![]() ![]() In many ways they are better even than cash. ![]() It was a huge humanitarian crisis that destabilized huge regions.”Īs a compact, stable, and transferable store of value, diamonds offer enormous advantages to smugglers, money launderers, and tax evaders. “Tens of thousands died in Sierra Leone, Congo, and elsewhere. “Half a million died in the Angolan civil war,” Smillie said of wars fueled by blood diamonds. “Diamonds are a great way to launder money, to hide money, to evade taxes, and all the rest,” said Ian Smillie, a cofounder of the Kimberley Process, a United Nations effort to stamp out what are often called blood diamonds or conflict diamonds - gems that are exploited to finance wars. Secretive, clannish, it still often operates on cash and a handshake. Diamond trade and HSBCĪ legal dealer weighing diamonds in Koidu, Sierra Leone Image: Photo: AP The diamond trade, whose world center is Antwerp, Belgium’s largest city, retains vestiges of ancient ways of commerce that make it highly susceptible to black market activity. Analysis of the Swiss bank’s files shows that it eagerly accommodated almost 2,000 diamond professionals, looking past unsavory associates, criminal investigations and the dismal reputation of the diamond industry generally. federal court in 2011.ĭaleyot’s relationship with HSBC was hardly unique for a diamond industry tycoon. And the New York-based diamond firm Lazare Kaplan International, a former business partner, alleges that Daleyot participated in a criminal conspiracy to defraud it of $135 million by laundering diamond proceeds, largely through his HSBC accounts, which were also the source of $20 million in bribes paid to bankers at Antwerp Diamond Bank, according to a civil lawsuit filed by Lazare in U.S. Now Daleyot is reportedly under investigation by Belgian authorities for money laundering and tax evasion, though he has not been charged. Visiting Geneva to buy a $41.5 million private jet, he invited his bankers to the airport to show it off, according to secret HSBC files obtained by the French newspaper Le Monde and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He’d recently obtained a tax ruling from Israel allowing him to pay just 5 percent in taxes on $85 million in earnings. ![]() With $886 million reported in revenue the previous year, Daleyot informed his bankers that he projected topping that amount in the year ahead with $1 billion. In the spring of 2005, Erez Daleyot, a Belgian-Israeli diamond tycoon with some dubious connections, paid a visit to his Swiss bankers at HSBC Private Bank, where he would soon have up to $38.5 million in accounts tied to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.īusiness was good. Examining how responsibility for the repair of the system is distributed and valued, both within the hospital and in terms of broader structures of health funding and policy, we argue, is essential to developing more sustainable systems for repair.Belgium, center of the world diamond trade, charges HSBC’s Swiss Private Bank with fraud many dealers under investigation around the world We argue that such interventions depend on the individualisation of responsibility for ‘making the system work’ and are best conceptualised as acts of temporary repair and care for the health system itself. Through the in-depth analysis of a single patient pathway through the hospital, we show how coordination work depends on frequent small acts of intervention and improvisation by multiple people across the pathway, including doctors, managers, nurses, patients and their relatives. In this paper, which is based on ethnographic research in a public referral hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, conducted between October 2018 and September 2019, we adopt a patient pathway approach to examine moments of breakdown and repair in the coordination of patient care. Central to the workings of a hospital are the technical and bureaucratic systems that ensure the effective coordination of information and biological materials of patients across time and space. ![]()
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