CORRUPTION

by David Nuttle

During three decades of operations, my charity (NPI) lost several projects due to major

corruption issues. In Kenya, NPI's CD (counter-desertification) technologies were approved by UN FAO and the UN agreed to fund a large desert farming demonstration using NPI's CD technologies. Two GOK (Govt. of Kenya) officials developed a scheme to illegally divert a good part of the grant funds to their personal Swiss Bank accounts. Upon discovery of this theft plan, the UN cancelled the entire grant and ended our plan to improve Kenyan food security.

NPI was training foreign political refugees who wanted to start small farms in the U. S. We had a 50-acre agricultural training center near Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Upon graduation, the USDA Farm Service Agency agreed to provide each refugee farmer with a 95 percent farm loan guarantee to help them obtain bank loans to buy small farms. Regions Bank of NW AR

(Arkansas) agreed to do the required USDA said guarantee paperwork. In the process of so doing, this bank used its own farm appraiser to triple the fair market value of farms refugees wanted to purchase. In addition, the bank would double the expected annual farm income of the farm a refugee wanted to buy. A flexible interest rate was used going from 02 % to 12 % in the first year, The bank's scheme was to make for refugee farmers unable to service their farm loans forcing them into a farm foreclosure. The bank's objective was to soon collect on the inflated USDA farm loan guarantees they worked to create.

Regions Bank had made farm loans on several inefficient small contract poultry farms that were in a pre-foreclosure state. The bank offered and encouraged our political refugee farmers to buy these farms to help their regular bank customers and avoid the cost of costly farm foreclosures. Four other banks with similar farm foreclosure problems were invited by Regions Bank to join in their scheme of fraud. When the farm foreclosures started, NPI soon discovered the bank fraud. With help from Farmer's Legal Action Group (FLAG) and some detective work we documented these frauds. We asked USDA to take legal action to soon recover stolen funds and get damage awards for the refugee farmers. The White House did not like the idea of USDA taking five banks to court. NPI thus employed the Henry Law Firm, of Fayetteville, AR to file qui tam litigation against each bank. The courts fined each bank $2 million, forced banks to pay damages to farmers, and returned about $73 million to USDA.

Under qui tam law the entity recovering lost federal funds gets to keep 20 percent of those funds, and that paid our legal costs.

At times, U. S. policy ignores government corruption problems. In South Vietnam, we ignored the fact that the President of that nation, Ngo Dien Diem, operated under the so-called Mandarin Rule and allowed his administrators to retain 10 percent of whatever came via their hands. Diem's military commanders were allowed to have & pay 40 percent ghost troops and deposit those funds in a commanders' personal Swiss Bank accounts. In mostly Buddhist Vietnam, Catholic Diem only appoint other Catholics as military commanders and since few had combat experience, he was paying for them to take a big risk.

We have corruption in our U. S. federal agencies. As an example, in the mid-1970s, the US

Army Corps of Engineers planned to construct a barge canal all the way from a Mississippi River location to Denver, Colorado. To do so, the Corps had to construct a large number of large reservoirs to impound and store enough water to float the barges. The Corps was not telling Congress their complete plan and was requesting Congressional approval and funds to do the project in stages. The idea appeared to be that if the canal & reservoir system was mostly done that Congress would complete the project. At the time I encountered the Corps they were taking our family farm to construct a 17,000-acre lake, Lake El Dorado in Butler County, Kansas. The first stage of their barge canal was completed to the Port of Catoosa near Tulsa, Oklahoma. A good friend, in the Corps, then gave me a copy of the Corps of Engineer's complete Denver barge canal plan. I published this plan under the title of "Truth Drowning: The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers" and gave copies to several members of the U. S. Congress. Members of Congress were angry about being deceived by the Corps and the Corps was ordered to end work on its Denver canal. At this point, our farm had already been taken, by the Corps, under eminent domain, so it was already lost.

In the process of exposing corruption, expect those you expose to possibly seek revenge.

Members of the Corps were angered by how I had exposed their deception of Congress and fraudulent barge canal project. A few days after I presented the Corps' semi-covert plan to Congress a "torch team" conducted an arson attack to burn our farm structures we still had 60-days to remove before water would be allowed to enter the Corps' new El Dorado Lake.

In addition, the Corps h ad their project appraiser fabricated our farm appraisal to create many damaging value factors to reduce the appraised value of our farm to $ .25 cents on known then known fair market farm value. We refused to accept the corrupt offer and told the Corps my family would proceed to an Eminent Domain trial. The Corps then worked to delay that trial for 5-years. When the trial finally occurred, we had a 3-Judge Panel of retired and excellent judges. These judges quickly realized the Corps' punitive appraisal of our farm was

false, and my family was awarded full fair market value in the Eminent Domain settlement.

Corruption and the greed that typically causes such acts are great evils!!!