Alexander Downer

Alexander Downer is an Australian politician and a thieving shit. See Australia Stole $40 Billion From East Timor for more and better details. Downer set up an espionage operation against the government of East Timor when they were negotiating a Treaty with Oz regarding a big gas field in East Timor's waters. He is now working for Woodside Petroleum, the beneficiaries of the stitch up, while Woodside is colluding with Noble Energy regarding gas fields in Cyprus waters. At the same time Downer is negotiating with Cyprus and Turkey. Incestuous? Corrupt? You betcha. Will he go to prison? Not a chance. The fact that Woodside will not develop except on their own terms should be irrelevant. It isn't because the hooligans that run Indonesia has invaded Timor once, killing a 100 thousand. It is perfectly prepared to do it again. It is only Australian forces preventing them.

Downer Baling Out Of Cyprus [ 29 March 2014 ]
Alexander Downer, an Australian chancer was talking to the Turks as well as the Greeks. Now the Turks are going to get the oil pipeline from Israel controlled oil fields so Downer is moving on after screwing East Timor by stealing their oil. But he is liable to be posted to London so his face still fits. NB his firm, Woodside is offering to lay the Israel To Turkey Pipeline.

 

Gas Pipeline From Israel To Turkey Considered ex Haaretz

 

Alexander Downer ex Wiki
Alexander John Gosse Downer
, AC (born 9 September 1951) is a former Australian Liberal Party politician who was Foreign Minister of Australia from 11 March 1996 to 3 December 2007, the longest-serving in Australian history. He was also the Leader of the Opposition for eight months from 1994 to 1995. Downer is currently the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Cyprus.

In 2003, Downer signed an agreement over the gas and oil reserves in the Timor Gap.[19] An agreement which has been criticised by some opposition parties and other critics, including a bipartisan letter of reproach from 50 members of the United States Congress, as being unfair to East Timor[20][21][22][23] as the gas reserves are closer to East Timor than Australia but are claimed by Australia on the basis of a treaty with General Suharto, in 1989.[24]

 

East Timor ex Wiki
East Timor, is a country in Southeast Asia.[6] It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor.............

East Timor has a lower-middle-income economy.[8] About 37.4% of the country's population lives below the international poverty line which means living on less than U.S. $1.25 per day[9] and about 50% of the population is illiterate.[10] It continues to suffer the aftereffects of a decades-long struggle for independence against Indonesian occupation, which severely damaged the country's infrastructure and killed at least a hundred thousand people. The country is placed 134th on the Human Development Index (HDI). Nonetheless it is expected to have the sixth largest percentage growth in GDP in the world for 2013.

 

Australia Stole $40 Billion From East Timor [ 14 December 2013 ]
The gas field is in Timor's waters. Australia wanted it. Australia got it by Espionage, by bullying. The spies told them just how desperate the Timorese were. It worked a treat. Throw them a few crumbs and have the rest. $40 billion is pretty useful to a spendthrift government.
PS Alexander Downer, a lead shit in this affair is telling Cyprus how to sort itself out.
PPS Cyprus also has gas worth billions offshore. They are there like flies on the proverbial.

 

Read the whole thing at source
And now for something completely different: a spy story that isn’t about Edward Snowden’s disclosures and the US National Security Agency's surveillance of everything and everybody.

This one could come straight out of a 1950s spy thriller: a microphone buried in a wall, a listening post manned by people with headphones, and transcripts of secret conversations delivered to negotiators.

Now it’s true that Australia is a member of the Gang of Five, more formally known as the Five Eyes (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand), which share most of the information that they acquire through hi-tech mass surveillance. That’s the kind of spying that Snowden’s leaks are about, and whatever Australia picks up through this process it presumably shares with its co-conspirators.

It was in this context that Australia listened to the phone conversations of Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife, and eight potential successors. When Indonesia recalled its ambassador from Canberra and protested, Prime Minister Tony Abbott swatted the protest away with the line they are all using now: “all governments gather information and all governments know that every other government gathers information.”

The Indonesian reply was a classic. “I have news for you,” said Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa. “We don’t do it. We certainly should not be doing it among friends.” He was, he said, deeply unhappy about the “dismissive answer being provided” by the Australian government.

So Australia has managed to alienate its biggest neighbour, probably for no advantage to itself, just as the United States has alienated Brazil with the same tactics.

But the kind of spying under discussion here was too shameful to share even with the other four eyes of the Anglosphere. It was an Australian-only operation mounted in 2004 to gather information about the negotiating position of a very poor neighbouring country, East Timor, so that Australia could rip its neighbour off in a treaty that divided a rich gas field on the seabed between them.

The treaty in question, Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea, always seemed a bit peculiar. The CMATS treaty gave Australia a half share in the massive Greater Sunrise field, which is said to be worth $40 billion. But that field lies just 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of East Timor, and 400 kilometres (250 miles) from Australia.

The normal rule on international seabed rights would put the boundary equidistant between the two countries, but that would have given East Timor sovereignty over the entire gas field. Instead, CMATS postponed a final settlement of the seabed boundary for 50 years, and in the meantime gave Australia 50 per cent of the revenue from the Greater Sunrise field.

The existing gas field off East Timor's coast has only about 10 years' life left, and the East Timor government depends on gas revenues for 95 per cent of its income, so it was very vulnerable in those negotiations. The Australian negotiators could exploit that vulnerability because they had daily updates on how desperate their Timorese opposite numbers were: the  Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged the prime minister’s and the cabinet offices.

Four ASIS operatives did the job, pretending to be part of a team of Australian aid workers that was renovating East Timor’s government offices. The man who gave the order was Australia’s foreign minister at the time, Alex Downer , who now runs a public relations firm that represents Woodside Petroleum, a major Australian company that was the main beneficiary of the treaty. Funny how things work out.

The operation would never have come to light if the former director of technical operations at ASIS, who led the bugging operation, had not had an attack of conscience on learning of Downer’s link to Woodside. He told East Timor about it, and the Timorese government then brought an action before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague demanding that the CMATS treaty be cancelled.

The Australian government’s response was to arrest the whistleblower and cancel his passport last week so that he could not travel to The Hague to testify, and to raid the Sydney offices of Bernard Collaery, the lawyer who is representing East Timor before the Court. [ The search warrant was granted by a criminal called  George Brandis, the Attorney General of Australia using an allegation of national security - Editor ].

The documents seized include an affidavit summarising the whistleblower’s testimony at the court and correspondence between Collaery and his client, Timorese President Xanana Gusmao. It’s more of the same sort of behaviour: the Australian government has decided to brazen it out.

Can Australia get away with this? Not legally. As Collaery says, “it was a carefully premeditated, involved, very lengthy operation with premeditated breaches of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties,  and premeditated breaches of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. This is a criminal conspiracy, a break-in on sovereign territory and a breach of Australian law.” And he has three more whistleblowers lined up to testify too.

But the case may still be settled out of court, because East Timor is still desperate. Woodside has not yet started developing the Greater Sunrise field, and it will never do so if there isn’t a deal. Offer East Timor another 10 per cent and a promise to go ahead, and it will probably drop the case. The poor cannot afford justice.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist who writes a weekly column for Embassy.
editor@embassynews.ca

 

Woodside Petroleum ex Wiki [ a crooked bunch of chancers ]
Woodside Petroleum Limited is an Australian petroleum exploration and production company. Woodside is the largest operator of oil and gas production in Australia and also Australia’s largest independent dedicated oil and gas company.[2] It is a public company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and has its headquarters in Perth, Western Australia........

The Greater Sunrise gas development lies in the Timor Sea north of Australia and includes the Sunrise and Troubadour fields, which were discovered in 1974. Greater Sunrise is located about 450 kilometres (280 mi) north-west of Darwin and 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-east of Timor-Leste. Approximately 80% of the fields lie within Australian waters, with the remainder in jointly administered waters. [ Is this the lie direct? - Editor ] The Greater Sunrise fields have a total contingent dry gas resource of 5.13 trillion cubic feet (145 billion cubic metres) and 225.9 million barrels (35.92×106 m3) of condensate. The Sunrise JV participants are Woodside (operator) (33.4%), ConocoPhillips (30%), Shell (26.6%) and Osaka Gas (10%).[10][unreliable source?]

In April 2010 Shell's floating liquefied natural gas technology was selected by the Sunrise Joint Venture for developing the Greater Sunrise gas fields in the Timor Sea. The Woodside-operated JV is now seeking to engage regulators on the concept selection process.[11]

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/12/australias-timor-spying-scandal-more-whistleblowers-emerge-2843220.html

Australia’s Timor Spying Scandal. More Whistleblowers Emerge

 

Woodside Petroleum colludes with Noble Energy. See Leviathan Natural Gas Field May Be Worth 70% More than Estimated 

Noble Energy is involved in Mediterranean gas i.e. with Cyprus & Israel

http://www.jewocity.com/blog/leviathan-natural-gas-field-may-be-worth-70-more-than-estimated/6427