Sophisticated methods of being at war with the whole world at all times gave rise to the development of a new super weapon in the United States, the ultimate target of which is to suppress economies of all other countries of the world. The topic generated serious discussions when Russia's Beeline cellular provider (which is actually a Dutch-registered company called VimpelCom company) paid the US a fine worth $307 million on corruption charges five years ago.
It was at around that time when experts of the French Center for the Analysis of Terrorism revealed a new weapon that US special services had created for the destruction of foreign corporations that were an obstacle for aggressive American businesses. Researchers called this new tool to crush those disloyal to Washington "lawfare".
The tool is devilishly inventive. If any foreign company — for example, Beeline or Russia's Federal Agency for Atomic Power (Rosatom) prevents the Americans from gaining control over the economy of any state, the United States resorts to the so-called Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) from 1977. The law, which was adopted during Carter's presidency, applies to any company of any nationality that has nothing to do with the United States.
In a nutshell, if a Russian company allegedly bribed an Indonesian company to get an order, the senior management of such a corporation could be arrested by the FBI and sent to a prison in the United States. Even a suspicion of a bribe is enough for the US Department of Justice to bring charges against the head of a foreign company and issue an arrest warrant.
It is worthy of note that the Americans are convinced that they are entitled to interfere in the affairs of any company on planet Earth. It turns out that managers of a European company or, for example, of Russia's Gazprom, which the United States despises, can feel at ease nowhere. They can be arrested and jailed without any charges at any airport from Japan to Poland.
This is how the United States eliminates competitors and milks money from them. The Americans have fined a number of the world's major foreign corporations and banks:
In total, in such an ingenious way, the US Treasury has earned about $9 billion over the course of just a few years. However, money and moral damage to competitors does not come first here.
After 2001, US Army Colonel Charles Dunlap formalized this method, which made it possible to unleash a real war of terror against the leaders of major, yet US-disloyal companies. In order to crush a company or impose its own management on it, the American state has turned into a tough bandit. US special services may thus abduct such a company manager and jail them.
In a special isolation ward, under the conditions of confinement with murderers and rapists, a person is persuaded to "cooperate with the investigation." The goal of this work is to obtain "voluntary" confession against his company simply in order to break free from that prison.
If you do not believe all this, dear reader, let us quote a small excerpt from the book by Frederic Pierucci, who had served two years in an American prison for one of the top leaders of Alstom, a French energy and transport group that the Americans had brought to ruin.
"From the very morning we were not allowed to drink water. (…) I had only one memory of Canaan — revolting, inedible food. (…) In 2011, there was one of the largest outbreaks of salmonellosis in the history of the United States there: about 300 inmates, not counting the guards, got sick (…). At 10 pm they took us to the Brooklyn jail. Another stop between 1 am and 5 am. All this time we were kept locked up in a cage like cattle along with four Hispanics and thirty-two African Americans. (…) All I could think of is that I had to try to survive in this cesspool next to murderers and novice terrorists. Sanitary conditions were horrible. It was damp everywhere, pipes were leaking, except for the showers, which had not worked for a long time, and the toilet was always clogged. One of the cells on our floor was used for trash and smelled unbearably. At night it was even worse. Aggressive mice would run all over prisoners' faces, so everyone tried to sleep with a blanket pulled over their heads. (…) I could not buy a cup, a glass, a spoon, a pair of sandals. (…). Eventually we managed to get a single pair of sandals that the four of us had to wear in turn … "("The American Trap" by Frederic Pierucci, published by Nouveaux Angles, 2021, pp. 440, 441-442).
Please note that it goes about foreign citizens, senior managers or qualified specialists, who get often seized on the territory of a foreign country.
This is how Victor Bout was detained. He was sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in a maximum security prison. This is how pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who has been jailed in the USA for 13 years already, was abducted from Liberia and delivered to the United States. Yaroshenko was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Interestingly, prisoners in the United States are considered to be slaves from a legal point of view. The 13th amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." It just so happens that slavery officially exists in the United States to this day.
To collect information about undesirable foreign citizens who have nothing to do with the United States, the Americans use another law. The law is called the Cloud Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act). This act allows them to spy on any person on the planet unrestrictedly, collect materials on them, tap their phones and hack into databases with the help of the almighty National Security Agency (NSA). In fact, the masters of the world are not subject to jurisdiction. They simply decided to extend their jurisdiction to the entire planet — including Russia.
Russian citizens Bout and Yaroshenko were persecuted for political reasons, but the Americans use their "gulag" in order to take control of entire nations.
This is what they did to one of the finest enterprises in French industry — Alstom, a transnational corporation. This company supplied turbines for French nuclear power plants and the defense sector — in particular, for French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.
In 2011, US-based defense corporation General Electric made an offer to Alstom to transfer the controlling stake in the enterprise to the United States. When Alstom refused, Washington brought in its Justice Department. The latter accused the French company of corruption and arrested three top managers — Pierucci, Rothschild and Pomponi. Having obtained the necessary confessions from them, the Americans sentenced Alstom to an astronomical fine. At the same time, the company was offered to exchange the fine for the transfer of ownership for the assets to the Americans. Alstom accepted the offer with the connivance of the Minister of Economy of France, would-be President Emmanuel Macron. As a result, France was deprived of its energy security and independence.
This is how the FCPA works as a "lawfare" weapon. The new method allowed the Americans to subjugate a number of key sectors of Europe. This is how the Americans fight competitors and take over other states.
The French Center for Intelligence Research CF2R analyzed the new threat, and France's former foreign intelligence chief Alain Juillet called the entire technology a manifestation of the era of brute force.
That was how the United States tried to take over Russia's oil industry by transferring the ownership of a large block of shares of Khodorkovsky's oil giant Yukos to US companies. The ultimate goal was even more ambitious — the United States wanted to block the supplies of Russian energy resources to China.