With Jean-Paul Carteron’s “Welcome to Dakhla” message on the Crans Montana Forum website this morning, it is apparent that he is ignoring the wishes of the people of Western Sahara to cancel his forum and is attempting to go ahead with his events in the illegally occupied non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara. His welcome reads:
It will be very interesting to learn the names all these
illustrious participants, who likewise have ignored the wishes of the Western
Saharans, have chosen to spit in the faces of the indigenous Sahrawis of
Western Sahara, and undoubtedly will have hell to pay. I will continue to
monitor the proceedings at the Forum in Dakhla. This post is just a reminder to
all these participants that Jean-Paul Carteron, their host in Dakhla, is hardly
a humanitarian “committed to a more humane and impartial world.” I admit to
spending way too many hours researching the background of this guy. He is not
transparent and as I have stated before there is precious little out there
about him. Just in case you didn’t follow the link to Robert Eringer’s bio of Carteron in my January 16 blog
article, here is the excerpt on
Carteron from Eringer’s book, The Spymaster of Monte Carlo, with the kind permission
of the author. Given all I know about Carteron’s depraved indifference to the
wishes and the plight of the Western Saharans, everything below rings true:
JEAN-PAUL
CARTERON
As a young man with a law degree
from the University of Paris, Carteron tried to break into French politics but
could not find support and lost several elections.
Perhaps disillusioned with the
system, he left France in 1981 and went to work as a lawyer for Jean-Claude
“Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti and wound up looking after Papa Doc’s huge
fortune.
When Papa Doc died, Carteron carried
on with Baby Doc Duvalier, for whom he facilitated real estate deals along the
Cote d’Azur and in Monaco.
The Duvalier regime was brutal,
murderous and corrupt--and the beginning of Carteron’s own financial
base.
As Haiti’s ambassador to the UN in
1985, Carteron took the opportunity to forge strong links with Eastern European
countries, and utilized those contacts as the basis for creating the Crans
Montana Forum in Switzerland in 1989.
Carteron was a Swiss national on the
basis of his first marriage to a Swiss national, Patricia Luyet, who apparently
ran off with Carteron’s mistress.
Only after bloodying his hands with
the Duvaliers and enriching himself did Carteron portray himself as a
“humanitarian.”
The forum endeavored to provide
respectability for brutal, corrupt regimes in Africa, from which Carteron
personally profited.
One notable example is Congolese
President Sassou N’Guesso’s six hundred thousand Swiss-franc “contribution” to
the forum, part of which benefited Carteron personally.
By 1996, the Swiss became
disenchanted with Carteron and requested he move his forum
elsewhere.
They suspected him of money laundering,
and his forum gave them logistical headaches due to its dubious participants,
many of which had to be kept under surveillance while in country.
Expelled from Switzerland, Carteron
chose Monaco as a new base and received permission from Prince Rainier to
create a Monaco S.A.M. and stage his forum inside the principality.
Carteron began to call his private
entity the Monaco World Summit.
Leaders of other countries invited
to participate for a fee were given the impression, because of its name, that
the summit was an official Monaco event or at least sponsored or sanctioned by
Monaco, which it was not.
Once he institutionalized his summit
in Monaco, Carteron began to establish himself as a professional
middleman.
His specialty: brokering honorary
consulships to Monaco from Eastern European and Balkan countries.
His standard rate to get someone named as
honorary consul to Monaco: fifty thousand euros or, in some cases, an
expensive Breguet wristwatch.
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