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His Majesty’s plunder: The royal machine behind the Trump Highway and Western Sahara’s phosphate wealth

The Cradle | August 3, 2026

There is a machine in the Sahara you can see from space. A conveyor belt, the longest on earth, nearly one hundred kilometers of steel from a mine called Bou Craa to the Atlantic. For half a century it has moved phosphate out of occupied Western Sahara, through wars, ceasefires, and a promised referendum that never came. The richest layer of the deposit is already gone, sold before the Sahrawis could ever vote on it. And the electricity that keeps the belt running is sold to the state by a wind farm belonging to the king.

On 26 July, US President Donald Trump announced that the highway running past this machine now carries his name. The announcement arrived as a four-minute Truth Social video, narrated by an obvious AI voice praising his “historic courage.” Rabat, six days on, has not said the name out loud. It does not need to. The name was never the payment.

The road is. It is 1,055 kilometers of settlement poured across Africa’s last colony, the kind of road empires have always built and named for themselves. It connects the mine, the port, an Israeli-held offshore block, and the duty-free fertilizer now sailing for New Orleans under an emergency Washington manufactured itself. Follow it far enough and the asphalt runs from phosphate to palace.

An occupation, bought in installments

Every payment has a paper trail, and this one begins five years before the name. The convention that built the road was signed in the presence of Moroccan King Mohammed VI in El-Aaiun (also known as Laayoune) in 2015, on the 40th anniversary of the Green March, at a cost of 10 billion Moroccan dirhams (MAD) – or around $1.074 billion. Morocco poured its annexation in asphalt, as empires always have, long before Washington blessed it. What arrived in December 2020 was not the road. It was the signature.

Morocco became the fourth Arab state to normalize relations with the occupation state, and in exchange the US recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the whole of Western Sahara. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, negotiated the deal and supplied the doctrine, likening the Sahara recognition to Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights. One occupation legitimized on the template of another. The architect said it so no analyst has to.

Tel Aviv paid its own installment in July 2023, when Netanyahu sent Mohammed VI a letter recognizing the Moroccan claim. A senior Moroccan official explained what the letter was for – Rabat expects the recognition to encourage Israeli investment in the territory. Recognition as prospectus. This is trans-Zionism as designed: the occupation state sets the template, Washington executes, the client kingdom collects.

What the road runs past

South of El-Aaiun, the machine comes back into view. The Bou Craa mine feeds its conveyor belt to the harbor at El-Aaiun, where bulk vessels have carried the territory’s wealth abroad since 1975. According to the figures of the world’s largest phosphate and fertilizer producer, Morocco’s OCP Group, Bou Craa delivers around a fifth of the company’s exports from just eight percent of its extracted volume. That is what occupations are for.

The quality tells its own story. Bou Craa’s deposit sits in two layers, and Western Sahara Resource Watch, which tracks every bulk shipment out of El-Aaiun, documented that Morocco has practically sold off the high-grade layer that should have been available to the Sahrawi people, mining the poorer second seam since 2014. What remains is the residue.

None of this is legally ambiguous. The UN’s legal counsel concluded in 2002 that further exploitation of the territory’s resources against the wishes of its people would violate international law. A South African court ruled in 2018 that ownership of a phosphate cargo from El-Aaiun was never lawfully vested in OCP at all. The company ships stolen goods. A court has said so. The road Trump wants his name on is the overland artery of that trade.

An emergency of Washington’s own making

The American market took the long way round. In 2021, Washington slapped a 19.97 percent countervailing duty on OCP after Florida’s Mosaic Company complained of subsidized competition. The rate yo-yoed for five years until a trade court cut it to 2.11 percent in December 2025 and Washington quietly dropped its appeal. Then came the war.

Washington’s strikes on Iran choked the Strait of Hormuz, the artery for roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade. Prices climbed, farmers rationed, and on 29 June Trump declared a national emergency under a Depression-era clause of the 1930 Tariff Act, suspending the duties entirely. The suspension is time-bound, not volume-bound: a USDA official confirmed OCP can ship unlimited tonnage for eight months. Washington set fire to the supply chain, declared an emergency over the smoke, and handed the normalization partner the keys to the American market.

Now examine what sails in. North African sedimentary phosphate is naturally high in cadmium, a carcinogen the EU capped at 60 milligrams per kilo in its fertilizers. OCP’s response was to lobby against the cap, hiring Dechert LLP and Edelman and proposing Brussels raise the limit to 80. The US has no comparable federal ceiling, leaving oversight to a patchwork of state rules. Europe’s restricted rock has found a market with no thermostat. American capital wasted no time: two weeks after the proclamation, US-based firm Koch Ag signed a joint venture stake in OCP’s fertilizer complex at Jorf Lasfar. The same conglomerate poured half a billion dollars into the occupation state’s tech sector through its investment arm Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), built under Eli Groner, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former top civil servant, settled in the occupied West Bank.

From phosphate to palace

Tracing the flow of revenue shows that it extends beyond the state treasury. OCP belongs to the Moroccan state. But the throne sits atop a parallel structure: the royal family controls roughly 60 percent of the Al-Mada conglomerate through personal holdings named SIGER and ERGIS, both derived from regis, Latin for king, feeding a fund in which Mohammed VI holds 50.6 percent. SIGER’s director, Mounir Majidi, is also the king’s private secretary: one man running the head of state’s office and the family vault.

Al-Mada’s energy arm, Nareva, is where the phosphate money turns royal. The wind farm at Foum el-Oued, built by a wholly-owned Nareva subsidiary, supplies nearly all the electricity OCP needs to mine Bou Craa, run the conveyor belt, and wash the rock for export. The state plunders the phosphate. The king sells the state the power that does the plundering. Every tonne leaving El-Aaiun has burned royal electricity first. All but one wind farm in the occupied territory sits in Nareva’s portfolio, and WSRW poses the question that answers itself: why would a king who profits from occupation ever back a UN peace process?

Moroccan outlet Barlamane reported that quantities invoiced on the expressway far exceeded the work actually built, prompting the equipment minister to bar the implicated survey bureau from public contracts for five years. On the road to Dakhla, even the overcharging is infrastructure.

The name was never the payment

Empires have always paved roads through conquered land and called it civilization. Rome did it, France did it in this same desert, and in July 2026 the tradition produced its densest month yet: duty-free phosphate sailing for New Orleans, Kosh Ag signing into Jorf Lasfar, and an American president naming a highway across a territory that was never Morocco’s to give. The belt at Bou Craa keeps turning, the royal turbines keep spinning, the receipts keep printing – and the only thing Rabat has still not done is say the name out loud.

August 3, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Comments Off on His Majesty’s plunder: The royal machine behind the Trump Highway and Western Sahara’s phosphate wealth

Israel protects Mexican official wanted for mass kidnap-murder, along with accused sex criminals and fraudsters

Israel is home to droves of international criminals

By Nate Bear – ¡DoNotPanic! – July 31, 2026

Israel has become a haven for international criminals. Many are dual-nationals who have taken advantage of their ability to move seamlessly between Israel and their second country of citizenship to commit crimes and, in some cases, evade justice.

The scale of the criminality, and the volume of cases (relative to the population of Israel), is astonishing.

Among the most notorious accused criminals being protected from justice by Israel is Timur Mindich, the ultimate financial beneficiary of the Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point. Mindich fled to Israel last year, just days before being charged as the mastermind behind a $100 million embezzlement scheme involving Ukraine’s state nuclear power company. Mindich also happens to be the co-owner of Kvartal 95 Studio, the production company founded by Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mindich, like many in this article, has taken advantage of Israel’s controversial Law of Return which allows any Jew in the world to claim Israeli citizenship without having to renounce their home country passport.

Some of those accused and charged have made minor or international headlines, some haven’t, but the scale of the issue was such that I thought it would be useful to document my research here.

In some cases, Israel has refused to extradite the wanted person despite requests from the country in which the crimes were committed.

Staying on Ukraine and refused extradition requests, we have Oleksandr Dubilet, the former Chairman of the Board of Ukraine’s PrivatBank. Dubilet is currently a fugitive in Israel and the subject of multiple criminal investigations and extradition requests for his role in embezzling at least $100 million dollars following the 2016 privatisation of PrivatBank. To date, Israel has refused to extradite him.

Israel as a bolthole for financial fraudsters is a common theme. One of the most significant SEC fraud cases in recent years involved over 150 Israelis (some with dual US-Israeli nationality, others not), wanted for their role in conducting binary options fraud worth upwards of $100 billion.

Binary options are a type of financial bet where the outcome is essentially all-or-nothing. Instead of buying a stock or currency, you bet on whether the price of a stock or currency will be above or below a certain level at a specific time. While not illegal, the Israeli companies were accused of rigging and manipulating prices and expiry times and using fake identities.

For a decade until 2017, Israel was the global centre for the online binary-options industry. The Israeli police failed to investigate, so hundreds of cases were filed in Israeli courts by people from dozens of countries who had been defrauded.

One of the most notorious fraudsters was Lee Elbaz, the CEO of Yukom Communications, a dual US-Israeli national. She was arrested in 2017 when on holiday in New York and eventually convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Other prime Israeli movers in the binary options fraud business were Yossi Herzog and Yakov Cohen, both connected with Yukom and other binary options front companies. They were charged with $140 million fraud in 2019 but despite being under a DOJ criminal investigation the US choose not to pursue their extradition, while other Israeli co-conspirators in the Yukom case have joined Elbaz in serving jail sentences.

Other Israeli kingpins in the binary options sector include Ran Amiran and Malhaz Patarkazishvili, also known as Pini Peter. They were charged with $100 million fraud by the SEC for their role managing the fraudulent options trader Spot Option. Because it was a civil case and the DOJ wasn’t involved they weren’t eligible for extradition from Israel and continue to reside in Israel. It was reported in 2021 that Amiran had reached a financial settlement for the damages with the SEC, likely so that he could once again travel to the US. Peter, a friend of Netanyahu’s, remains unrepentant, despite being ordered to pay the US government $87 million, a judgment he has appealed.

Benjamin Netanyahu with financial fraudster Pini Peter

There are hundreds of other Israel-linked individuals charged with binary options fraud identified on the SEC website, including joint German-Israel nationals Gil and Raz Beserglik who ran binary options call centres out of Germany to scam people.

Another hotbed of Israeli fraud is the moving industry, where companies pose as legitimate household goods movers only to steal belongings or withhold items unless additional payment is made. One of the largest “hostage load” prosecutions was of Advanced Moving Systems, an Israeli-run company which lured customers with artificially low moving estimates and then extorted them by holding their household goods hostage until they paid fraudulently inflated prices. Many of the dozens of people behind the scam remain wanted, with their current location unknown. Dozens of other Israelis connected with fraudulent moving companies also remain on the run, and have likely fled to Israel. (Incidentally, the Israelis arrested by the FBI on September 11th and quickly released were working for a Mossad counterintelligence operation using a moving company as cover. But that’s another story).

Penny stock fraud is another rich seam for Israeli crooks. This type of fraud takes place when the stocks of small companies trading under $5 a share are marketed to often older and uniformed people using high pressure sales marketing tactics, with the caller promising guaranteed returns, often claiming to have inside information. One of the largest instances in recent years saw dual US-Israeli citizen Sharone “Barry” Perlstein and numerous Israeli co-conspirators charged with creating at least 15 fraudulent public shell companies to sell millions of dollars worth of penny stocks using fraudulent tactics. Previous penny stock fraud cases had also involved Israeli nationals.

The diamond industry has also attracted a fair share of Israeli swindlers. One of the most well-known is Mordechai “Moti” Ferder, a California-based luxury jeweller at the centre of one of the largest fraud scandals in the American jewellery industry. Ferder was accused of juicing his company’s accounts to boost the valuation before selling to an investment company, while in reality he was racking up liabilities worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2025, with an FBI investigation underway, Ferder fled California for Tel Aviv.

Then there is Gery Shalon, the Georgia-born Israeli responsible for hacking JP Morgan and carrying out the largest theft of customer data from an American financial institution in history.

Outside the fraud cases, Israel also attracts politicians attempting to shield themselves from justice in their home countries. One of the most notorious and ongoing cases is that of Tomás Zerón, the former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency of Mexico. Zerón, who received training in Israel before assuming control of Mexico’s version of the FBI, is accused by Mexican authorities of having direct involvement in the kidnap, torture, and likely murder of dozens of university students.

The Ayotzinapa kidnapping is considered one of Mexico’s most heinous human rights abuse cases. It took place in 2014, when forty-three leftist students were kidnapped and disappeared on their way to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Zerón is said to have known or ordered the students to be handed over to a cartel group to be murdered and disposed of. The former Mexican top cop promptly fled to Israel after being officially accused of participating in the crime.

Despite an extradition order, an Interpol red notice and numerous requests from Mexico to hand him over, Israel has refused, reportedly as punishment for Mexico’s criticism of Israel at the UN.

Another Mexican diplomat who fled to Israel is Andrés Roemer. Formerly Mexico’s Ambassador to UNESCO based in Paris, and Consul General of Mexico in San Francisco, Roemer fled to Israel in 2021 after being accused by 61 women of rape and sexual assault. While a Jerusalem court has authorized the former diplomat’s extradition to Mexico, he remains in Israel under house arrest.

Roemer is not alone among Jewish sex criminals fleeing from justice in the home countries to Israel. The phenomenon is so prevalent that even CBS News has covered it. Probably the most famous accused sex criminals to have fled to Israel are the Hollywood directors Brett Ratner and Bryan Singer. Rush Hour director Ratner, a good friend of Netanyahu’s, fled to Israel in 2023 after being accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct and assault on set.

Singer, the director of two X-Men films and the 1990’s hit, The Usual Suspects, fled to Israel around 2020 after being accused of sexual abuse, including of children.

Brett Ratner with Benjamin and Sarah Netanyahu, and ultra-Zionist attorney Alan Dershowitz

Israel is a magnet for criminals of all flavors, making this brief compendium just the tip of the iceberg. The Law of Return, known to be policed very lightly, is a gateway allowing Jews to use their dual nationality to commit crimes and then swerve justice under an ethno-supremacist legal regime set up to protect them. Some succeed in avoiding justice, while others are not so lucky.

August 3, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Comments Off on Israel protects Mexican official wanted for mass kidnap-murder, along with accused sex criminals and fraudsters