رئيس حكومة الاقليم مسرور برزاني يشتري صيدلية وعمارة
في ميامي ب فلوريدا بقيمة 18 مليون دولار !


Cowboy Drugstore

Traces of a kleptocrat from Iraq to Delaware to Miami
by Zack Kopplin
December 7, 2021


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ALICE MARTINS/AP PHOTO

Masrour Barzani, Iraqi Kurdistan prime minister and owner of a Miami building housing a CVS




This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
A few blocks from the water, in the heart of Miami’s glitzy South Beach, is a drugstore not like the others. Tourists buying sunscreen and straw hats from the CVS on Washington Avenue are financing a Middle Eastern kleptocrat.

The plexiglass building housing the roughly 12,000-square-foot pharmacy is worth $18.3 million and, because of favorable rent terms negotiated with CVS, should generate significant profit for its landlord. In 2019, based on Miami property records, local press credited a Virginia-based real estate company, KLNB, with purchasing the building. But the Virginia firm’s inclusion in the property registrar was a diversion. “KLNB is not the owner of this property and had no involvement in the transaction,” a company representative said.

The actual purchase was made by an anonymous Delaware shell company. Buried in incorporation documents for this Delaware company’s Florida branch isthe name of the building’s real
owner: Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan.



A semi-independent region in Iraq’s north, Kurdistan is a hereditary monarchy in all but name and has been dominated by the Barzani family for decades. The Kurdish prime minister has abused his power to attack, torture, and kill his critics, including Saudi-style assassinations of journalists. While he previously served as the region’s intelligence chief, Barzani had a local university student, Zardasht Osman, tortured and killed for publishing a satirical poem about the social advancement that would come with marrying one of the prime minister’s sisters.
The Kurdish prime minister is not a benign pharmacy operator. But because of America’s underappreciated role as an enabler of corporate secrecy, if not for a clerical error, South Beach residents would have no idea about the Washington Avenue CVS.
No one knows the extent of the illicit wealth hidden inside the United States. Corporate secrecy laws, maintained by states like Delaware, keep it that way. But tracing the Barzani family’s investments, like this Miami pharmacy, explains why America has become an appealing destination for dirty money.
THROUGH OIL AND CORRUPTION, the Barzanis, whose agents did not respond to requests for comment, have amassed enormous amounts of wealth. For example, a real estate investment in Kurdistan, owned by a company secretly connected to one of the prime minister’s brothers, has been valued at $1.27 billion. Like other despots, the Barzanis turned to secrecy havens, the kind of places exposed by the Panama and Pandora Papers, to conceal their money.
Secrecy havens are jurisdictions that don’t require public disclosure of the names of the owners and shareholders of companies housed within their borders. This enables all sorts of financial crimes, from tax evasion to money laundering and facilitating bribery. But, unlike the king of Jordan and Argentina’s former president, whose secret companies got busted in previous offshore leaks, Barzani assets and business deals were not exposed in the Panama and Pandora Papers.
They’ve only been caught in one major leak, a database of Dubai property records, obtained by the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies, which contains details about the Barzanis’ assets in the uber-expensive Burj Khalifa complex and one of the city’s artificial islands, Palm Jumeirah, along with the family’s connections to United Arab Emirates royalty.


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https://prospect.org/power/cowboy-dr...-a-kleptocrat/


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