https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/3266980

Trade mission to Uzbekistan? Could there be something about that? Doesn't sound like it, but you never know.

Trade? UK? Uzbekistan? Think Prince Andrew...

World leaders, mobsters, smog and mirrors INVESTIGATION: Who is the Kazakh-Turkish family behind so many football scandals? - https://theblacksea.eu/stories/football-leaks/the-football-leaks-family-world-leaders-mobsters-smoke-and-mirrors/

..The cause of the letter was a botched three-day, get-to-know-you meeting two weeks earlier. The board of the Qatari royals' venture firm, Qatar Investment & Projects Development Holding Co (QIPCO) had travelled to Turkey with a couple of billion dollars to invest and met with Arif Arif, a 27-year-old businessman and face of the Arif family's London-based trading companies, Doyen Capital and Doyen Sports. Arif - who is also known as Arif Efendi - promised the royals the highest-level meetings with government ministers and businessmen.

..This wasn’t bravado. Since setting up shop in Turkey, Tevfik had cultivated an impressive cabal of influential friends – and the list was growing. The dirty dealings of the Kazakh-Turkish Arif family, and their powerful friends, are exposed as the architects of the Doyen Group, the major subject of the Football Leaks data obtained by Der Spiegel and shared with EIC's media partners.

The millions of leaked internal emails, contracts and other company documents from the Doyen Group helped The Black Sea and EIC partners reveal the inner workings of a multi-billion Euro global enterprise founded in the toxic smog and violence of Kazakhstan's natural resources sector in the early 1990s.

..For a family who for decades had largely avoided unwanted publicity, the Savarona scandal in Turkey in 2010 was a dramatic coming out party. On 28 September 2010, officers from the Turkish gendarmerie stormed the deck of the Savarona, a luxury yacht once owned by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic. On board was Tevfik “Skip” Arif and a cabal of influential businessmen, mostly from Kazakhstan, being entertained by several young 'models' from Russian and Eastern Europe.

Months earlier, acting on a tip from an unnamed source, police began tapping the phones of a group of Turkish pimps and associates of Tevfik. Copies of transcripts contained in the Savarona indictment, obtained by The Black Sea, reveal that police first tracked Arif and his inner-circle when they arranged orgies with prostitutes, one of whom only 15 years old, at the Rixos Hotel Belek earlier in March. Then again as they prepared the bash on the Savarona.

After the police sting operation that morning in September, Arif was arrested on sex trafficking charges. For many in Turkey, it was the first time they had heard of the Kazakh-born businessman now accused of running a prostitution enterprise that included underage girls. The charges against him might have been ambitious, but the new fame was unwelcome and problematic. The sting had exposed Arif’s powerful, billionaire friends to the media spotlight.

..On board the yacht was the ‘Kazakh trio’, Alexander Mashkevich, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov. The three men, none of whom are from Kazakhstan, own the multi-billion Eurasian Natural Resources Company, a mining conglomerate with close ties to the President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

..When Arif was acquitted in 2011, the company hired UK firms, Bell Pottinger and Shillings, specialists in public relations and privacy, to cajole news organisation into removing references the Savarona affair. This was important for business. The Kazakh trio were seemingly crucial to the family's past and future success. It is a strange friendship that going back two decades to the early days of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan and the lucrative metals business.

..The men behind the Doyen are four secretive brothers from Kazakhstan: Refik Arif, Rustem Arif, Vakif Arif and Tevfik, born Tofic Arifov. Little is known about the other three, but Tevfik, an ethnic Turk born in Cambul, Kazakhstan in May 1953, earned an international relations degree from a university in Moscow. His first known job was in the USSR Ministry of Commerce and Trade in Kazakhstan in the late 70s, serving as the director of the department of hotel management.

..Over the next few years, The Cherneys and the Reuben Brothers spearheaded Trans World into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth in the natural resources sector, as it became the third biggest seller of aluminium in the world. To get to the top, the brothers played dirty - criminally dirty, say some.

It was during these years that the Arifovs likely crossed paths with the Kazakh trio. In an interview with EIC’s Belgium partner, Le Soir, Patokh Chodiev said that he, Mashkevich and Ibragimov first met the Reubens in Spring 1992. At the time, the trio were making billions selling copper on the international market through their British Virgin Islands company, Kazakhstan Mineral Resources Corporation, with the help of Kazakh officials.

Seeing a mutual interest, the Kazakh trio and the Reubens joined forces. They set up a network of offshore companies in the BVI, including one named KazChrome. It could not have hurt the fortunes of Tevfik, the Reubens or the Kazakh trio that Refik Arif, also born in Kazakhstan, in 1961, was from 1991 to 1999 senior manager at the Kazakh Ministry of Industry, and the “first point of contact for foreign investors wanting wishing to invest in phosphorous and ferroalloy”.

..Demirhan became useful almost immediately, during a scandal involving Sarah Ferguson, Britain's Duchess of York and former wife of Prince Andrew, brother of the heir to the British throne. In 2008, the Duchess took part in an undercover documentary on the shabby state of Turkey’s orphanages. In the film, disabled chidren were left in their own excrement and one, who was never let outside, had to lay in a corridor close to a window to feel the sunlight on his face.

The film prompted Turkey's Social Security and Child Services Authority and the Ministry of Family Affairs to lodge a criminal complaint against Ferguson for entering the country under false pretences, and claimed she was part of a “smearing campaign against Turkey by [those] opposing Turkey’s EU membership.”

The Ministry of Justice even issued an international arrest warrant. The Duchess turned to her friend in London, Arif Arif, and Demirhan, to defuse the crisis. Doyen drafted an apology letter for Ferguson addressed to Prime Minister Erdoğan explaining the misunderstanding. It is not clear if the letter was ever delivered, but the charges against Ferguson were eventually dropped.Aside from a little PR for former royals, Demirhan assisted Doyen in exploring education and gold deals in Turkey. But he also opened doors for Doyen.

Finally found some of the links between the USVI (Jeffrey Epstein) and BVI (Richard Branson)...