1115.org

Last week, I started the week, by writing about how Stephen Payne, a “lobbyist with close ties to the White House (was) offering access to key figures in George W Bush’s administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”

I ended the week by talking about the breathtaking dishonesty of John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann.

That was his breathtaking dishonesty on the subject of the Iraq war. But Scheunemann is a ranking member of the McCain campaign. Which pretty much guarantees that when it comes to breathtaking dishonesty, he’s hardly likely to be a one-trick pony.

So Sunday brought us a surprise convergence between these two stories. It turns out that:
— Stephen Payne may have also “acted as a conduit in the past for funds passed to elements connected to the Bush administration in return for access to its senior figures.
— Stephen Payne managed to do all this “lobbying” without ever registering as an agent for a foreign entity
— Randy Scheunemann makes a surprise guest appearance in this latest round of revelations.
— At the undercover meeting last week where Payne was recorded offering access to key figures in the Bush administration in return for six-figure donations to the Bush library , Payne bragged about having Scheunemann firmly in his pocket, saying that Scheunemann had been “working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years”.
— Scheunemann may also be linked to Payne’s past conduit misdeeds.

Here’s the Sunday Times (which broke the Payne story last week) spelling out the latest episode, about ” a $2m payment … allegedly made by a foreign government to secure a visit from Dick Cheney, the US vice-president.”

There are increasing suspicions, however, that Payne may have acted as a conduit in the past for funds passed to elements connected to the Bush administration in return for access to its senior figures.

In 2005 Payne, who is president of the US lobby firm Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP), was said to have agreed a $2m deal with the Kazakh government to arrange a visit by Cheney to the central Asian country.

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh president, wanted Cheney’s trip to be seen as an endorsement of his regime, which is widely considered to be repressive.

The visit, which took place in May 2006, caused surprise internationally for the lavish praise which Cheney heaped upon Nazarbayev.

Yerzhan Dosmukhamedov, who in 2005 was an adviser to Timur Kulibayev, a billionaire and son-in-law of Nazarbayev, was involved in the negotiations with Payne.

Dosmukhamedov, who has since founded an opposition party and gone into exile, said his negotiations, carried out at the behest of the Kazakh government, specified that Cheney would visit Kazakhstan.

He understood that the money was paid to Payne’s company via KazMunayGas (KMG), the Kazakh state-owned oil and gas company, on the understanding that some of it would be passed to people connected to the Bush administration.

Last week Payne, who has visited Kazakhstan several times including accompanying Cheney on his trip there, said no payment had occurred and that he had never closed a deal with KMG.

“Neither I, , nor any other entity that I am associated with have ever worked for any entity in Kazakhstan,” he said in a statement.

That’s a bald-faced lie, since entities that Payne is intimately associated with never got the memo, and confirmed to the Sunday Times that they work for entities in Kazakhstan. That, in fact, they represent Kazakh entities in the U.S. Even though they are not officially registered as doing so. Which is illegal, and is punishable by a fine or prison.

But I interrupted…

The Sunday Times, however, has discovered the existence of a channel through which funds from the Kazakh government could have been readily transferred.

A sister company to WSP, Worldwide Strategic Energy (WSE), of which Payne is also president, has a subsidiary, Caspian Alliance, which is the sole US representative for KMG.

The disclosure is contained within a draft of a 44-page WSE “placement memorandum” brochure circulated to potential energy investors last year. It adds that the Caspian Alliance was “providing KazMunayGas with political risk analysis as well as access to energy leaders and executives”.

The document shows a photograph of Payne, wearing traditional Kazakh dress, standing next to Kulibayev, who was vice-president of KMG until October 2005, when he became the chairman of KazEnergy, the country’s oil and gas umbrella organisation.

When contacted by The Sunday Times, staff at the Caspian Alliance, which is based in Azerbaijan, confirmed that it is a subsidiary of WSE and represents KMG in America.

In a further link, Randy Scheunemann, chief foreign policy and national security adviser to John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, was listed in the WSE brochure as part of its executive team. Scheunemann and Associates, his lobbying firm, is reported as having represented the Caspian Alliance in 2005.

At the undercover meeting last week, Payne said Scheunemann had been “working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years”. When confronted over the link to KMG, Payne declined to comment.