Cold steel and the Billionaires Club

More news of holidaying yacht owners. Lakshmi Mittal, the steel billionaire, is mooring his yacht in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, this August.

He and his wife, Usa, were at the birthday celebrations for Fawaz Gruosi, who owns de Grisogono, the watch and jewellery maker, and who numbers the Saudi royal family among his customers.

Also there was JCB digger owner Sir Anthony Bamford and his wife, along with Russian oligarch Vladislav Doronin.

The party was thrown at the legendary Billionaires Club (above) by Flavio Briatore.

The Billionaires Club is Flavio Briatore's ultra expensive hill top disco in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, only open in high season, from the end of June through August. Here you can send £10,000 on dinner alone in the restaurant, Cipriani, and splash $50,000 on a methuselah of Cristal.

It's near the harbour and awash with low lighting, Persian rugs and beautiful people.

But be warned, the New York Times reported recently that the hotspot has gone downmarket lately - why, some recent visitors aren't even millionaires, let alone billionaires!

There's a lot of it about, particularly in Russia.

Forbes says there are now 110 dollar billionaires in Russia, with more in Moscow than in any other city in the world. Only America has more. And there are many multimillionaires.

Rich Russian parents send their children to English boarding schools, but not until they've finished their early education at Mes, the elite Moscow Economic School. Abramovich's children went to school here. So did Khodorkovsky's - he was once Russia's richest man but now languishes in jail. The children of Pyotr Aven, one of Russia’s first oligarch bankers, now in England, are former pupils. Oleg Deripaska, 40, is Russia’s richest man – worth about £14 billion - and he has a child at Mes.

Entry costs £25,000, although parents are said to pay far more to get their child in. Average yearly fees are around £7,000 – a fraction of what it later costs to send them to Britain.

The children arrive in Porsche Cayennes, Maseratis, BMWs, 4WDs and so on, accompanied by tough looking security men armed with guns. The kids are adorned with designer clothes and jewelled watches, with credit cards, i-phones, mobiles, nannies, bodyguards and bulletproof cars.

The place to live is off Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse, a road that snakes westwards out of Moscow through forests of silver birches and pines. Known as Rublyovka, the area is Moscow’s Beverly Hills, home to the gated compounds of oligarchs, government ministers, Kremlin officials, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Along the road, stretches of forest are boxed in behind 16ft-high metal fences surveilled by CCTV cameras and patrolled day and night by private security guards.

Near by is Barvikha Luxury Village, an elite shopping complex. Lamborghini and Ferrari have a showroom here. The Bentley dealership sells a car a day. Gucci, Prada and Armani are here, as is Dolce & Gabbana, and Brioni, the Italian fashion house whose custom-tailored suits can cost up to £15,000, and Bottega Veneta, where you can buy a handbag for £10,000.

The rich ski in Courchevel and swim off yachts in Sardinia and St Tropez.

16 years after the collapse of communism, it's amazing what a little touch of captialism can do.

the background on Porto Montenegro - with names

Extracts from a good explanatory article in TourismeRoi, written last year, and full of interesting names and facts about the Porto Montenegro development.

On the left Peter Munk

Berth of a nation by ERIC REGULY - Friday, August 01, 2008: BUDVA, MONTENEGRO.

Peter Munk and I are in the library of the “Te Manu,” a white floating palace built in Italy, owned by a Mexican, named after the Polynesian word for “bird” and chartered for the week by the chairman and acting CEO of Barrick Gold and his family.

The yacht is anchored in Budva, a medieval town turned bustling resort on the coast of Montenegro, one of the breakaway republics of the shredded Yugoslavia. It has four levels, a crew of 11 and an interior clad with pear, cherry and walnut panelling. At 49.4 metres (160 feet), it is one of the biggest and most expensive of its kind in the rarefied world of superyachts – generally defined as crewed pleasure boats of 30 metres or longer. This one rents for $175,000 to $210,000 (U.S.) a week.

Te Manu is more than a boat. It is also Mr. Munk's office. But the affairs of the world's biggest gold company are not on his mind. Porto Montenegro is. The table is strewn with notes, plans and diagrams for the superyacht marina and luxury resort that is the billionaire's newest and most glamorous project.

He and his high-profile backers recently became Montenegro's biggest foreign investors, with their €260-million-plus ($405-million) plan to make Porto Montenegro the Mediterranean's, perhaps the world's, premier superyacht destination.

Mr. Munk is tackling this project at 80, making him one of the world's oldest CEOs. Porto Montenegro proves he's one of the most energetic too. “Peter Munk is amazing,” says fellow Canadian gold magnate Pierre Lassonde, the former president of Newmont Gold. “He will be 81 this fall and he is still building projects. My definition of young is when your coefficient of dreams to memories is greater than one. Peter only talks about the future. The past rarely comes into his conversation.”

Porto Montenegro will transform the Montenegrin economy for the better, Mr. Munk promises. “It will improve the prosperity of the country and raise its status internationally,” he says.

But the project has had a rough start. Thousands of Montenegrins took to the streets in protest when word got out that the old Arsenal navy yard would be recast as a playground for the rich. Some locals think Munk and Co. are building something akin to a gated community for floating Russian billionaires – Russian tourists and investors are already so thick on the ground that the country is known as “Moscow by the Med.” Marine biologists fear the yacht harbour will damage the already stressed ecology of the Bay of Kotor, the Med's only fjord and one of the loveliest anchorages on the planet.

Montenegro presses against Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Albania on the southern fringes of the Dalmatian Coast. Green mountains plunge into the Adriatic, the water is clear cerulean blue. Ancient towns, dot the shores. Hotels, restaurants and shops are springing up, but the densities and the prices are nowhere near the horrific levels of France's Côte d'Azur.

If Mr. Munk gets his way – there is no reason to think he won't, given the money already invested and the approvals obtained – the Te Manu won't stick out from the crowd at Porto Montenegro, some 15 kilometres north of Budva. The Bay of Kotor marina will have berths for 650 yachts, 150 of them superyachts. Boats as long as 150metres could be accommodated in a pinch.

Oliver Corlette explains why a marina capable of taking that many superyachts will find an eager market. He is the Australian-born, 33-year-old managing director of Porto Montenegro and came into the Munk family fold through the New York office of Onex, controlled by Gerry Schwartz, where he worked on the private equity team with Anthony Munk, Peter's son. Anthony is a Porto Montenegro investor.

Mr. Corlette says there is simply no room anywhere for the new flotilla of superyachts. Antibes, in the south of France, is probably the Med's biggest superyacht marina; it can accommodate only a few dozen of the biggest boats. The problem is so many superyachts are being built. “The modern yachts are like ships,” he says. “Harbours like Monaco and Antibes were created at a time when 30 metres was considered huge. It's not any more.”

At last count, more than 900 superyachts were under construction as the new millionaires and billionaires from Russia, India, China and parts in between put deposits on the ultimate status symbols. Porto Montenegro will be able to cope with a number of these boats once the marina is finished in a couple of years.

Mr. Munk says the economics of marina ownership are irresistible. Marinas are like hotels in the sense the guest rents a small bit of real estate – a dock in the captain's case. Hotels require extensive refurbishing to remain competitive. The non-stop capital expenditures drain cash flow. “The port business is like the hotel business, except there are no capital expenditures after you build the cement docks,” he says.

A year lease on a superyacht dock would start at €100,000 or so. But the yachts also need to be cleaned, fuelled, repaired and refurbished. Superyachts, says Mr. Corlette, cost about €1-million a metre to build. The annual operating bill works out to about 10 per cent of the construction cost – the tab to run a 40-metre yacht would come to €4-million a year. Porto Montenegro hopes to grab much of this spending. Mr. Munk hopes to become a partner in the commercial shipyard, called Bijela, across the bay from Porto Montenegro, and convert it into a yacht-repair business.

Mr. Munk landed Porto Montenegro through a combination of luck, good timing and impeccable connections.
He has chartered yachts for much of his adult life and he remembers the time several years ago when he kissed off Monaco, the over crowded Mediterranean anchorage of the yachting elite. He jumped overboard for a swim, felt something brush his skin and realized he had had an encounter with a condom.
No more Monaco. But where was he to go? It wasn't long before he found a potential yachties' paradise in a broken half-country called Montenegro. “I didn't even know where Montenegro was,” he says.

Four years ago, at a dinner party in London, he was approached by a friend who told him he should invest in Montenegro, then still attached to Serbia and going nowhere, thanks to the economic sanctions imposed on Serbia and Montenegro in the 1990s, when war was ripping the Western Balkans apart. “I said forget it – it's not even a real country,” Mr. Munk said.

But Mr. Munk soon changed his mind. He called Robert McDougall, Canada's ambassador in Belgrade. “The ambassador said Montenegro is going to be independent and was convinced it would become like Monaco,” Mr. Munk says. “I trusted him.”
Another phone call was made by Mr. Munk's friend Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire and owner of Basic Element, the powerful industrial group that last year invested $1.5-billion (Canadian) in Canada's Magna International auto parts company and bought Montenegro's aluminum smelter, called KAP, the year before. “Oleg made the first phone call to the prime minister [of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic] and opened the door for me,” he says.

Before he knew it, Mr. Munk was flying over the tiny country of 700,000 people in a military helicopter, peering down at potential development sites. And there it was – the Bay of Kotor. “I had never seen a place like this,” he says. “I fell in love with it.”

The bay is a geographical wonder. Lord Byron called it “the most beautiful encounter between the land and the sea.” Its steep, rugged mountains frame a natural harbour that is well shielded from the Adriatic and has about 100 kilometres of coastline. The bay takes the rough shape of a figure eight, with the inner and outer portions pinched in the middle by a narrows.

The inner bay has a delicate ecosystem. It is fed by mountain springs, producing brackish water. It is also home to two perfect medieval towns, Kotor itself and nearby Perast, both ruled by Venice from the 1400s to the late 1700s. Kotor features a UNESCO-protected fortified wall that snakes for four kilometres over its mountain backdrop. Perast is famous for its baroque palaces and churches.

The outer bay has been prized as naval base since the Roman empire. In the Middle Ages, it was a Venetian military outpost. In the late 1800s, the Bay of Kotor became one of the three bases of the Austro-Hungarian navy. After the end of the First World War in 1918, it became part of Yugoslavia. Josip Broz Tito, the country's leader after the Second World War, employed it as the port of the Yugoslav Navy. Later, after passing through the hands of Serbia and then Montenegro, the ships and submarines became idle. The Arsenal base, which covers 24 hectares near the town of Tivat, was rotting away, though it still employed 480 workers when Mr. Munk first saw it.

Where the locals saw decay, Mr. Munk saw a seaside ribbon of yachts, luxury hotels, condos, restaurants, casinos and a golf course – the “next Monaco,” as Mr. Corlette puts it. Mr. Munk convinced the Montenegrin government that turning the Bay of Kotor into an elite tourist destination was the proper strategy – the small country didn't have the infrastructure for mass tourism. Somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 jobs would be created.

Mr. Munk flew in George Nicholson, the chairman of George Nicholson International, the best-known yacht management and brokerage company, to see the Arsenal site early last year. Mr. Nicholson declared it ideal for superyachts. “George measured the docks,” says Mr. Munk. “We went to Kotor and Budva and he said it was like St. Tropez in the 1940s.”

The Montenegrin prime minister, Mr. Djukanovic became a friend – The prime minister and his wife were lunch guests on the Te Manu on the day I interviewed Mr. Munk. A tender was called and Mr. Munk's holding company, Adriatic Marinas, won three consecutive 30-year property leases – effectively ownership – for a relatively small amount of money. In exchange, Adriatic Marinas made commitments to buy out the Arsenal naval workers, pay for the environmental cleanup and the like. Mr. Munk is investing €50-million to €75-million of his own money into the project.

He owns about 54 per cent of Adriatic Marinas. The rest is held by an all-star team of investors. They include Mr. Deripaska; Anthony Munk; Nathaniel Rothschild, the Atticus Capital partner and the man in line to become the fifth Baron Rothschild; Lord Jacob Rothschild, Nathaniel's father; Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire who is chairman of the luxury goods group LVMH; and Sandor Demjan, the chairman of TriGranit, one of the largest property developers in Central and Eastern Europe.

Mr. Munk owns about 18 per cent of TriGranit, where Nathaniel Rothschild is also an investor; the Hungarian company will handle construction at Porto Montenegro. The World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) are sinking small fortunes into local water, sewage, roads and electricity systems.

News of the Porto Montenegro project and the mysterious clan of wealthy investors triggered fear and loathing in the country. “The resistance was huge,” Mr. Munk says. “A lot of the [foreigners] they had been exposed to were rip-off artists.”
About 3,500 Montenegrins took to the streets in Tivat to protest the loss of the Arsenal jobs. “The people were very emotional,” says Dragan Kankaras, 48, the bearded Tivat mayor. “The Arsenal existed for 120 years and it was the biggest employer in the region. People were afraid of change.”

Some Montenegrins suspected the prime minister didn't strike the best deal for the citizens – the government has no direct investment or board governance role in Porto Montenegro, though all the zoning and planning had to be approved by the government. While some admire Mr. Djukanovic as the father of the newly independent Montenegro, others think he is not to be trusted. Last summer Italian prosecutors accused him of conspiring with the Mafia to smuggle cigarettes into the European Union between 1994 and 2002. He denies the charges. He also sued a local newspaper whose editor claims he was beaten up on Mr. Djukanovic's orders.
Montenegro's opposition, led by Nebojsa Medojevic has said he sees the super-rich snapping up the country's prime assets in “colonial” style and has accused the government of corruption in development projects.

The good news for Mr. Munk and his backers is that the Porto Montenegro protests are melting away as the lure of new jobs captures the Montenegrins' imagination and the Munk goodwill machine, which includes scholarships, English lessons and university support, rolls forward.

The Arsenal naval yard, where Porto Montenegro is to be built, is in a sorry state. The remnants of the once proud Yugoslav and Serbian navies await their appointment with the cutting torch.
Submarine lie rusting in the dock. Mr. Munk's small marketing team plans to turn one into a museum with a Cold War flavour. Other subs are being cut up in the yard by sweaty workers in the Montenegrin summer's blast-furnace heat. Two millennia of naval history have come to an inglorious end.

But the vast concrete docks are largely intact. So is a massive crane that will act as a sort of marina beacon. Even though construction has yet to start, it's just possible to get a sense of the future Porto Montenegro. The flat area behind the main docks, right on the water, will be the home of a 150-room Four Seasons hotel and about 250 condo units.

The large swath of property away from the harbour is to become a new city. It will have a conference centre and hotel, a market square where the subs are now being dismantled, an art gallery, a museum, a sports complex and 10,000 square metres of retail space, including a supermarket and a department store. A few kilometres away, near Tivat's airport, which is already jammed with private jets, an 18-hole golf course is to be built. The marina will be in operation in 2010, the Four Seasons a year later.

Sandra Bijelic, an employee in a Tivat real estate office that is doing booming business with Russian clients, says “It will be good for us to have employment for our people, but Tivat and Kotor must have their soul.”

Vesna Macic, 36, a scuba-diving biologist at the University of Montenegro's Institute of Marine Biology, worries that the environmental controls won't be strict enough to prevent oil and chemicals from infiltrating the Bay of Kotor. “If big yachts come here, they have to take on fuel,” she says. “The problem is that they could pollute very easily. And do we have to have a golf course? We don't have enough drinking water in this country. Golf courses take a huge amount of water. So do yachts.”

Mr. Munk and his team say nothing was worse than the dilapidated Arsenal site, with its seabed covered in pollutants from rusted, leaky ships. All of it will be cleaned up, they insist. The yachties will pump vast loads of money into the economy. Jobs will be created. Plus he's having fun. “I don't play bridge and I'm a lousy skier,” he says. “But I have some ability to create and we are creating something wonderful here.”

© The Globe and Mail

Bilderberg 2

For starters, this is a reasonable run-down on Bilderberg, by a BBC journo, and published in BBC News On-Line magazine in 2004. No doubt thing have moved on, but here are the basics of the story:

"Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory - By Jonathan Duffy - BBC News Online Magazine

The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organisation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever.

Given its reputation as perhaps the most powerful organisation in the world, the Bilderberg group doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations.

Telephone inquiries are met with an impersonal female voice - the Dutch equivalent of the BT Callminder woman - reciting back the number and inviting callers to "leave a message after the tone".

Anyone who accidentally dialled the number would probably think they had stumbled on just another residential answer machine.

Leiden in Holland, is the inauspicious base of the Bilderberg group
But behind this ultra-modest façade lies one of the most controversial and hotly-debated alliances of our times.

On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting.

For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues.

What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.

Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted.

The shadowy aura extends further - the anonymous answerphone message, for example; the fact that conference venues are kept secret. The group, which includes luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and former UK chancellor Kenneth Clarke, does not even have a website.

DISCREET AND ELITE
This year Bilderberg has announced a list of attendees
They include BP chief John Browne, US Senator John Edwards, World Bank president James Wolfensohn and Mrs Bill Gates

In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.

In Yugoslavia, leading Serbs have blamed Bilderberg for triggering the war which led to the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the London nail-bomber David Copeland and Osama Bin Laden are all said to have bought into the theory that Bilderberg pulls the strings with which national governments dance.

And while hardline right-wingers and libertarians accuse Bilderberg of being a liberal Zionist plot, leftists such as activist Tony Gosling are equally critical.

A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol, UK.

"My main problem is the secrecy. When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on.

Timothy McVeigh was among those who believed the conspiracy theory
Mr Gosling seizes on a quote from Will Hutton, the British economist and a former Bilderberg delegate, who likened it to the annual WEF gathering where "the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide".

"One of the first places I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling.

But "privacy, rather than secrecy", is key to such a meeting says Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf, who has been invited several times in a non-reporting role.

"The idea that such meetings cannot be held in private is fundamentally totalitarian," he says. "It's not an executive body; no decisions are taken there."

As an up-and-coming statesmen in the 1950s, Denis Healey, who went on to become a Labour chancellor, was one of the four founding members of Bilderberg (which was named after the hotel in Holland where the first meeting was held in 1954).

His response to claims that Bilderberg exerts a shadowy hand on the global tiller is met with characteristic bluntness. "Crap!"

"There's absolutely nothing in it. We never sought to reach a consensus on the big issues at Bilderberg. It's simply a place for discussion," says Lord Healey.

Formed in the spirit of post-war trans-Atlantic co-operation, the idea behind Bilderberg was that future wars could be prevented by bringing power-brokers together in an informal setting away from prying eyes.

"Bilderberg is the most useful international group I ever attended. The confidentiality enabled people to speak honestly without fear of repercussions.

"In my experience the most useful meetings are those when one is free to speak openly and honestly. It's not unusual at all. Cabinet meetings in all countries are held behind closed doors and the minutes are not published."

That activists have seized on Bilderberg is no surprise to Alasdair Spark, an expert in conspiracy theories.

"The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new. For hundreds of years people have believed the world is governed by a cabal of Jews.

"Shouldn't we expect that the rich and powerful organise things in their own interests. It's called capitalism."

Initially, it sound glamorous and mysterious - but then you add the ovweight Mr Kenneth Clarke, and Mr Denis Healey as one of its founding fathers, and it begins to lose some of its shine.

Personally, I've always rather like Healy and Clarke and thought they talked sense, but I don't see them as Lords of the Universe. They have always been politicians, and therefore wage slaves, have never made enormous sums of money through their own brain power, courage, energy and application, and indeed seem the epitome, in spite of the Oxford degree, of the slightly inhibited but hugely respectable lower middle class suburbanites, given to the standard political thinking of one of the two main political parties. No evidence of original or bold thinking there.

More to come on this.

Bilderberg

The Bilderberg Group is an unofficial, invitation-only club of around 130 people, most of whom are persons of influence in the fields of politics, business, and banking, and who meet annually in luxury hotels or resorts around the world.


Meetings are normally in Europe, and once every four years in the US or Canada.


The 2009 Bilderberg meeting was in Athens, from 14 -16 May.

Everyone seems to be sworn to secrecy, press coverage not allowed, altho' special well trusted journos do attend, but keep silent.

Naturally, all this lead to huge conspiracy theories. Is this the master race planning take-over of the world: is it that hoary old rumour that the Jews are at the back of everything and planning to run the word? is it the Illuminati - if they ever existed? the Knights Templars - tho' hang on, aren't they the Illuminati by another name?

More to come on this one.




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The Prince and the Kings in the new playground of the rich

To Home Base this morning to look at mirrors for living room, which is half way through being redecorated. How prosaic is that?

So let's move on swiftly to the rich, a much more fun subject, and follow up on the Lockerbie story I posted on yesterday - tho' now the coverage has moved on to the personalities involved.

So, more on the rich world playground which is in full swing in the Adriatic.
Above is the Hotel Splendid, Becici, the setting for the get- together of the Prince of Darkness and his pals, with further details supplied this morning by the Daily Mail.

"And what a small world it is. In March this year, Prince Andrew went to Montenegro to open the new British embassy there.

During the trip he took time out to be shown round the £500million Porto Montenegro marina which is being developed on the coast near Tivat.

Two of the main investors in the project are Mr Deripaska and his financial adviser Mr Rothschild. Indeed, the former's business interests make him the largest private employer in Montenegro.

Early last year, when he was still EU Trade Commissioner and not yet ennobled, Peter Mandelson announced that he had secured a bilateral agreement with the tiny Adriatic nation.

'Today's signature is an important milestone,' he declared at the time. Montenegro's progress toward becoming a reliable world trading partner had been ' remarkable'. Mr Deripaska must have been delighted.

It later emerged that during Lord Mandelson's tenure as commissioner, there had also been two cuts in EU aluminium import tariffs, which has benefitted Mr Deripaska's company Rusal - the EU's biggest importer of the raw metal - by tens of millions of pounds a year.

In June this year what was described as the most lavish celebration ever held in the Adriatic took place near the Tivat marina.

Saif Gaddafi had chosen the Splendid hotel in Becici as the location for his 37th birthday party. Among the guests, who flew in on a fleet of a dozen or more private jets, were Prince Albert of Monaco, Mr Deripaska and Mr Rothschild.

Saif is said to be interested in investing in Montenegro. Presumably he and Mr Deripaska had plenty to talk about - the Russian also controls the oil company Russneft and Libya is looking for foreign investors in the energy industry. Business and pleasure combined in one ostentatious display. "

In the comments, a writer asks an intriguing little question: All Bilderberg members . . . ?

You don't know what Bilderberg is? Watch and learn, reader.

The Prince of Darkness, Montenegro and Lockerbie

Left is Porto Montenegro

I am in the final stages of finishing my second book, hence this blog has been neglected. But from now on, tho' I may not always have the time to write it up from the personal daily perspective, I'll try at least to post anything that is of particular interest to me in the news of the day.

Those of you who know my Money blog (also 'resting' whilst I bring my book to a close), will expect the items selected to in one way or another concern my favourite subject, that mysterious and enchanted world of the very rich.

And enchanted so describes that world, for to be enchanted is to be subject to magical influences, to be bewitched, to be put under a magical spell - and all those things come about when you enter the world of the rich, for its high voltage air crackles with magic.

As the cliched quote says "The rich are different." Most people say that comes from Scott Fitzgerald, but what he actually said was: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me," and the famous misquote actually comes from Hemingway.

Personally I like "The rich are different, they pay less taxes." It is reminiscent of that other lovely 'rich' quote, courtesy of J. Paul Getty - "The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."

So, here is the Sunday Telegraph debating the mystery of the release of the Lockerbie bomber, and the involvement therein of The Prince of Darkness , as he wheels and deals among his delightfully rich friends:

"Mandelson, his wealthy friends and the Libyan connection"

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secreatry, is facing growing questions over his links with Saif Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi, following the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi.

In a destination that developers predict will soon make the tax haven of Monaco look "second rate", it was described as the most glamorous party ever seen in the Adriatic.

As the champagne flowed, fireworks lit up the night sky, a dozen private Lear jets were parked on a nearby runway and giant yachts were moored offshore.

The fabulously wealthy guests at the appropriately-named Splendid Hotel included Prince Albert of Monaco and Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate.

Also at the resort were Oleg Deripaska, the Russian entrepreneur, and Nat Rothschild, the British financier - both close allies of Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary. The billionaires held a business meeting the following morning.

And who hosted the 37th birthday party in June in one of the trendiest locations in Montenegro – a newly-independent nation whose cause Lord Mandelson has repeatedly championed?

The unlikely host – hundreds of miles from his African homeland – was Saif Gadaffi, the son of the Libyan leader, who, it emerged last week, has met Lord Mandelson twice in the past four months.

At at least one of those meetings, the fate of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, was discussed.

In October 2008, just days after his return to the Cabinet to shore up Gordon Brown's ailing leadership, Lord Mandelson admitted that his links to Mr Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch, stretched back years more than he had earlier admitted.

Lord Mandelson, who denies acting improperly or trying to influence Mr MacAskill's decision, most recently met Mr Gaddafi "fleetingly" at the Rothschild's family's Greek £30 million estate on Corfu – just a week before it emerged that Megrahi was set to be freed because he is suffering from aggressive and terminal prostate cancer.

According to Lord Mandelson's spokesman, the Business Secretary also met the met the man tipped to be the next leader of Libya at an official engagement in London in May this year.

Less than a decade ago Libya was a pariah nation that was not only blamed for Lockerbie but also had a long history of sponsoring international terrorism.

Saif Gadaffi, 37, the favoured of Colonel Gadaffi's seven sons, is an architect, businessman and politician, who was educated at the London School of Economics.

In recent years Mr Gadaffi has forged a firm friendship with Mr Deripaska and Mr Rothschild, Lord Mandelson's friends.

Mr Rothschild hosted a party Mr Gaddafi in New York late last year. More recently, Mr Gadaffi has developed personal links with the Business Secretary himself.

Indeed, Lord Mandelson's spokesman said this weekend that he hopes to see more of the Libyan politician in the coming months.


What is not known is the extent of the personal business interests that Mr Gaddafi, who has a penchant for pet tigers, now has in Montenegro, a nation that Lord Mandelson has supported during its three years since gaining independence.

Libya has significant business links in Montenegro, and judging from his recent birthday party, Mr Gaddafi is clearly quite a "player" in the country.

Mr Deripaska and Mr Rothschild have invested heavily in the £500 million-plus Porto Montenegro project to make the country the "premier marina destination in the Mediterranean".

Lord Mandelson, as EU Trade Commissioner, championed Montenegro's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) saying last year: "Montenegro has made remarkable progress in preparing for WTO entry.... The EU is a strong supporter of Montenegro's entry into the WTO, and is proud to be the first partner to conclude bilateral accession talks."

But, crucially, did Lord Mandelson, who in 2006 ended EU trade tariffs on aluminium thereby hugely benefiting Mr Deripaska's business interests, lobby for Mr Megrahi's release?"