Science.

pando.com/2014/03/13/max…

Here’s a cool tale about how Thiel supposedly agreed to invest in PayPal within 24 hours of meeting Levchin. 👌👌

finance.yahoo.com/news/23-old-ma…

Anywho, eventually eBay came along and bought PayPal for a gazillion dollars, so Thiel got rich. So his next investment was $500,000 into Facebook, even though Facebook had no revenue generating model at that point.

money.cnn.com/2012/08/20/tec…

“Thiel became a Facebook investor in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg first set out to turn his dorm room project into a lasting business. Thiel and his associated investment funds held more than 44 million shares of Facebook when the company went public.”

Presumably I need not remind you how that turned out…

thenation.com/article/societ…

Now where was I going with this? Oh yeah! So here we are 25 years after those sketchy Credit Suisse CLN derivatives, and we find out that Facebook has been defrauding advertisers. Huh. Well I guess they figured out how to monetize the platform!

cnbc.com/2021/02/18/fac…

In 2011, Thiel and some other members of the “PayPal Mafia” (🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️) invested in another online payment processor called Stripe.

siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/pete…

Interestingly, Stripe has a special program in which they help Russian “entrepreneurs” to incorporate US businesses, set up US bank accounts, and launder, er I mean, “process” payments through Stripe.

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1388910532929937417

Stripe also has a program that allows their clients to create virtual gift cards on the fly. 🤔🤔

https://twitter.com/stringwallapp/status/1389643235992158210

So depending on who you ask, it sort of looks like maybe Stripe is engaging in a Khawaja-style conspiracy to launder donations beneath the $200 reporting threshold into GOP political campaigns using more Russian funded gift cards.

https://twitter.com/StringwallApp/status/1388902808372588545

Now here a couple stories from the “stranger than fiction” department. Remember how a lot of people thought it was weird that Peter Thiel would pump millions into Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker?

theatlantic.com/business/archi…

“The lawsuit concerned a video of Hogan (né Terry Gene Bollea) having consensual sex with his best friend’s wife, while that same friend recorded the encounter—secretly, according to Hogan and later reporting.”

“Behind the scenes of this tawdry affair, a more shocking story was playing out, in which Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor, seemed to be exorcising a deep grudge against Gawker by bankrolling Hogan’s lawsuit to destroy the media company that published the sex tape.”

Now I don’t claim to know what that was really about. Maybe the billionaire investor really did get his feelings hurt. (I find that a little hard to imagine, but whatever.) Maybe he just really loves wrestlers? I don’t know. But here is what I do know…

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a group of former Bulgarian secret service agents had access to state funds stashed away in foreign bank accounts in Austria, Liechtenstein, & Switzerland. They used this $ to start an industrial empire.

rferl.org/a/bulgarian-ex…

These oligarchs hired former national wrestlers & weight lifters to work as their security squads. “Soon, the Bulgarian wrestlers-turned-bodyguards began to operate their own dubious "security" services. Then they moved into insurance firms and real estate.”

‘In fact, so many Bulgarian wrestlers became henchmen for the country's nomenklatura mafia that ordinary Bulgarians in the early 1990s began to call all organized-crime figures in the country "bortze," or "wrestlers."’

One such former Bulgarian wrestler turned mobster is a dude named Evelin Banev. In Dec 2020, Swiss prosecutors indicted Banev along with Credit Suisse and one of the Swiss bank's former employees for allegedly helping to launder about $39 million of drug money through the bank.

So apparently Thiel’s former employer Credit Suisse has a little problem with bending the rules. Sometimes they even steal from their oligarch clients.

ft.com/content/2e6119…

Which did not end well for the banker that was blamed for it.

finews.com/news/english-n…

Seems like there is a tendency for people connected to Credit Suisse investigations to die.

businessinsider.com/credit-suisse-…

Around the same time that Thiel was investing in Facebook (even though Facebook had no revenue plan), he was also starting a big data surveillance firm called Palantir. (Probably not a coincidence.)

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

There are any number of alarming concerns about Palantir that we could discuss, such as whether we want any private company having access to state level mass surveillance data (let alone someone with Peter Thiel’s history). Or the question of whether they might be fudging numbers

But this sort of ties it all back to the Parmalat fraud:
“A former high-level Credit Suisse executive said she was terminated after refusing to mislead auditors scrutinizing a joint venture between the bank and the big-data firm Palantir Technologies”
nbcnews.com/business/corpo…

“Colleen Graham, a 20-year employee of the Swiss-based bank who rose to head its compliance unit in the U.S., alleged in her complaint…that the bank wanted her to bend the rules to avoid multimillion-dollar losses for itself and Palantir.”

“The companies had launched a joint venture called Signac LLC, co-headed by Graham, which was developing software to police Credit Suisse's traders and wealth managers worldwide.”

“Credit Suisse and Palantir asked Graham to convince the auditor, KPMG, to avoid the problematic consequences, the filings said, by booking the revenues improperly in 2016.”

But these are the people in charge of developing the tools to police bank employees and prevent wrongdoing??

Just a member of the “PayPal Mafia” hanging out with the woman who helped Jeffrey Epstein launder money for global organized crime and hostile foreign intelligence services.

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1391164296420200448