9/11:Thermite Still Best Explanation For WTC Collapse,Workers Illnesses,
I don't doubt the veracity of those witnesses who heard explosions at the base of the WTC on September 11,2001,but just like the planes that may or not have been able to have penetrated the steel structure that neither would have been likely to cause a collapse and Israelis dancing in celebration who were captured and then released by our corrupt Israeli controlled U.S. government as well as Israeli company ICTS International who controlled Lgan Airport Boston and allowed those planes 11 and 175 to take off that day with allged 9/11 Al Qaeda terrorists on board yet with no video surveillence cameras to prove it -Israel should be investigated as well as Larry Silverstein's and Israeli Australian partner Frank Lowy who both made windfall profits from their insurance scam after the fact.
Still Menachem Atzmon and Shin Beit agents who guarded Logan on 9/11 and who have direct reationship to Benjamin Netanyahu and who gained control and access through stock fraud that allowed them to buy Hunleigh airport security rent-a-cops and the contract to guard the airport through stock fraud,shuld have been invesigated just like the 'dancing Israelis' of Mossad and their moving van company who were arrested that day and then released in NJ and NYC.THEY ARE THE ONES NO DOUBT WHO DONALD TRUMP 'MISTOOK' FOR ARABS.
However those explosions heard by witnesses to the event may well have been necessary to cause the buildings to fall exactly in the uniform manner one would see in any controlled demolition and Larry Silverstein himself used the term 'pull it'' of a controlled demolition to describe the demolition of Building 7,it is probable that conventioonal demolition explosions were used to engender the type of collapse observed.
Larry Silverstein, who made billions of dollars from the attacks ... Haaretz reported that he was such good friends with Benjamin Netanyahu that he spoke with him on the phone every Sunday. ... Frank Lowy was not at the WTC on 9/11.
Christopher Bollyn on the Cause of the High Mortality Among the First Responders URL Link: www.youtube.com/watch
Thousands of first responders and others who worked on or near "the pile" of the destroyed World Trade Center are very sick and dying, as this current news story points out:
What is the cause of the extremely high mortality rate among the firemen, policemen, and others who worked on or near "the pile"? This is the crucial question that Jon Stewart and others in the controlled media have ignored since September 2001.
WHY DO THEY IGNORE IT?
Why does the controlled media ignore the obvious cause of the rare cancers and other systemic diseases that have killed so many 9/11 first responders?
The reason why the controlled media - and Jon Stewart - avoid discussing the cause of the rare cancers and other diseases that have killed so many of New York's finest is because they are trying to protect the official myth of what happened on 9/11 -- and its utterly false explanation of what brought down the Twin Towers.
I understand that many people like Jon Stewart because he made them laugh as a comedian on the long-running Daily Show, which he hosted. Stewart is, however, also on the board of directors of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, a tax-free organization dedicated to supporting and teaching the false account of what happened on 9/11 -- and that is not so funny, to say the least.
Stewart and the controlled media who support the official myth of 9/11 will not go near the subject of what has caused the high mortality among the first responders because understanding the cause of the disease also blows the official 9/11 myth to smithereens, just like the Twin Towers.
Because this subject is so important, and because there is so much confusion about it, I need to be very clear in my explanation. One person asked me if there were many sick first responders from the Pentagon site, which is a good question.
I have not heard about any sick first responders from the Pentagon, although there may be some, and that is because the two sites were very different. The Pentagon site was, of course, much smaller and involved fewer responders, but more importantly, the fire was quickly put out at the Pentagon whereas the "fires" burned beneath the WTC rubble for more than three months.
A bluish smoke, laden with toxic ultra-fine particles, rose from the pile for three months after 9/11.
This is the key: understanding that these "fires" raged for more than three months - beneath the rubble - and that the smoke that was produced by these "fires" was extremely toxic exposes the falseness of the official explanation of what brought down the towers.
These "fires" were not normal fires, but extremely hot chemical reactions that burned beneath the rubble despite being continuously doused with water. We know that these hot-spots were hotter than boiling iron because the smoke that they produced contained nano-size particles of iron and other elements. This was the subject of one of my key research articles about 9/11: "Why Did Iron Boil beneath the Rubble?"
The smoke from "the pile" was extremely toxic because it contained "unprecedented amounts" of extremely small (i.e. nano-size) particles. Because these particles are so small they are able to pass through the protective barriers in the body until they wind up in the nucleus of the human cell, where they do immense damage to our health.
The first responders working on the pile did not have respirators.
The first responders worked on the smoking pile without respirators, which was "like working in the stack of an incinerator," as professor Thomas Cahill told me:
The conditions were "brutal" for people working at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in adjacent buildings, Cahill, a professor emeritus of physics and atmospheric science, said. "It was like they were working inside the stack of an incinerator," he said. "The debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together the components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least 6 weeks," he said.The DELTA Group's work revealed the presence of extremely small metallic aerosols in unprecedented amounts in the plumes coming from the burning WTC rubble. Most of the particles in these plumes were in the category of the smallest ultra-fine and nano-particles: from 0.26 to 0.09 microns. The extraordinarily high level of ultra-fine aerosols was one of the most unusual aspects of the data, Cahill said. "Ultra-fine particles require extremely high temperatures," Cahill said, "namely the boiling point of the metal."- Why Did Iron Boil beneath the Rubble? Bollyn, May 2006
The people, like Jon Stewart, who are involved in the 9/11 cover-up cannot discuss the peculiar toxicity of the smoke that has sickened and killed so many people in New York because it would raise questions about what produced this deadly smoke. Pray tell, why did iron boil beneath the rubble? This subject simply cannot be discussed by those protecting the official myth because it demolishes their explanation of what brought down the towers on 9/11.
This is why I have spent so much time trying to explain this matter. It is an urgent matter of public health and scientific integrity, and it completely exposes the pack of lies we have been told about what caused the destruction of the World Trade Center, and that is of the utmost importance.
Support Bollyn's work on Patreon
Recommended reading:
"Robert Oswain R.I.P. - NYPD Victim of Toxic WTC Smoke," Bollyn.com, May 18, 2010
Jon Stewart and the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund – Is it all a show?
"Accountability doesn’t appear to be something that occurs in this chamber… I'm sorry if I sound angry and undiplomatic, but I am angry, and you should be too." – Jon Stewart before the House Judiciary Committee, June 11, 2019
Jon Stewart (born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) became famous as the television comedian who hosted a satirical news program, called The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Recently, Stewart has been in the news speaking before the House Judiciary Committee to discuss reauthorizing the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. At one point Stewart lashed out at the congressmen telling them: "You should be ashamed of yourselves."
His televised performance before the committee is clearly a dishonest effort by Stewart to claim the moral high ground in the sordid saga of 9/11.
Why do I say Stewart is being dishonest?
It is dishonest because the primary cause of the cancers and mortality among the first responders, the ultra-fine particles in the smoke that rose from the pile, is being ignored. The smoke that the first responders were exposed to for the first three months on the pile was laden with unprecedented amounts of toxic ultra-fine particles (i.e. nano-particles).
Why are the ultra-fine particles in the smoke being ignored by Stewart?
Stewart is not ignoring the extremely toxic nature of the smoke because he doesn't understand the toxicity of ultra-fine particles. That is easy to understand. Ultra-fine particles are particulate matter of nanoscale size (less than 0.1 of a micron in diameter). These extremely small particles are dangerous to our health because of their size, which allows them to pass through the body until they wind up getting lodged in the nucleus of the human cell where they wreak havoc on the human system.
If it is so simple to grasp the toxic nature of the smoke, why is it not being discussed?
Jon Stewart and the other clowns involved in the 9/11 cover-up cannot address the peculiar toxicity of the smoke that rose from the pile because that would require an explanation that they cannot face.
As I explained in my article from May 2006 entitled, "Why Did Iron Boil beneath the Rubble?":
The DELTA Group's work revealed the presence of extremely small metallic aerosols in unprecedented amounts in the plumes coming from the burning WTC rubble. Most of the particles in these plumes were in the category of the smallest ultra-fine and nano-particles: from 0.26 to 0.09 microns. The extraordinarily high level of ultra-fine aerosols was one of the most unusual aspects of the data, [Dr. Thomas] Cahill said. "Ultra-fine particles require extremely high temperatures," Cahill said, "namely the boiling point of the metal."
Stewart and others involved in the cover-up ignore the toxic nature of the smoke because it came from hot-spots hotter than boiling iron, and they don't want to talk about what was creating these extremely hot reactions under the pile.
Why do I say that Jon Stewart is part of the cover-up?
Stewart is on the board of directors of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which is an institution to promote the official myth of what happened on 9/11. The chairman of the board of this institution of propaganda is the former mayor, Michael Bloomberg. If Stewart were truly serious about helping those afflicted by the toxic smoke he would spare us the crocodile tears and start asking the questions that need to be heard, like what made so many first responders so sick? But then, if Stewart were serious about 9/11 he would focus his attention on who did it and why it was done.
Sandy Hook Newtown CT Shooter's Car Traced To Dane County Wi Sheriff's Dept.
Paradoxical that Dane County Wisconsin is the very county in Wisconsin where only a few dats ago professor emeritus and ex Marine James Fetzer who alleges Sandy Hook was-is a government conspiracy was recently railroaded by a Judge Remington that allowed a Jewish Zionist allegedly named Leonard or Lenny Pozner to persue a $ one million award against him for claiming that a death certificate provided by Lenny Pozner himself was not an original with proper government authentication which appears to be the case.Leonard Pozneror and his attorney Zimmerman,(related to Bob Dylan ?,ha), then presented in court another death certificate that was authenticated by the state of Conneticut and thus won the case through decption.Whether his son and others died at the hands of alleged autistic Adam Lanza,ho may if he existed not been capable of shooting or driving due to his alleged medical condition,the legal system was simply used for an ongoing cover up to censor other very crucial facts that the main stream media helped them cover up such as the strange fact that even the CIA who until 9/11 were barred fromoperating in the U.S. WERE AT THE SCENE OF THE ALLEGED XRIME OR GOVERNMENT DRILL IMMEDIATELY IF NOT BEFORE THE ALLEGED SHOOTING EVEN TOOKPLACE ! And the witness himself is a friend of CNN'S WOLF BLITER NAMED RABBI PRAVER !
Sep 5, 2018 - We were told Adam drove his mother's 2010 Black Honda Civic to ... THE SANDY HOOK KILLER'S CAR IS LICENSED TO DANE COUNTY SHERIFF DEPT, WI ... on the day of the shooting by the alleged shooter, Adam Lanza.
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5 days ago - A Dane County, Wis., judge on Monday found that a longtime conspiracy ... James Fetzer, of Oregon, Wis., and Mike Palecek, of Saginaw, edited ... Died at Sandy Hook,” which alleges Leonard Pozner circulated a fraudulent ...
The Sandy Hook event, now almost six years later, has produced more questions than answers. One of those unanswered questions concern the car brought to the school on the day of the shooting by the alleged shooter, Adam Lanza. We were told Adam drove his mother’s 2010 Black Honda Civic to the scene before he walked into the Sandy Hook Elementary school and killed 20 children and 6 adults.
The media showed the car reported by Connecticut State police and was searched for weapons and clearly has the license plate of CT 872-YEO. The official released Sandy Hook Report issued by the State of CT also has their video CDMCS Vehicle Processing of a 2010 Honda Civic with the same license plate.
After further research, it appears that Nancy Lanza’s black 2010 Honda Civic can be found in Newtown, CT tax records along with a 2009 BMW and 2006 Toyota Corolla. However, the car in question is shown to have a license plate listed as Connecticut 872-YEO. Initial reports claimed the car was registered to a “Christopher Rodia”, but that information was debunked when background checks on Rodia indicated that he did not own a 2010 Honda Civic and had an alibi for the morning of the shooting.
However, other questions remain and need to be answered. First, the license plate, when traced via through the DMV, turns out to be owned by the Dane County Sheriff’s Department in Madison, WI. The CT license plate also returns search results for a 2010 Ford Silver Crown Vic Police Interceptor, issued, 03/29/2012, which was prior to the Sandy Hook shooting. Its listed activity is “PTT” and Registration Type is for “GOV” use. The VIN number for this vehicle is 2FABP7BV4AX134170. Separate databases yield conflicting results for the same license plate considering the owner of is Dane County Sheriff’s Department but also listed as a 2010 Honda Civic and the license plate is listed as a police interceptor.
So how does a CT plate, registered as a police interceptor that is owned by the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, WI end up on a 2010 Honda Civic, shown as the vehicle the alleged shooter brought to the scene that day? Shouldn’t the owner (Nancy Lanza) be the registered owner of the license plate?What more direct and obvious proof could we have that law enforcement was in on the scam? Does anyone think they were unable to track the license plate on the car of an alleged mass murderer?
Upon researching the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, I discovered they play an important role in Active Shooter Training and has their own training academy. According to their 2012 Annual Report,
“The Dane County Sheriff’s Office Special Events Team (SET) has been successfully deployed to large gatherings, protests, and disturbances since the 1960’s. SET is comprised of sixty-four members and utilizes a mini-team model. This model facilitates communication and addresses issues of consistency and accountability. Given the target rich environment of large crowds, this structure provides for an easy transition to an active shooter scenario or other rapidly evolving threats. In 2012, The Dane County Special Events Team participated in several deployments including visits by President Obama to the University of Wisconsin campus in October and downtown Madison in November.”
Dane County Sheriff David Mahoney, Democrat, recently met with you, Mr. President, in a roundtable discussion in the Roosevelt Room during in a week-long conference. Your focus was on building the wall to control migration into the nation (as it should have been), while Mahoney wants more gun control, more mental health agenda and to continue his active shooter charade. Had you have known, you might have asked why the car at the Sandy Hook shooting is registered with his own department.
Another student of Sandy Hook has discovered the American-Israel Education Foundation conducted a conference on “Law Enforcement to Israel” (10-16 April 2011), funded by AIPAC, two of the participants of which were Sheriff David Mahoney from Dane County and Captain Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Police Department, which recently featured its own spectacular shooting event. We have a cozy group of law enforcement officers tied to Israel, Sandy Hook and Las Vegas, too.
NICKEL:RUSSIAN-UKRANIAN ISRAELIS RAPE GUATEMALA MAYA AGAIN
TRUMP LIKES IT THAT WAY.
I remember the mine at El Estor on the shores of of Lago Isabel for many decades,iy was considered Canadian but was probably international Jewish controlled all along.It appears the Bronstein's are just part of the internatuonal Elders of Zion that the Jewish controlled media assures us is a myth.And of course Jes are not Jews at all but white people from Russia and East European origen.Isreal prpvided the Galil rifles whose bullets were in everybody dead body shot by Israeli controled Guatemala military in the 1980's.
The company was co-founded by Aleksandr Bronstein, an Estonian,(Jewish Zionist), entrepreneur, and his son Daniel, who is a German citizen.
Mar 18, 2010 - Arkady Gaydamak, President of the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities ... Farida Gainullina, Russian Federation State Duma Labor and Social ... But the well-known oligarch, Alexander Bronstein who owned the company ... has been one of the captains of domestic business - Alexander Bronstein.....Alexander Bronstein is a St. Petersburg citizen. He was born in Leningrad. He studied in Estonia. In 1980 Alexander worked in the Ministry of Forestry and Conservation of the Estonian SSR. From 1988 to 1998 he held leading positions at JV ?Estland-West?, Handels GmbH, Shanton International LTD, and Raznoimport Trading (UK) LTD......
Mar 18, 2010 - Arkady Gaydamak, President of the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities ... Farida Gainullina, Russian Federation State Duma Labor and Social ... But the well-known oligarch, Alexander Bronstein who owned the company ... has been one of the captains of domestic business - Alexander Bronstein.
Solway reports its headquarters are in Larnaca, Cyprus. The website gives a telephone number which is not answered, and an email address which bounces. Cyprus company registrations reveal the Cyprus entity is owned by an entity registered elsewhere, but not identified. Russian press reports claim that one of the prominent shareholders is Boris Birshtein, a Russian-speaker with a controversial business record. He emigrated in the Soviet period, and holds Canadian and possibly Israeli citizenship. He lists his home office in Toronto, but doesn’t respond to questions there.
Left: Birshtein with Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; right: Birshtein with former Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien
A group of fishermen from an Indigenous community in Guatemala demanded to know more about the environmental impact of a ferronickel mine established on their ancestral land. One of them was killed, and a local reporter was criminalized for covering the story.
Forbidden Stories, an international consortium of 40 journalists publishing in 30 media organizations around the world, joined forces to continue the reporter’s work. This is part of the “Green Blood” series, a project pursuing stories of journalists who have been threatened, jailed or killed while investigating environmental issues.
If it were not for a journalist taking pictures that day, some might claim that it is unclear how Carlos Maaz’s last moments unfolded. There was a cloud of tear gas, the chaos of an improvised protest, the echo of bullets and rocks flying through the crowd.
In one photograph, he is seen standing in the middle of the road among protesters, his hands at his side, holding no weapon. In a photo taken one minute later, the body of the fisherman is lying on the pavement and a police officer, recoiled in the back of a pickup truck, gun drawn, is aiming toward the camera.
For a long time, the series of photographs was the only concrete piece of evidence of what happened that day.
According to his wife, Maaz’s body was left there for half a day before villagers, realizing authorities would not come to move the body, picked him up themselves and buried him.
Carlos Maaz was a member of the Maya Q’eqchi’ community in Guatemala, an Indigenous group with an attachment to the land. He was an artisanal fisherman, worried about suspected contamination of the lake that was his livelihood. He was also a father and a husband.
“He provided for us and took care of us,” says his widow, Cristina Maaz Pop. “When he was murdered, I didn’t even think about being happy. Since that day I don’t feel at home anymore. And now there is no one to help me.”
The company fishermen blame for their worry is Solway, a Swiss group originally operating in Russia with a holding company in Malta. It arrived in El Estor — a remote municipality hidden in the middle of mountains and hills — in 2011 to take over a ferronickel mine named the Fenix Project, selling the alloy of iron and nickel internationally to various steel manufacturing companies.
After Maaz’s death, the police immediately held a press conference and denied that anyone had died during the protest. This denial was simply a lie, according to Carlos Choc, a journalist with the Maya news website Prensa Comunitaria, who had taken the photo of Maaz’s lifeless body. The community website had just started a yearlong project covering the social and environmental impact of the mine. For a long time, the reporting project stopped there, that day. The investigation into Maaz’s death was at a standstill while authorities went as far as to open a criminal case against Choc.....
The day he died, Carlos Maaz was participating in a protest with a group of fishermen. The source of their concern was a red slick that had appeared in March 2017 on Lake Izabal, Guatemala’s largest lake, that they attributed to the ferronickel mine.
They asked for an environmental study. A month later, a governmental body took samples of water and concluded an aquatic weed was to blame for the colour of the lake.
It was caused by the invasive water plant hydrilla, said Environment Minister Alfonso Alonzo, “which is red, the red spot is part of the ecosystem of the lake. That hydril grew, because of the water that is contaminated by bacteria, because of the lack of wastewater treatment plants in the Polochic River.”
Yet experts we consulted reach a different conclusion.
“All the results of the existing analyses show clear evidence of elements characteristic of mining activities,” said Lucas Barreto Correa, a Brazilian biologist specializing in water pollution. “There are inconsistencies in the official statements, and more consolidated government information is needed regarding the pollution present in the lake.”
During a visit of the mine by Forbidden Stories reporters, Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN) — the company that operates the mine — categorically denied doing any harm to the environment.
“It doesn’t hurt the lake because, in fact, both [the metal processing facility] and CGN have environmental monitoring programs,” said Carlos Fernandez, the director of a nature reserve managed by the mine. “We have [International Organization for Standardization] certifications, commitments to environmental impact studies authorized by the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and those commitments are a very big responsibility that we as a company are fulfilling.”
The parent company Solway said the levels of pollution had not changed since the plant’s operation started.
The fishermen do not believe that and claim that the suspected contamination was affecting them significantly.
“We won’t be able to make a living from fish if they continue to pollute our water,” said Alfredo Maquin, one of the fishermen. “But what are we going to live on, what are we going to give to our children? Where are we going to work?”
After outcry from the community, the Ministry of the Environment announced on very short notice that a meeting would be held 60 kilometres away to address their concerns, according to Father Ernesto Rueda Moreno, a priest who was the local point of contact for authorities.
Yet there were rumours that criminal proceedings had been opened against them for blocking the passage of the trucks from the mine a few weeks before. “The fishermen feared that they would be arrested,” remembers Father Ernesto.
When the fishermen met at dawn on May 27, 2017, to decide whether to go to the meeting, they felt Guatemalan authorities had abandoned them. Their response was to organize a blockade. It was not their first one, and, as it turns out, the police were already on their way. When the fishermen started to throw rocks, police answered with bullets. An hour and a half later, Maaz lay bleeding and dead on the ground, shot by a police officer in the chest.
Two years and a ballistics report later, Alonzo still denies there was a death. When journalists from Expresso (Portugal) and Le Monde (France) confronted the environment minister in his office in Guatemala City, he kept circling back to a technicality.
“No investigation was made, no investigation could be made, no public prosecutor or anyone from the state officially entered to verify whether that person had died,” he said.
As a result, no one has been held accountable for Carlos Maaz’s murder. Instead, criminal charges have been laid against fishermen and journalists. Arrest warrants issued in August 2017 accused seven of them of “threats,” “incitement to commit crimes” and “illicit association.”
The fishermen were initially legally prosecuted over an earlier demonstration during which they closed a road in El Estor and were charged with detaining mine employees in a car. Choc and his colleague Jerson Xitumul were added to the case at a later stage.
“We believe that the facts presented by the company as an accusation were not sufficient to justify an arrest warrant,” said Choc’s lawyer. “From what we have analyzed in the file, we have seen that it is based on identifications made by the lawyer of the company who was not present at the time of the facts.”
According to Jose Felipe Baquiax, a judge who presides over the criminal chamber of the Guatemalan Court, the types of charges filed against the fishermen and the journalists are usually intended for organized crime, not protesters.
For the two reporters from Prensa Comunitaria, these charges meant the threat of arrest. Jerson Xitumul spent a month in one of the most dangerous jails of the country before being allowed to return home under house arrest. In July 2018, all charges were dropped against him, but he decided to quit journalism.
When Choc saw what had happened to his colleague, he decided to hide. “I had to live clandestinely,” he remembers. “All my heart is in my town, my passion for my journalism work in El Estor, but there were moments when I did despair.” During that time, Choc was separated from his children and had to sell most of what he owned as he could no longer work.
Choc started working in journalism 12 years ago and joined Prensa Comunitaria in December 2016. Prensa Comunitaria is a Maya news agency in Guatemala whose goal is to “document the voice of the community and their different struggles.”
Choc describes his job as simply “telling the truth.” His passion for journalism dates back to his teenage years. “When I was 15 years old, I remember that my father really liked to listen to soccer,” he recalls, smiling. “So I remember when he put on the radio, I sometimes liked to narrate the game. That’s where my work as a journalist started. Then I got to know a little more, and then I also discovered the need that there is in our town to be able to inform on the reality of things.”
Tensions between Maya Q’eqchi communities, authorities and the mine have grown for decades. In El Estor, the ferronickel mining operation cut down the region’s giant green lung, the forest. From the sky you can now see an orange stain spreading where trees once stood; buildings and pipes covered in ore dust.
The original expropriations necessary to establish the mine triggered accusations that police and mine security forces had committed rapes and murders in 2007 and 2009. Back then, the mine was owned by a Canadian company, Skye Resources, before it was bought by another Canadian company, Hudbay, which eventually sold it to Solway.
Hudbay is currently facing a lawsuit in Ontario brought by the family of another activist, Adolfo Ich Chaman, who was killed at the El Estor mine in 2009.
The Russians replaced the Canadians in 2011, but the operating company remains CGN, a company whose industrial safety has been questioned repeatedly. In 2016, a boiler explosion killed five workers.
“Many of us warned them that this boiler was dangerous, and they ignored it,” explained Manuel Ramos Ochoa, a former employee. “They are interested in producing, producing, producing … They don’t care about anyone’s life!”
The widow of one of the workers killed in the accident tells a similar story. She wishes to stay anonymous out of fear that, if she speaks out, the company might take away financial compensation she receives as a result of her husband’s death.
“When he died, they continued working,” she says. Her husband had warned several times about problems with the boiler up until the fatal day of the explosion. “Their boss said that it didn’t matter, that he must keep working, that nothing was going to happen. He even said that there were more dead in his country and that was nothing, that they were used to losing people.”
In a statement the chairman of the board of Solway, Dan Bronstein, confirmed that on the morning of August 13, 2016, the day the boiler exploded, problems had occurred in a temporary waste storage unit auxiliary to the boiler.
“The thermal power plant’s personnel detected that the wall of the hopper had worn out,” he said.
But “according to the design documentation for the boiler of that type, this type of deviation does not require stopping work,” he said of the decision not to shut down.
He added that the company is replacing the damaged boiler with one from a different manufacturer and that another boiler, identical to the one that exploded, has been shut down. Experts hired by the operating company and a government investigation were unable to establish the cause of the explosion, he said.
Outside of the mine, worries about its environmental impact have been growing. Although there isn’t definitive proof that environmental concerns raised by fishermen and others were caused by the mining operations, there is evidence of mounting environmental damage. Villagers reported seeing red smoke coming out of the mine at night.
“At night, they remove the filters, when they are processing their products,” said Ochoa. “They think that people don’t see it, and in the end, nobody says anything about it.”
A mine spokesperson denied their processing plant ever emitted red fumes at night, despite photographic evidence to the contrary.
Forbidden Stories tested the quality of the air over a month using an environmental sensor. The results show peak concentrations of coarse particulate matter six times higher that hourly exposure recommendations by the World Health Organization.
“These are the levels that can be measured in China during major pollution episodes,” said atmospheric scientist Boris Quennehen.
In a statement, Solway said that “excessive concentrations of [fine particles] in communities are associated with sources unrelated to the plant: road dust, waste incineration in fields and wood used for cooking.”
“We are worried because that has a long-term impact,” says Anibal Coti, the director of a medical centre in El Estor. “There are people who are reported with bronchial, asthma problems, bronchitis, pneumonia.”
Confronted with these findings by reporters from Le Monde and Expresso during a visit to the mine in April, Maynor Alvarez, CGN’s manager for community affairs, simply answered: “Monitoring is carried out, not only for water: water, dust, noise. And the monitoring is carried out periodically according to what the law orders and is signed. We have faith, I as Pronico, I as authority, I as community, we have faith in this monitoring.”
As for the government, villagers feel that it has largely ignored their concerns.
“Governments never really think about the Indigenous people,” said Cristobal Pop, the leader of the fishermen’s association. “What matters to them are only interests, where there is money with the companies, which can give them good profits, regardless of the life of the people, of the peasants, of the Indigenous.”
After spending a year and a half in hiding, journalist Carlos Choc was finally able to see a judge in January and succeeded in avoiding pretrial detention. He is now awaiting a hearing on his case.
“I never thought, never in my life I thought during the 12 years that I worked as a journalist, that someday I would go through this because of my job,” he said. “I know the false accusations are going to end. And when that’s over, I don’t want to cry.”
The opencast Fenix mine belongs to the Bronstein family and is run by their Swiss-based Solway group. Solway benefits from Guatemala’s low nickel royalty rate, which is calculated at just 1% of all the revenues made from selling the unrefined ore it digs out of the ground. Recent proposals to increase rates to 15% were not implemented.
Solway’s extraction business, Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN), digs the ore out of the ground. Its sister company, Pronico, also owned by Solway, operates a refinery at the Fenix site, and after buying the ore from CGN, turns it into ferronickel.
CGN is the company that pays the compulsory royalty tax. The price at which it sells to Pronico determines its revenues, and therefore how much the Guatemalan treasury receives...........
An analysis of Solway’s filings with the country’s mining ministry helps to explain why its contribution is so low.
What to do if you are a Russian mining company with a billion dollars’ worth of asset exposure securing large debts, and your chain of production is struck at start and finish by corruption scandals, international litigation, popular protest, collapse of government authority, and homicidal violence? The solution is to pretend to your bankers you aren’t Russian — and privately beg the Kremlin for help.
That is what the Solway Group of companies has been doing at its nickel mine in central Guatemala, and at its ferronickel refinery in southeast Ukraine. Asked about Solway’s Russian roots by a Ukrainian reporter last month, Solway’s chief executive Daniel Bronstein replied that “Solway Investment Group is a Cyprus-based international industrial group with a 100% EU capital and operational offices in Luxemburg, Switzerland and Estonia.”
At almost the same time, a Russian source in Guatemala City said the Russian Ambassador, Nikolai Babich, had been to see the President of Guatemala, Otto Molina, to ask for his intervention on behalf of the mine’s Russian management and the Solway owners.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (below, left) met with Molina (right) on March 26, but there is no record in the ministry communiques that the two of them discussed the Fenix mine and the security of the Russian investments there.
Solway bought into Guatemala in 2011. In 2013 Director of the Latin American Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry Alexander Schetinin noted that the Guatemalan government had formalized the license for Solway to operate through [Compañía] Guatemalteca de Niquel [CGN] “with Russian participation. We hope that now the logical step would be signing in the near future bilateral agreements on investment promotion and protection; actually we are ready to agree, it will be this year.” The agreement was signed on November 27, 2013. The Russian and Guatemalan foreign ministers have endorsed the agreement as “a fundamental tool for ensuring the growth of the volume of trade exchanges and investments between the two countries”, but it has yet to be ratified.
Ambassador Babich (right) met with President Molina late last year and discussed Solway’s concerns to protect its mine from local Guatemalan protests, land claims by the indigenous Mayas of the area, and allegations regarding the mysterious deaths of three university students in the mine area in 2012. Since then the Guatemalans have begun organizing protests to disrupt the movement of Solway’s trucks carrying ore from the mine to the port of Santo Tomas de Castilla. A delegation of Guatemalans is due in Canada this month to support claims against the mining company’s former Canadian owner for murder, rape, and loss of homes and land.
Russian Embassy officials are hostile towards the protests of local residents against the Fenix mine, and openly take the side of Solway and its Russian employees, although Solway’s Cyprus registration is acknowledged. It is estimated that there are 150 Russian nationals in Guatemala working for Solway and its local mining company. The Embassy is assisting them individually, and also the company, though this is not acknowledged publicly because the company is not officially Russian. The Embassy claims it doesn’t know who Solway’s shareholders are.
Solway reports its headquarters are in Larnaca, Cyprus. The website gives a telephone number which is not answered, and an email address which bounces. Cyprus company registrations reveal the Cyprus entity is owned by an entity registered elsewhere, but not identified. Russian press reports claim that one of the prominent shareholders is Boris Birshtein, a Russian-speaker with a controversial business record. He emigrated in the Soviet period, and holds Canadian and possibly Israeli citizenship. He lists his home office in Toronto, but doesn’t respond to questions there.
Left: Birshtein with Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; right: Birshtein with former Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien
A published list of Solway directors doesn’t mention Birshtein. Birshtein doesn’t mention Solway in his list of company affiliations. A spokesman for Solway in Moscow, who declined to be quoted by name, is emphatic that the Solway shareholders are EU citizens, and that Birshtein has had no relationship to Solway.
On the Solway list there are two members of the Bronstein family, Alexander and Daniel. On a Guatemalan Government visit to London last year, Bronstein junior was listed on the Guatemalan side as Solway’s chief executive. He reports education at British schools and employment with the Swiss-American investment bank Warburg Dillon Read, before he moved to Solway. Solway said this week he holds an EU passport.
Another name on the Solway board of directors is Mikhail Lipkin, who is a US citizen and US resident with a controversial public record. The New York Times reported a summary in September 1997. Here is the 9-year old US Securities and Exchange Commission dossier, identifying Lipkin as a resident of Marlboro, New Jersey, and accusing him of stock fraud. The record continues in New Jersey and gets more controversial.
Andre Seidelsohn is another of the Solway directors; he appears to be based in Estonia. Click this, and then his name, to open the record of Seidelsohn’s company associations.
In last month’s Ukrainian press interview, Daniel Bronstein explained that his family had owned an aluminium smelter in Volgograd, and when it was sold, invested the proceeds offshore. “We started reinvesting money gained from the aluminum deal into ferronickel production all over the world including Ukraine. In 2003 we purchased corporate rights on Pobuzhskiy Ferronickel Plant (PFP) that had been bankrupted by the previous owner. ..We purchased the plant and invested over USD 100 million into modernizing the processing technology for adjusting it to the imported ore, with the higher percentage of Nickel. In 2004 the plant was restarted at its full capacity and hasn’t stopped since.”
The Solway website reports the group had also owned stakes in the Kluchevsky Ferroalloys Plant and the Red October Steel Plant in Volgograd, before selling out. The Volgograd steel story can be read here.
According to Bronstein, he and Solway said sayonara to Russia more than a decade ago. “At the end of 1990s –early 2000s there were great possibilities in Russia. Today, after consolidating all our assets in base metals and ferronickel, we can see more profits in the western countries.”
A rating agency report implies that in 2013 Solway returned to Russia to raise finance by selling bonds. Solway told Fitch that in 2012 it had revenues of $557 million, and earnings of $119 million. The breakdown of production value, according to Fitch, was ferronickel concentrate (67% of revenues in 2012), copper and copper concentrate (14%), lead concentrate (11%), and zinc concentrate (5%).
What is revealed thereby is that two-thirds of Solway’s revenues depend on the Guatemalan mine and the Ukrainian refinery. According to Fitch, there is transfer pricing between the two. “Fitch notes that transactions with related parties account for a significant share of revenue. The Agency considers the relatively low level of transparency in Solway one of the factors constraining the ratings.”
Solway was coy with Fitch in disclosing its debt, but forecast “deleveraging” to start in 2014 and continue into this year. Since the Fitch report, the nickel price has fallen sharply. It is now half of what it was when Solway moved into Guatemala:
In 2014, the Ukrainian refinery was cut off from its feedstock from Indonesia after the government in Djakarta banned export of unprocessed nickel ore. “If we did not have a project in Guatemala,” concedes Bronstein, “we would have stopped the plant in Ukraine. It is nearly impossible to find ore on the world market.” Guatemalan export figures indicate there was a surge of ore shipments in 2014 when the value jumped tenfold to $55 million.
Ukrainian reports reveal that in 2013 Pobuzhskiy turned out 21,184 tonnes of nickel product. In 2014, the total was down 12% to 18,615 tonnes. Although the plant is well to the west of the fighting in the Donbass, the civil war has caused a dramatic drop in electricity to power the refinery. The International Monetary Fund programme for Ukraine has raised the price of electricity by 28%, while the collapse of the central government’s budget and the loss of Donbass-region coal and other power sources have cut electricity supply. So nickel output is forecast to fall again. Solway says its 2014 nickel production should have been 37,000 tonnes. It claims it is targeting a rapid rate of growth — 37,000 tonnes this year; 86,000 tonnes in 2016; and 120,130 tonnes in 2017.
According to Bronstein last month, “due to the latest political and economical events banks hardly consider any capital investments in Ukraine. Even financing trade deals is ranked as highly risky investments. At the same time our production process is very long. It starts with loading the ships with raw ore in South America and ends months later with delivering the final product to the customer. Meanwhile we still have to pay for delivering, processing etc. and this needs to be credited. None of the banks is ready to support Ukrainian businesses nowadays.” In its pitch for fresh western loans, Pobuzhskiy claims: “100% of the share capital is owned by EU citizens.”
Solway releases claim it has invested more than $500 million in Guatemala, and is promising to invest more than a billion dollars. If it can expand its Guatemalan nickel refinery, this will offset the trouble in the Ukraine. But trouble now threatens Solway in Guatemala.
Today Solway released a summary of its results for 2014. The group says it lifted sales revenues by 3.3% over 2013 to $532 million, while reduced costs lifted earnings by 29.4% to $120 million. Net debt, the group says, was $132 million. The numbers don’t appear to be much better than those reported by Fitch for 2012.
The new report explains “the increase in revenue was primarily generated by the company’s ferronickel development, in particular the successful commissioning of the Fenix Project in Guatemala… In 2015 Solway plans to complete its ramp-up phase and reach 25,000 metric tons of annual nickel production. Further expansion at Fenix during Phase 3 could potentially drive production capacity up to 50,000 metric tons. Since acquiring Fenix in 2011, the Group has invested 530 million USD in the asset.”
The Fenix (Phoenix in English) mine in central Guatemala has been the site of conflict for decades. Initial production by a Canadian mining concern lasted for just four years before the mine was shut down in 1981. Until the Solway takeover in 2011, the Mayan Q’eqchi’ had been driven off their traditional land and forcibly resettled. As Canadian mining companies battled indigenous claims to the land and opposition to evictions, there was police violence, murder, rape, and environmental damage from the mining. For this noone in Guatemala blamed Solway or the Russians when they took over.
The sale and purchase agreement between Hudson Bay Minerals and Solway indemnified Solway from what had already happened, and HudBay accepted legal liability. The Canadian courts have ruled that the Mayans are eligible to sue HudBay, and their claims are proceeding. The Toronto law firm Klippensteins is representingthem.
At the moment the mine site comprises both a pile of ore already excavated from the earlier, abandoned operations, and a new strip mine. The ore is trucked east to the new port of Santo Tomas de Castilla, indicated on the map at the older port of Puerto Barrios.
Solway arrived in September 2011, when HudBay, a listed Canadian miner, sold out. HudBay had paid $400 million earlier, but then decided it could not afford to risk an estimated billion-dollar in the investment required to make the Fenix mining operation profitable. The Canadians exited before nickel had peaked in price.
Solway paid $140 million in cash, and a promise of $30 million in royalties to come. HudBay’s financial report for 2011 says it had written down the value of Fenix by $212 million from its acquisition price. Solway thought it was getting a bargain.
A Russian by the name of Dmitry Kudryakov is the chief executive of the mine and of the local mining company Solway owns – Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN). He immediately promised to invest $1.6 billion in the mine, and bring annual ore production up to 150,000 tonnes. In July last year, he and Guatemalan officials inaugurated a new ore-processing plant.
Kudryakov claimed at the time that the mine company was producing 25,000 tonnes of nickel, which it was exporting; employing 1,500 people; and representing value of “US$470 million of foreign exchange and US $50 million annually to the treasury in taxes and royalties.” It is unclear how these numbers have been calculated. Telephone and emailed questions to Kudryakov at CGN have gone unanswered.
Local and Canadian sources report that Solway and CGN have run into several problems. In 2012 three university students on an environmental biology field trip mysteriously died on CGN land. There are calls for an independent investigation, and for the mining company to accept liability. Also, there has been violence between CGN’s security force and what local sources describe as a “narco gang”, which demanded control over the trucking contract for ore deliveries to port. Local sources say the gang got what they asked for. This in turn has aroused suspicion that there is more to the cargoes leaving Guatemala than 2%-grade nickel bearing ore bound for Pobuzhskiy.
Referring to Guatemala’s drug production and trade, a Canadian source said the remote area surrounding the mine “is a well-known narcotics region.” Russian officials meeting their Guatemalan counterparts have referred several times to the priority they share in combatting drug trafficking. Following Lavrov’s March 26 meetings in Guatemala, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced the Russian plan to “develop cooperation between law enforcement agencies. Representatives of the National Police of Guatemala undergo professional training in Russia, taking an active part in the ongoing Russian Federal Drug Control Service in Nicaragua regional courses for training and staff development of anti-drug services of the countries of Central America. We hope to continue this cooperation.”
This year protests by the Maya against Solway’s mine operations have intensified. The sizeable number of Russians who are employed by CGN are isolated in a guarded compound outside the town of El Estor, avoiding local contact for fear of clashes. Local sources claim road blockades of the mine truck route have begun.
In the capital, President Molina, a former general, announced on May 21 the replacement of his ministers for environment, energy and mines, and interior, following disclosure of evidence of high-level corruption linked to mine permits and the ore and minerals trade. His action followed the resignation of his Vice President, Roxana Baldetti, on May 8 “Not since 1944,” says a Guatemalan source, “has there been such an outpouring of disgust for the authorities, both political and economic. May 30 was the most recent general nationwide mobilization. Another is planned for June 11. Demands include that the government step down; that a constituent assembly be established to set up a multicultural, multilingual federation of autonomous Maya territories. A liberation movement has begun.”
Last week, Francisco Palomo, a well-known pro-government lawyer, was assassinated in a Guatemala City street (right). National elections for the presidency and parliament are due on September 6. Molina has already served one term, and is constitutionally barred from running again.
In Moscow a source at Norilsk Nickel, the global leader in nickel production, said he is sceptical of the Canadian and Guatemalan belief that Russian investors are behind the Fenix mine. “It was a small project. Solway needed laterite materials for their production of ferronickel. They looked initially at a project in Indonesia. Then Indonesia imposed an embargo on the export of raw materials. [Solway] first thought to build a plant for processing [nickel ore] in Indonesia, then abandoned the idea and began to consider Guatemala. The project is high cost. Any laterite project has an unpredictable cost.” The source says he cannot estimate how cost-effective Solway’s Fenix is in today’s low nickel market. He acknowledges that to feed the Ukraine plant, Solway has calculated it doesn’t have much choice after the Indonesian embargo.
“I had understood they would flip it”, said a Canadian source of Solway’s original intention for Fenix. “Unless the mining project is more than meets the eye. The Fenix mine site is in a very remote area of central Guatemala. What else can you do there? It’s difficult to counter HudBay’s calculation that a billion-dollar investment won’t be profitable.”
Solway counters that Guatemala’s cost of production can be kept down to a level that will remain profitable at current or anticipated prices on the nickel market. It is also betting that electricity costs in Guatemala will not rise at the speed of Ukrainian power rates. “The corporate strategic goal,” according to Solway’s statement this week, is “to enter the world’s top ten producers of nickel. In 2015 Solway plans to complete its ramp-up phase and reach 25,000 metric tons of annual nickel production. Further expansion at Fenix during Phase 3 could potentially drive production capacity up to 50,000 metric tons.”
Bronstein adds: “Despite difficult market conditions, 2014 was marked by considerable improvement in results, particularly reduction of the debt level and a sharp growth in EBITDA compared to 2013. Completion of the ProNiCo nickel smelter in Guatemala and launch of the gold production facility at Island of Urup, a part of the Group’s KurilGeo Project, are the highlights of a year of progress at Solway. These achievements mark significant milestones on the way to implementing The Group’s strategic goal – to become one of the world’s top metal producers.
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Ambassador Babich (right) met with President Molina late last year and discussed Solway’s concerns to protect its mine from local Guatemalan protests, land claims by the indigenous Mayas of the area, and allegations regarding the mysterious deaths of three university students in the mine area in 2012. Since then the Guatemalans have begun organizing protests to disrupt the movement of Solway’s trucks carrying ore from the mine to the port of Santo Tomas de Castilla. A delegation of Guatemalans is due in Canada this month to support claims against the mining company’s former Canadian owner for murder, rape, and loss of homes and land.
In last month’s Ukrainian press 
Last week, Francisco Palomo, a well-known pro-government lawyer, was