Intelligence Online
A complaint filed by U.S. national Robert Eringer against prince Albert of Monaco has shed light on the role of private consultants in micro states.
Often for want of sufficient resources, tax havens farm out intelligence and security work to outside consultants. Between 2002 and 2008, the American Robert Eringer was in charge of the Monaco Intelligence Service that answers to Prince Albert (IOL 604). What is more, intelligence for the republic of San Marino was long overseen by a former Russian intelligence officer who went into private business, Sergei Ivanov.
However, the precursor was Ciex, a firm set up in 1994 by Patrick Grayson and Gerard Willing and which ran a unit to sniff out potential investors in Monaco on behalf of Prince Rainier. Thanks to the connections of Hamilton McMillan, who headed the European operations of MI6, before joining Ciex, the firm equally advised Liechtenstein until the beginning of the current decade.
Retaining the services of well-known corporate intelligence outfits can help some tax havens to burnish their reputation, specially in the fight against black-collar crime. For instance, Monaco’s government called on Kroll last year to establish procedures allowing the principality to get off the “list of uncooperative tax havens” drawn up by the OECD. Kroll did similar work in Antigua, where the former boss of Kroll’s Miami office, Tom Cash, helped the island rewrite legislation against money laundering.
The consultants often work hand in glove with big law or lobbying concerns which see to the foreign financial relations of tax havens (White & Case for Jersey and Guernsey, for instance, and Covington & Burling for the principality of Liechtenstein, etc. IOL 600).
But private investigators aren’t always on the side of the micro-states. In the early 2000s, the British government commissioned Kroll to look into suspected money laundering circuits in Gibraltar, which has been a British overseas territory since 2002. The Foreign Office also employed corporate intelligence firms to carry out inquiries in the Turks and Caicos islands, a British protectorate. The island has been placed under supervision after an official board of inquiry carried out in 2008-2008 under Robin Auld. The findings were turned over to Gordon Wetherell, the island’s governor.
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