The Rothschilds are the most famous banking family in history. In the 19 th century they lent money to Kings and governments and funded both sides in the Napoleonic wars. They once saved the Bank of England from collapse with their own money. But how did they come to be so fabulously wealthy? In this two-part feature we first look at their rise from the ghettoes of Frankfurt, and then in part two we ask why they have been accused of everything from deliberately starting wars, to assassinating presidents and controlling the entire global financial system.
In The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 1) EconomyWatch journalist David Smith finds out how the Rothschilds came to be:
From their five European bases, the Rothschilds became masters of the political universe. They lent money to Kings, including England's George IV, dined with Prime Ministers like Disraeli and Gladstone, funded the creation of a pan-European rail network and financed wars, including both sides in the Napoleonic Wars.
Their status was put most eloquently by the contemporary newspaper Nile's Weekly Register in 1835:
"The Rothschilds are the wonders of modern banking...peering above kings, rising higher than emperors, and holding a whole continent in the hollow of their hands....not a cabinet moves without their advice."
Of Baron Nathan Rosthchild, the head of the English branch, the newspaper said:
"He holds the keys to peace or war. They are the brokers and counselors of the Kings of Europe and of the Republican chiefs of America. What more can they desire?"
The Rothschilds didn't just lend money to royals, they also behaved like royalty by marrying each other constantly. In 1836 Nathan's son Lionel married his first cousin Charlotte Rothschild, who was herself the daughter of Nathan's brother James, who had married his niece. In other words, her father was also her great uncle. Of Nathan's seven children, four married Rothschild first cousins. Such inbreeding was genetically questionable, but it bred loyalty and kept money safely in the family.
The Rothschilds ability to form symbiotic links with the powerful became notorious.
Read the rest of The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 1) on EconomyWatch.
In The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 2), David Smith investigates the veil of conspiracy surrounding the Rothschilds:
We can trace the roots of this antipathy as far back as the 19 th century when the Rothschilds were the supreme financiers of the world. At that time, the family was already being accused of financing wars for their own financial gain. The German writer Friedrich von Scherb wrote in his 1893 history of the family that:
"The house of Rothschild has arisen from the quarrels between states, has become great and mighty from wars. The misfortune of states and peoples has been its fortune."
This view that wars could not be fought without the support of Rothschild finance was shared by the left-wing English writer JA Hobson, who wrote in his book Imperialism: A Study (1902) that the Boer Wars had been funded by a small group of Jewish-German financiers, principally the Rothschilds, for economic gain.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat May 16, 2020 12:25 pm Post subject:
Q&A with Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson talked about his book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, on the power of social networks throughout history and their influence in the present.
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook,
Niall Ferguson
It's the kind of genre that looks like history, and usually involves some historical narrative, but it's nearly always detached from any scholarship. There's fake history as well as fake news. And most conspiracy theory history is fake history.
00:02:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
This makes it very difficult for the professional historian to write about these subjects. I mean, who wants to write about the Illuminati if most that is already out there is crazy stuff.
00:02:34
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And who wants to really talk about the Freemasons of the American Revolution? If you write about that, won't you just find yourself on the same shelf in the bookshop as the crazy books?
00:02:46
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I've noticed over my career, that these actually quite interesting and important subjects have been abandoned by professional historians and left to the cranks and the conspiracy theorists.
00:02:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And that's a pity because there are stories to be told about all of them; about the Illuminati, about the Rothschild's, you name it, there is some history there, but it's just very different history from the conspiracy theories.
00:03:13
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And part of the point of "The Square and the Tower" is to say, we should be able to talk about these subjects without being classified with the cranks and the conspiracy theorists.
00:03:24
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Before we get too far into the book, let's catch up about you. I mean, you're well known in some circles in this country, for things like "The Ascent of Money", PBS series – documentary series. What was that, and when did you do it?
00:03:38
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Ten years ago, I published a book and produced a television series called, "The Ascent of Money", a financial history of the world. And this series was designed to give people some historical context for the crisis that I saw coming.
00:04:02
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, 2006, '07 I was writing quite a lot about the coming financial crisis. What struck me when I would spend time on Wall Street was that the people who were running the investment banks knew no financial history beyond their own careers. They certainly weren't prepared for a financial crisis on the scale of 1929, which was what they got with the failure of Lehman Brothers.
00:04:24
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I'm a great believer that historians can help us with the present and even with the futures that we contemplate. What I tried to do in "The Ascent of Money" was to say, look here, Wall Street, the chances are very high that a major financial crisis will happen. That's what history leads us to expect.
00:04:35
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
What can we learn about the financial system from history? I don't really understand anything until I know it's history. That's how I operate.
00:04:41
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I wanted to tell this story of money, where do banks come from, what's the bull market, what's the stock market? Why do we buy houses with loans called mortgages? So, I wrote a book that essentially gave the reader a sense of where the financial system came from and why it was very likely to suffer a major crisis.
00:04:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
The crisis happened just after the book came out. I think Lehman went bust just a few weeks after the publication of the book, which was interesting, and meant that I had at least something to say about what was happening in real time as financial history was being made.
00:05:14
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Ten years later, this book is trying to do something similar for Silicon Valley; that is to say, I'm saying to Silicon Valley, history applies to you. History didn't begin with the Google IPO or the founding of Facebook. History goes a long way back and it's relevant to you.
00:05:32
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But I'm also saying to readers interested in history, network science is pretty important, and historians need to understand it. And if you don't really understand how networks work, you will not only fail to understand the present, but you'll actually have some trouble understanding the past.
00:05:45
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, it's a bit like "The Ascent of Money" goes to Silicon Valley. That's a rough characterization of this book. And any of your viewers who enjoyed "The Ascent of Money", will I hope, enjoy this book.
00:05:54
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Where did you grow up?
00:05:55
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
In Glasgow, in Scotland. You can tell from my odd accent that I'm from the British Isles, but I actually come from that peculiar part of the British Isles; Scotland, which is one of those countries with a superiority complex, rather than an inferiority complex.
00:06:07
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Most small countries have an inferiority complex. But the Scots have long thought that they invented the modern world, that they run the United Kingdom, and that where ever they go they will find traces of their forefathers' endeavors, including the United States with its many traces of Scottish influence. But that's where I grew up and I was encouraged to think that Scotland had a special mission to transform the world.
00:06:46
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
And what were your parents doing?
00:06:49
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
My father was a doctor. My mother, now retired, was a physicist who taught physics. So, I come from a relatively scientific family. My sister is a professor of physics at Yale. She's the clever one.
00:07:07
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I was the black sheep of the family in that I drifted into what some people think of as a social science and others think of as one of the humanities; history. So, I study the change particles called human beings, and the way in which they behave.
00:07:29
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But I think my – my family gave me a couple of advantages; at least two. And one was a tendency to think about the world with the framework of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through my grandfathers' I was the heir of a certain intellectual legacy that goes back to Adam Smith and David Hume, and the great thinkers of 18th century Scotland.
00:07:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And I think the other advantage that they gave me was to think of history as a branch of literature. So, there were history books in the house, but side by side with the great books of fiction. And so, I was introduced at an early stage to the idea that above all, history must be literature. It must be readable.
00:08:16
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
A. J. P. Taylor was a historian that I remember occupying some space on my parents' bookshelves. And that inspired me to find history attractive as an intellectual endeavor, but also as a literary endeavor.
00:08:27
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Your college education; how extensive was it and where was it?
00:08:32
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Well extensive is a funny word to use because in some ways an Oxford education is intensive. One reads history. I spent three years as an undergraduate at Oxford reading history.
00:08:48
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
That was a wonderful opportunity. I had grown up in Glasgow. To me, Oxford was nirvana; a kind of promised land of not only stunning architecture, but also brilliant minds.
00:09:02
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I couldn't believe that it was possible to be employed to sit in a book lined study and divide one's time between reading books, writing books, and talking about books with students.
00:09:18
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
These Oxford dons – we would call them professors in the United States, seemed to me the luckiest human beings alive. And all I wanted to do once I saw their lifestyle, was to have it myself, to have a lifetime spent in this realm of books.
00:09:35
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It was very inspiring to be at Oxford in the early 1980's for another reason. Britain was in a great state of fervent. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Most universities lent in the direction of the left.
00:09:50
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
To be pro-factual was to be in a minority. We were – I became one of these young Thatcherites. We were a feisty minority who enjoyed making the case for the Thatcher government.
00:10:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I had a certain political education at Oxford, as well as an academic education. And Oxford being Oxford, unlike American universities, there's only one exam. It's at the end; finals. Everything hinges on that.
00:10:18
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
What you do in the proceeding years is kind of up to you. I didn't go to many lectures. In fact, I went to hardly any lectures. I did learn to play the double bass. I dabbled in student journalism. I found that I couldn't act.
00:10:34
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I tried pretty much everything except sport and found that I wasn't really that good at any of the things other than writing history essays so that the final -- in the final phase in final year, I reverted back to being a historian just in time.
00:10:51
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
When you're talking about networks in your book, Oxford is a network, Magdalen College, I would assume is a network.
00:11:01
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
There are some 35 colleges are more at Oxford. What does it mean for you that you were at Magdalen College inside Oxford as far as networking?
00:11:11
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Absolutely. To go to Oxford and to go to one of the most prestigious -- the most prestigious college, Magdalen, is to be admitted into the network of the British elite.
00:11:23
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Right there, the contemporaries that you meet will include future leaders, will include future editor, there’s a sense in which Britain is still, as it has been for centuries, run by people who went to Oxford and Cambridge.
00:11:39
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
You go to the Oxford Union which is the debating society, what you're really seeing is students preparing for the House of Commons, practicing, getting the hang of standing at the dispatch box. And some my near (ph) contemporaries of gone to great things.
00:11:57
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Rather to my own incredulity, Boris Johnson is now the foreign secretary. That's not something I would have predicted back then, it's probably something that he would've predicted.
00:12:11
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I think Oxford admits you to the network that is sometimes called the establishment, that still to a surprising extent runs Britain. I didn't really appreciate that at the time I think.
00:12:25
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I only retrospectively appreciate the extent to which that was admission into a very important network that extends into politics, that extends into the media, and that extends into business.
00:12:39
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And the -- from that point onwards, in your life without even necessarily being aware of it, when you meet somebody at a cocktail party in London, a transaction occurs which goes like this, oh, did you go to Oxford?
00:12:55
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Oh, which college? When were you there? Do you know X? Oh, yes, I know Y. Now people who haven't been admitted to that network can’t play that game.
00:13:06
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It's the central activity of social networks, exchanging information and building a connection that then has utility in the present. Because of course if you and I went to Magdalen, we have a set of common experiences and that builds a kind of trust.
00:13:26
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, the chances are that any future transaction that we embark on or project that we decide to do together that will be based on that underlying mutual understanding. That’s how social networks work and Oxford introduced me to that world.
00:13:45
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
In your book, you talk about Oxford and how it relates to Cambridge. I want to get back to this in a second. I want you to tell us about the apostles.
00:13:56
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Yes.
00:13:57
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
But after you graduated and came to this country, how many different places have you taught in the United States?
00:14:06
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I first taught at New York University for a couple of years and then went to Harvard. And I was professor at Harvard for 12 years and only recently moved to Stanford, so three. I’ve given multiple guest lectures here, there and everywhere, but those three institutions of the ones where I've spent time.
00:14:29
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
So who are or were or can be an apostle and what are they?
00:14:33
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Cambridge had a very remarkable institution that doesn't really have equivalence anywhere else. The Cambridge apostles were -- are because it still exists a society of extreme intellectual exclusivity.
00:14:49
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It dates back to the 19th century. It was an intellectual discussion society. Members would meet, give papers, be brilliant, eat sardines on toast. That's about it. Doesn't sound like much, does it?
00:15:04
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But it was really and remains one of the most prestigious societies that one could be elected to. And the process of election was an arduous one. Only rarely were elections made. So, the apostles remained relatively few in number.
00:15:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It was probably the height of its intellectual influence in the 1910s and 1920s, when John Maynard Keynes, certainly the most influential economist of the 20th century was a member, along with his friend Lytton Strachey, one of the great iconoclastic writers of that generation.
00:15:47
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And they look down from a great height on everybody else. They regard himself, not without some cause as very clever indeed.
00:15:58
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
You’re write, they were in a word insufferable.
00:16:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
They were pretty insufferable actually. Reading the younger Keynes's correspondence of the subject makes you realize that a very exclusive network has a kind of nasty side to it. It was quite misogynistic.
00:16:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
The apostles of the early 1900s, certainly tended gay, nothing wrong with that. But the kind of misogyny that kept -- accompanied that particular chapter in Cambridge history doesn't look well today. But they were primarily an intellectual group.
00:16:44
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
One interesting consequence of their elitism and that's the only word for it was a disdain for all the conventional wisdom that Britain had inherited from the Victorians. So, if you are the crème de la crème intellectually, naturally, you're far too clever to believe in free trade, or gold stand or any of the things of that the Victorians believed in. The British Empire.
00:17:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, the interesting about the apostles was that by the 1920s they were questioning most of the conventional wisdom of the previous generation. But what then happens, and this is really why I write about the apostles in the book, was something surprising, they got hacked by the Russians. Sounds rather like a contemporary problem, there’s nothing new under the sun.
The mystery of Lord Victor Rothschild’s (1910-1990) connections to Soviet intelligence has vexed researchers for over a half century now. As the scion of an ultra-wealthy banking house and confidante to Winston Churchill, Rothschild was an influential figure in Britain’s power elite for decades, occupying key positions in counterintelligence, the energy sector and strategic policy planning. But was he also the notorious Cambridge Spy Ring’s “Fifth Man,” a spy for Moscow who could access the crown jewels of UK secrets?
The Cambridge network – consisting of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – has gone down in history as one of Soviet secret service’s most successful penetrations, to the shame of the British establishment. Long after their exposure, Rothschild was well-situated as a grey cardinal of UK politics, seemingly untouchable.
In 1994 investigative author Roland Perry wrote The Fifth Man, implicating Rothschild as a Soviet asset based on interviews with anonymous KGB veterans in Moscow. Yet Perry couldn’t obtain the direct proof he needed to clinch the case.[1] Now, new evidence has surfaced, suggesting that if not the Fifth Man, Rothschild was indeed working for Soviet foreign intelligence alongside the Cambridge Five from the 1930’s up to the initial stages of the Cold War. The source is none other than the first chairman of the KGB, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov (1905-1991).
Ivan Serov KGB
An enforcer for Stalin and Khrushchev, General Ivan Serov served as the first chairman of the KGB from 1954 to 1958.
Ivan Serov was a physically brave and ruthless NKVD officer who specialized in mass deportations and quelling internal unrest under Stalin. In 1954 he was chosen to head the newly reconstituted state security apparatus, the KGB, by Nikita Khrushchev, who considered Serov reliable from their time in pre-war Ukraine. “Ivan the Terrible,” as the Western press christened him, led the KGB until 1958, when the Politburo sent him to head the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Ousted in 1963 after the exposure of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky as a CIA-MI6 agent, Serov was soon lowered in rank, excluded from the Party, and forced into retirement. Though relegated to oblivion, the cashiered Kremlin enforcer kept a diary – a fact that was known to the KGB as early as 1971. Serov concealed his writings within the walls of his Moscow dacha’s garage, and they were only discovered in 2012, some two decades after his death.
Serov’s diaries, published in Russian as Notes from the Suitcase (Zapiski iz chemodana), reveal a myriad of details on NKVD wartime deportation operations, the treacherous games played amongst Stalin’s lieutenants, and a first-hand account of how the Red Army crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. While Serov was not a professional intelligence officer, some of the most fascinating entries concern the espionage operations that he oversaw as chief of the KGB and GRU. And the question of Lord Victor Rothschild – whether he acted as a Soviet asset – is finally put to rest.
Serov describes meeting Rothschild while accompanying Khrushchev on his April 1956 visit to London:
I met with Victor Rothschild only once, at the embassy. This person was well-known from very long ago as an “heir” to the Philby affair and others. He knew perfectly well that these people, having certain inclinations, were connected to us, and used them to pass on information to Moscow, including false information.
Overall, useful ties with him ended with the formation of Israel.
As you remember, the British government was always against the creation of Israel, while Rothschild, to the contrary, aided this.
All materials on the Palestinian problem in the 1940’s and on the British position were received by our intelligence service in the 1930’s-40’s. After Burgess and Maclean’s escape, he only appeared at official receptions at our embassies and met with the ambassador, Mikoyan or Malenkov.
In London he made an unpleasant impression on me. He didn’t inspire trust. I’ve met many such hustlers in Bessarabia and Romania, as well as in Germany after the war.
The contact, according to the program of the visit and issues for discussions with the British, was interesting, of course. But Rothschild always pursued only his own goals. In his own way, Rothschild also compromised Philby and others. Ties with him put the information passed on by them in doubt.
We were helped by such solid, serious, moral and non-mercenary people who shared our views, such as Bernal, Ivor Montagu, and major scientists. Rothschild was just a fellow traveler.[2]
The ex-chairman of the KGB opens his passage with a stunning claim – Victor Rothschild not only knew of his school friends’ espionage, he actively supplied information to Moscow Center through their network[3]. Back in their Cambridge days, Rothschild, Burgess, and Blunt had all been members of the Apostles, a campus society characterized by Marxist intellectual speculation and homosexual activity. But as Serov makes clear, Rothschild the ‘fellow traveler’ was not under Soviet control. Rather, it is implied he was pursuing another aim entirely – the creation of a Jewish state, a family dream fulfilled in the aftermath of the Second World War. The role of the Rothschilds in founding Israel is undisputed[4]; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was due largely to the energies of young Victor’s uncle, Lord Walter Rothschild[5]. Secret diplomacy, double-dealing, the use of spies, and even terrorism all formed an indispensable part of the drama. And now Serov’s revelation would suggest that by the end of the 1940’s, the Soviet Union had outlived its utility in the eyes of the legendary financial dynasty.
Stalin had been among the first to support the fledgling State of Israel; after all, the political spectrum of the new nation-state leaned heavily socialist, and a large portion of its immigrants had come from the Eastern Bloc. Armaments from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia helped tip the balance in favor of the Zionist cause during Israel’s War for Independence, what Palestinian Arabs rather less enthusiastically have termed an Naqbah, “The Catastrophe.” At the time of Israel’s formation, the Kremlin believed Ashkenazi settlers, refugees and emigres – some of whom had fought in or alongside the Red Army against Nazi Germany – would deal a blow to Western imperialism in the Middle East. As Serov’s entry indicates, Rothschild and the Cambridge network helped inform the Soviet leadership and perhaps further undermine Britain’s weakening grip on the Palestine Mandate[6].
Soviet hopes for a red stronghold on the Levant, however, would evaporate quickly. Stalin was in firm command of international communism, but the Zionist movement proved well beyond his grasp. Events from the 1948 assassination of playwright and Jewish Antifascist Committee chair Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk to the Doctors’ Plot show that the “Father of All Nations” was unable to bring Zionism under his control. The postwar purge of prominent Jews in the Soviet Union conformed to Stalin’s standard practice of eliminating any and all perceived potential threats to his rule.
While Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion initially pursued a policy of balance between East and West[7], he came to steer his country toward the Atlantic alliance – Israel needed a dependable great-power patron with a wealthy and influential Jewish diaspora community, and the United States fit the bill. Less than a generation into Israel’s existence, under the Johnson Administration, Washington and Tel Aviv cemented extensive security cooperation (read: billions in arms contracts and economic aid) that continues to this day.
The Soviets would counter Israel’s westward shift by backing not only the dispossessed Palestinians, but also secular Arab states in the region such as Syria, Egypt, and eventually Iraq. In the context of the Cold War, it made sense for Israel to arrange intelligence sharing with Western powers, especially the United States. The CIA’s pointman for the Israeli relationship throughout the first half of the US-Soviet struggle was Company counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who happened to be a longtime drinking friend and understudy of none other than Kim Philby.
The demise of the Cambridge Five, beginning with the flight of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951, roughly coincided with Israel’s gradual but steady integration into the Western camp. Working in Washington as the MI6 liaison, Philby knew from the freshly-decrypted Venona intercepts that Maclean’s career as a Soviet agent (codename “Homer”) was coming to an end. He sent the debauched Burgess, who was also serving at the British Embassy and living in his house at the time, to warn Maclean and facilitate his escape. As it turned out, both Cambridge school mates vanished behind the Iron Curtain, leaving Philby under a dark cloud of suspicion and forcing his resignation. The master spy played it cool, laid low, and eventually made his way to Beirut five years later as an MI6 asset under journalistic cover (additionally re-establishing contact with the KGB).
Philby’s final unmasking in Beirut during the winter of 1962-63 was the result of Rothschild action, a fact that most accounts have passed over without critical analysis. While Anatoly Golitsyn, the KGB major who defected to the CIA in 1961, is popularly attributed to have confirmed Philby’s identity as a Soviet agent, it was Victor Rothschild who sealed his fate. The ostensible reason for the legendary mole’s exposure was his unfavorable attitude toward Israel, as conveyed on the pages of The Observer and The Economist. Flora Solomon, an ardent Zionist whom Philby unsuccessfully had attempted to recruit in the 1930’s, became incensed at his pro-Arab, anti-Israel journalistic slant and decided to reveal what she had known for decades. Solomon, whose son would found Amnesty International, reported Philby to a figure perched high in the British security establishment: Lord Victor Rothschild[8].
Rothschild Victor House of Lords
If Serov’s diary is genuine, then Rothschild would have no interest in Philby being brought back to the Old Bailey to stand trial, risking his own exposure. Much better to have the Cambridge Five’s brightest star spirited away to Moscow than spilling secrets of high criminality in the establishment. As MI6 was about to close in with a group of officers headed by old friend Nicholas Elliott, Philby received a warning[9]. Anthony Blunt, his spy days largely behind him and now ensconced as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, went to Beirut under the pretext of a botanical excursion in December of 1962, mere weeks before Philby’s escape. The documentary film maker George Carey notes he was ostensibly in search of the frog orchid, a flower that grows wild in England, yet nowhere in Lebanon[10]. So who sent Blunt, the KGB’s London residency or his longtime associate Victor Rothschild?
Moscow Center wouldn’t need to send Anthony Blunt all the way to Beirut to tip his old school friend off to the oncoming danger. Philby was already in contact with his immediate handler, a certain Petukhov stationed nearby under Soviet diplomatic cover, and Yuri Modin, his longtime control officer. Modin had in fact warned him of Golitsyn’s defection in the summer of 1962, instructing him “not to return to Britain because of the danger of arrest, and to make contingency plans for his escape.”[11] Modin himself thought that through its seeming incompetence, MI6 “had actively encouraged him to slip away.”[12] The most powerful elements of the British ruling class, personified by Victor Rothschild, wanted Philby safe and silent behind the Iron Curtain so that higher-level elite treachery would remain hidden from public view.
During his lifetime, Lord Victor Rothschild threatened to sue anyone into penury for claiming he had worked for Soviet intelligence. Hardly would he believe that one day, from the grave, the former chief of the KGB would expose him as a spy.
[2] Serov, Ivan. Zapiski iz chemodana. Ed. Aleksandr Khinshtein. Moscow: Olma Media Group, 2016, pp. 543-544.
[3] The late Stanislav Lekarev, a veteran of the KGB First Chief Directorate who had worked in London, claims that Rothschild was first contacted by Soviet intelligence in August of 1934 at a symphony. His recruiter was supposedly the illegal Theodore Mally (“Otto”). Lekarev posits that Rothschild was not an agent in the ordinary operational sense, but rather was handled as a high-level agent of influence.
LONDON — In what would be the largest public share offering in history, the British government Thursday announced that it will sell $12 billion worth of shares in British Petroleum Co. PLC.
The offering marks the most ambitious selloff so far in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher`s campaign to ''privatize'' government-owned industries.
The more than $30 billion raised over the last eight years by selling off British Airways, British Gas, British Telecom and more than a dozen smaller companies has put Thatcher in the enviable position of being able to both cut taxes and increase government spending.
Along the way, the number of Britons owning shares has increased to more than 15 percent from under 5 percent.
No date for the selloff was announced, and no price will be set for shares until N.M. Rothschild and Sons, the London merchant bank handling the sale, has gauged demand.
The government holds a 31.5 percent stake in British Petroleum, which is worth an estimated for 6 billion pounds ($9.7 billion), and it will also sell a block of new shares for 1.5 billion pounds ($2.4 billion), officials said.
In past privatization issues, critics have complained that the prices were set unrealistically low in order to ensure that the offerings were vastly oversubscribed. One recent study estimated that $500 invested in 15 privatization issues, a total investment of $7,500, would now be worth $16,740.
In two earlier privatization issues, however, people who bought and held onto British Petroleum ended up losers. Shares sold for 363 pence in 1979 and 435 pence in 1983. BP closed on the London Stock Exchange Thursday at 353 pence ($5.66).
Anthony Alt, a managing director of Rothschild, said the British Petroleum offering, in the manner of past privatization issues, would be handled in such a manner that purchases would be guaranteed for small investors.
''As you know, it is one of the aims to widen and deepen share ownership,'' he said, ''and a substantial portion of this share offer will be reserved for the man in the street.''
Alt also said that more than 20 percent of the stock--a record for a privatization--will be sold abroad. In the past, there was heavy demand in the United States for depository shares (ADRs) representing British privatization issues.
Currently 6 percent of BP is foreign-owned, whereas more than half the oil company`s assets are abroad. Last month it bought for $7.8 billion the shares of Cleveland-based Standard Oil Co. that it did not already own, lifting it to No. 3 among world oil companies.
By buying all of Standard Oil, BP has raised its presence in the United States and stands to gain from Standard`s large Alaskan reserves should oil prices start to rise again. Standard is the second-biggest U.S. oil producer after Exxon Corp.
The portion of BP stock earmarked for foreign investors may be reduced if the domestic demand is overwhelming, Alt said. That may well occur. Earlier sales of state companies, such as the utilities British Gas and British Telecommunications, have been heavily oversubscribed.
Up to now, the biggest sale of a state-owned company has been the 5.6 billion-pound ($9 billion) stock offering of British Gas. British Telecom was sold for about 4 billion pounds ($6.4 billion).
Once known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., BP was among the first companies to tap the oil fields in the Middle East. It has recently become a big producer of North Sea oil and, through its American subsidiary, extracts oil from Alaska.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 12:17 am Post subject:
The Government was last night plunged into fresh controversy over "sleaze" with Labour allegations of "jobs for the boys'' when it emerged that Lord Wakeham had joined the merchant bank NM Rothschild and Sons six months after stepping down from th e Cabinet.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wakeham-job-revives-sleaze-row-1569 724.html
Gordon Brown, the Shadow Chancellor, called on the Nolan Committee on standards in public life to investigate the bank's appointment of Lord Wakeham, who handled the privatisation of the regional electricity companies as Secretary of State for Energy. Rothschild was one of the Government's advisers on the electricity sell off.
The appointment put the Government back on the defensive with the Nolan committee inquiring into MPs' outside interests, and it enabled Labour to deflect from its own difficulties on Clause IV back to its allegations about Tory "sleaze."
It raised renewed concern about the conduct of ministers. Next week the Nolan committee will be studying the employment of ministers leaving office. It will call Sir Norman Fowler, former Conservative Party chairman, Lord Armstrong, the former Cabinet secretary, and Lord Younger, the former defence secretary.
Lord Wakeham may earn up to £50,000 a year for his part-time post with the merchant bank, which was also involved in coal privatisation.
Mr Brown said Cabinet ministers should be banned for up to five years from joining companies if there was a conflict of interest. He called on the Nolan committee to lay down as a minimum requirement on ministers "a decent interval - probably a whole Parliament" to ensure they did not benefit from decisions they had made in Cabinet.
"The public will be dismayed that some people who have been in the Cabinet making decisions about privatisation are now sitting on the boards of companies benefiting from these privatisations. That makes the case for changes and for new rules very strongindeed,'' Mr Brown said."It is wrong to be involved in the privatised industries one year and benefit from the privatisation the next."
But Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, chairman of the bank, said the appointment would "broaden and deepen the experience of the bank's board".
Lord Wakeham, recently appointed chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, last night did not answer questions when he left PCC headquarters in London.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2022 12:20 am Post subject:
NM Rothschild pitches motorway privatisation plan
(TIMES ONLINE) A radical plan to raise £100 billion by privatising the motorway network has been presented to the three main political parties by NM Rothschild, the influential investment bank.
Rothschild, an architect of several privatisations, made its pitch in the weeks running up to the summer recess on July 21, Whitehall sources said. Bankers told leading politicians that the sale of the roads overseen by the Highways Agency — all motorways and most big trunk roads — could help revive battered public finances.
Toll-road companies and infrastructure funds would compete to operate and maintain stretches of the network.
In one version of the scheme, the government would pay for upkeep through a system of “shadow” tolls. A more radical, and less politically palatable, option would be for companies to charge motorists directly through toll booths or electronic card readers. The RAC Foundation, a motorists’ group, advocated privatisation in a report last week.
The Rothschild plan has already won the support of Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader and Treasury spokesman.
“This is an attractive, positive idea which could release considerable resources to the public finances and may have real environmental merits,” Cable said. “The scale of it is vast — it makes rail privatisation look like small beer.”
Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said the Conservatives had “no plans” to back Rothschild’s proposals: “Rothschilds, like many other banks and consultancies, have approached me and my team on a range of ideas for our transport network, including their ideas for our road infrastructure, but we are not working on any proposals for privatisation of the strategic road network and have no plans to do so.”
Motorway privatisation was considered by John Major’s Conservative administration, which sold British Rail, but was rejected.
A spokesman at the Department for Transport said: “It is not unusual for organisations to suggest ideas to government departments but ultimately all policy is decided by ministers and there are no plans to sell off a stake in the Highways Agency.” Rothschild declined to comment.
The bank was behind many of the key privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s, including British Steel, British Gas and British Coal. It has close links to the Conservatives, having employed several senior Party figures including Lord Lamont, John Redwood and Lord Wakeham. Oliver Letwin, the former shadow chancellor, works there part-time.
Politicians of all Parties are seeking ways to decrease the need for large tax rises or heavy cuts in public services. The bank bailouts and a recent collapse in tax revenues has seen public sector debt rise to more than £800 billion, 56.8% of GDP — up from 35.5% just two years ago.
Road tolls are unpopular, however. When Labour mooted road pricing two years ago, more than 230,000 signed a petition on the Downing Street decrying the plan .
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