Month: April 2022

The High Court in London has heard claims that “substantial sums” from Nebehat Isbilen were paid to Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah.

It is understood that £750,000 has been repaid by the prince to Mrs Isbilen.

The business adviser, Selman Turk, has rejected the allegations.

The complex court case involves claims brought by 77-year-old Mrs Isbilen that her business adviser Mr Turk misused her funds.

Court documents show that among the expenditure and investments being questioned were payments to Prince Andrew and Sarah, the Duchess of York.

According to the court papers, Mrs Isbilen claims Mr Turk advised her to make a “gift” of £750,000 to Prince Andrew, which it is claimed she was misled into thinking was for assistance with her passport.

This amount was transferred from her account on 15 November 2019.

“The representation that Mrs Isbilen needed to make a gift to the Duke of York in connection with her passport (or for any other purpose) was false,” says her legal team in their claim of dishonesty against Mr Turk.

Representatives of Prince Andrew have not commented on the ongoing court case. But it is understood that the prince was not aware of any arrangements between Mrs Isbilen and Mr Turk.

And it is understood that the prince has returned £750,000 to Mrs Isbilen.

The discovery of payments to Prince Andrew emerged after a court order allowed a search of Mr Turk’s financial dealings, as Mrs Isbilen’s lawyers tried to establish the whereabouts of her assets.

Court papers show that some of the lost money had been attributed by Mr Turk to professional costs and unsuccessful investments, but there were claims of significant amounts still to be explained.

The High Court had been told Mrs Isbilen needed help moving assets out of Turkey after her husband became a political prisoner, and that Mr Turk was trusted to help.

Jonathan Tickner, Mrs Isbilen’s lawyer, said she had been “the victim of serious fraud and financial wrongdoing”, and was determined to pursue her claim against all those involved.

Court documents show that Mr Turk has disputed the allegations and disagrees with her understanding of how her assets have been handled.

Mr Turk had also been a winner of an award at the Pitch at the Palace business initiative, headed by Prince Andrew.

Agitated protesters stormed through barricades, and were accused of setting fire to a bus on Thursday night.

President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa blamed the events on “extremist elements”.

Sri Lanka is in the midst of a foreign exchange crisis that has crippled its economy.

Faced with 13-hour power cuts, a lack of fuel, essential food items and medicines, public anger has reached a new high.

The protest outside the President’s house began peacefully, but participants say things turned violent after police fired tear gas, water cannons and also beat people present.

Protesters retaliated against the police by pelting them with stones.

On Friday morning, police arrested 45 people although no charges have been made against them yet.

The demonstrations mark a massive turnaround in popularity for Mr Rajapaksa who swept into power with a majority win in 2019, promising stability and a “strong hand” to rule the country.

Critics have been pointing to rank corruption and nepotism – his brothers and nephews occupy several key ministerial portfolios – as one of the main reasons for the situation the country has found itself in.

News reports that the president and his ministers are exempt from the power cuts, along with opulent displays of wealth by family members, have only increased anger.

The government has been blaming the crisis on the pandemic’s impact on tourism – one of the island nation’s main sources of foreign revenue – along with a series of attacks on churches on Easter Sunday 2019 which led to a marked drop in tourists.

But experts say that this crisis has been a long time in the making.

“This is an implosion, an accumulated outcome of what has been building up for a couple of decades and as usual there is no one to take responsibility for it. Of course, the present government is directly responsible for its wilful mismanagement of the crisis since they came into power in 2019 by sheer incompetency, arrogance and of course corruption,” Jayadeva Uyangoda, a political scientist and commentator, told the BBC.

Sri Lanka’s former deputy central bank governor WA Wijewardena told the BBC that Sri Lanka made a fundamental mistake in not integrating with the global economy after the end of a civil war in 2009 which saw its economy grow at rates of almost 9%.

“Exports which accounted for 33% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2000 have now fallen to 12% and remain at that level,” he said.

In the more immediate term, a government refusal to let the Sri Lankan rupee depreciate also took a massive toll on its foreign reserves.

Accordingly, foreign reserves which stood at $7.6bn (£5.8bn) at the end of 2019 have now fallen to a level of $2.3 bn; of those reserves, usable reserves have fallen to some $300mn.

Mr Wijewardena feels things will get a lot worse before they get better, as there is no sustainable flow of foreign exchange for the heavily import-reliant country.

Sri Lanka no longer has enough dollars to buy essential items like fuel to power vehicles or even generate power.

As a result, the country’s electricity board has been imposing power cuts that have grown longer and longer in duration. On Thursday, power was switched off for 13 hours, with 16-hour cuts expected in the coming days.

This has disrupted businesses, education and day to day life for millions.

Long lines have been reported outside fuel stations, while people have also had to queue up for hours in the heat to buy items like cooking gas cylinders with sometimes tragic results.

Five elderly people have died after collapsing in queues over the last few weeks.

Shortages in food items and essential medicines are also being reported from across the country.

Seven months after he took on the role, one report said he was blamed for “inadequate briefings” and a “lack of mastery of subjects”.

The US correctly assessed that Russia was planning a large-scale invasion, while France concluded it was unlikely.

Gen Vidaud was blamed for that by France’s military chief, a source said.

However, the military source told AFP news agency that his job was to provide “military intelligence on operations, not on premeditation”. As Gen Vidaud’s service concluded that Russia had the means to invade Ukraine, the source said that “what happened proves him right”.

When contacted by the BBC, a military spokesman said French armed forces chief Gen Thierry Burkhard had no comment to make.

However, in early March Gen Burkhard acknowledged that French intelligence had not been up to the level of US or UK briefings, which were publicised to pile pressure on Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The Americans said that the Russians were going to attack, they were right,” he told Le Monde newspaper.

“Our services thought instead that the cost of conquering Ukraine would have been monstrous and the Russians had other options” to bring down the government of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, he added.

France’s misreading of President Putin was all the more embarrassing because President Emmanuel Macron had spoken to him regularly in the days leading up to the invasion on 24 February.

Intelligence specialist Prof Alexandre Papaemmanuel told AFP it was too easy to blame military intelligence for the failure, which lay with France’s entire intelligence community.

But Gen Vidaud, France’s former special forces commander, appears to have been squeezed out for other reasons too.

Weeks after he took charge of military intelligence, his service came in for criticism when Australia scrapped a multi-billion dollar submarine contract with France in favour of a security pact with the US and UK. The Aukus pact came out of the blue in France and prompted a diplomatic spat.

According to Ukraine’s state nuclear company Energoatom, staff at the plant said there are currently no “outsiders” at the site.

Earlier, it said some Russian forces had set off towards the Belarusian border, leaving a small group behind.

The announcement appears to confirm reports by senior US defence officials on Wednesday of a withdrawal.

Russian troops seized Chernobyl at the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.

“This morning, the invaders announced their intentions to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” Energoatom said in a statement on Thursday.

The company later accused the Russian military of abducting members of the Ukrainian National Guard held captive since the start of the war. Energoatom sourced its information to workers at the plant and did not give numbers.

It also confirmed reports that Russian troops had dug trenches in the most contaminated part of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, receiving “significant doses” of radiation. There are unconfirmed reports that some are being treated in Belarus.

Reuters news agency quoted workers at the plant as saying some of the soldiers had no idea they were in a radiation zone.

The Russian military, however, said that after capturing the plant radiation levels at the plant itself had stayed within a normal range.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement that it was unable to confirm the reports.

The head of Ukraine’s agency in charge of the exclusion zone, Yevhen Kramarenko, said that radiation levels appeared to be normal and there was no indication of significant damage. However, as the sensors for detecting radiation levels were not working, staff needed to check the facilities, he added.

The head of the IAEA said it was in close consultations with Ukrainian authorities on sending a mission to the Chernobyl plant in the next few days.

While “Chernobyl” is a word that evokes apocalypse, nuclear experts stressed throughout this saga that there was no risk of “another Chernobyl”.

There is no working nuclear reactor on the site. As Prof Claire Corkhill from Sheffield University told me at the time, even if buildings containing contaminated material were pierced “we wouldn’t be talking about plumes of radioactive smoke”.

She was much more concerned when Russian forces attacked a building at the working Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility on 4 March. That incident caused the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to plan a trip to Ukraine – essentially to ask Russian forces to keep nuclear facilities out of the line of fire.

“What is a concern in Chernobyl now,” Prof Corkhill told me, “is that we haven’t had regular communication between the site and the IAEA, which basically keeps a [safety log] of where any potentially hazardous material is. We now need to go in and establish that none of that material is missing.”

Other scientists are concerned about the damage that may have been caused to a place that has become a wildlife refuge and a site of international research collaboration.

Prof Nick Beresford, who studies the exclusion zone’s landscape, says his Ukrainian colleagues now don’t know if they will have labs to return to. “The zone itself, over the last nearly 40 years, has become a site for wildlife,” he added.

“Lots of rare species moved in when people moved out. We just don’t know how this will have affected the wildlife.”

In recent days Russia has said it will scale down its operations in northern Ukraine around the capital Kyiv and focus its forces on the eastern Donbas region. Chernobyl is located north of Kyiv.

But on Thursday Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Moscow was repositioning rather than withdrawing in order to regroup, resupply and reinforce its offensive in Donbas.

“At the same time, Russia maintains pressure on Kyiv and other cities. So we can expect additional offensive actions, bringing even more suffering,” he said.

There was no change in Russia’s objective to pursue a military outcome, he added.

The occupation of the Chernobyl site since 24 February, the day of the invasion, has been dogged with concerns about power outages and problems for the staff, many of whom were trapped there for weeks and could not get home.

Although no longer a working power station, Chernobyl was never fully abandoned and still requires constant management.

It is the site of what is considered to be the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986.

The Russian withdrawal follows an announcement several days ago by the mayor of Slavutych, a nearby town housing workers at the plant, that Russian troops had left the town.

The train operator will now be run by a company owned by the Scottish government.

The previous operator, Abellio, had its franchise ended early amid criticism of the quality of the service.

The UK’s rail network was privatised in the 90s by John Major’s Conservative government. Before Abellio, ScotRail was run by National Express and First Group.

Passengers should not see any significant changes in services right away, but the Scottish government said it was a new beginning for the railways.

All ScotRail staff will transfer to the new Scottish government-owned entity, and the move has been welcomed by trade unions.

However, critics say Scotland’s railways have just seen the biggest fare rise in a decade – and that some services now run less frequently than before the pandemic.

On Thursday, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon insisted bringing ScotRail into public ownership was a “historic moment”.

She said ScotRail services, which cover all rail services which start and end within Scotland, would continue as normal.

But she said the change in ownership “provides an opportunity to modernise” and would help to “deliver passenger services which are efficient, sustainable, safe, fit for the future”.

To help with that, she pledged staff and travellers would be able to take part in a “national conversation” which would “contribute to the future vision” for the service.

At First Minister’s Questions, Conservative transport spokesman Graham Simpson said issues with lifeline ferry services in Scotland showed that “the SNP is no good at running things”.

With ferry operator CalMac still waiting for two new vessels, which are years late and overbudget, he said rail passengers should be worried that ScotRail would “turn out to be CalMac on wheels”.

The SNP leader, however, insisted her party had already delivered significant improvements, citing several towns which have gained new rail links, with more to follow.

She went on: “Bringing ScotRail into publish ownership and control is an historic moment, and I am delighted it is happening under this government.”

Dutch firm Abellio has been running the franchise since 2015, but had its contract ended early amid criticism over cancellations and performance levels.

The arrangement was made under powers which allow the Scottish government to take over the rail franchise without a bidding process.

Scotland’s railways were temporarily nationalised in March 2020 to help the service cope with the impact of coronavirus.

Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth said Scotland’s railways should be in the hands of the people of Scotland.

She said it was an “exciting opportunity to deliver a better railway service that best meets the needs of our passengers”.

Kevin Lindsay, of the union Aslef, said it was a cause for celebration.

He said rail franchising was a “failed experiment”, adding: “The railway should be for the people, by the people.

“We now have an opportunity moving forward to deliver a railway which delivers for the whole of Scotland.”

A “massive bang” was reported in Brownley Road, Wythenshawe, Manchester shortly after 18:30 BST on Thursday.

Plumes of smoke could be seen rising from the property, and nearby homes were evacuated while firefighters made the scene safe.

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said investigations were ongoing into the circumstances that had led to the explosion.

It is understood that the victim was an elderly man who lived at the property.

GMP added that several properties were without power and road closures were in place while emergency services remained at the scene.

Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service said it was “saddened that someone has lost their life”.

Matt Muncaster, who lives nearby, said he was getting off a Metrolink tram at Crossacres when he heard the blast.

The windows were blown out, he said, followed by a “huge amount of smoke” billowing out of the house.

The 27-year-old said he “instinctively” ran over to the property alongside another man, and both attempted to kick down the front in case anyone was inside.

When they were unable to get inside they ran to the nearby Wythenshawe fire station to raise the alarm, he said.

As they approached an engine was on its way to the scene, he said.