I've just gotten around to Googling the address of the sole and anonymous testimonial provider and come up with this contract form.  It belongs to a Perth based company called Search World, one of those e-businesses that influences websearch rankings to optimise a company's internet appearance.

 It looks to me that somebody has goofed.  If the only person that Firepower could find as an endorsee is their internet ad-man, doesn't this make the testimonial a fallacy?

At any rate, the company's internet image has changed somewhat of late.

The added product data on the site seems to be mostly concerned with soot, sludge and smoke.  As far as I can see the pictric acid (explosive) and detergent composition of Firepower products, of which there are plenty of US patents, still holds as likely. 

Has Firepower not patented its products because ithey're patented already?  I'd take a guess that if the group applied for a patent they'd probably get knocked back.

How, you wonder, was Austrade so negligent as to not know that their white kinght of carbon emission came to them with an already blackened reputation?  Ryle reports in today's SMH  that Johnston had made sworn statements in New Zealand containing false claims of Australian testing, and had tried to block the release of documentation that proved that his product-of-the-day was a placebo.  You'd think that DFAT, ASIO or the US Embassy (apparently interchangeable these days) would have sent a communique back to Canberra for Downer to deny reading.

Somebody really needs to ask Firepower CEO Finnin what he was talking to Saddam's co-owners of Alia about.

Paul Walter, on the day that the PM visited the Murray Mouth for a photo-op, it was timely to read that piece.  I found these lines eye-catching

Separating water from land is just the first move in a number of legal rewritings which we can expect to see in coming years.

If you think Howard’s move on saving the Murray Darling Basin is important, look closer, read the small print, look out for separations. They are markers of far worse things to come.

 Howard was very close today to the tract of water in which Premier Rann was advocating a Public Private Partnership, the Twin Lakes project I keep harping on about.  Are the "public" component of such plans on the Murray about to move under Howard's control?  By the way the fact that Howard has just announced spending all this money affirming the freshwater nature of the Coorong makes it highly unlikely that Turnbull is going to bung a weir across and turn it all back to a saltwater based environment.   The  most likely water control now would be the Halliburton partnership, which promises to save each year the water volume that the PM has magnanimously condescended to send down.   If he now has control over such projects then he can more than easily afford to do so.

It looks to me that the instigations of the previous Sate Liberal Government have just been stolen back by Liberal at a Federal level.

As Howard was being chauffeured to the Murray Mouth, he might have been reading this in yesterday's Advertiser:

[extract]

MORE than $1 billion worth of infrastructure works are in progress in the Port Adelaide region ahead of a defence and housing boom.

Freight links in the city's north-west are being upgraded, with bipartisan support, as the Port is about to be transformed by the $1.5 billion Newport Quays inner harbour redevelopment and the $6 billion air warfare destroyer contract.

Long-awaited $178 million opening road and rail bridges over the Port River are expected to be finished this year.

The road bridge, which connects the $90 million Port River Expressway with Victoria Rd, will achieve the longstanding ambition of diverting trucks from the Port Centre.

Both bridges will open for shipping with the road span expected to be finished by the end of the year and the rail link by the middle of the year.

The rail bridge connects with the Le Fevre Peninsula rail corridor, which is being upgraded to dual track as part of a $24 million program.

This will link with the container terminal and $100 million Outer Harbor grain terminal, operated by ABB Grain, which is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

A dredging of Outer Harbor's channel was finished last year, extending it from 9km to 11.7km and deepening the channel by 2m to 14.2m. The $45 million project was jointly funded by the State Government and Flinders Ports.

A $24 million marina is being built at Largs North, which will house the Port Adelaide Sailing Club - relocated from the inner harbour.

The joint state / federal Northern Expressway, expected to cost $550 million, will link with the Port River Expressway via Port Wakefield Rd.

The air warfare destroyer construction, based at Osborne's ASC, is an important driver of the freight link upgrades. As part of the deal to secure the contract, the State Government will spend $243 million on a defence precinct for subcontractors and others involved in the destroyer construction

Toto, I don't think we're in Romania any more.  Anyway as Paul Starick's piece was being posted I was finishing a Halliburton Australia recap which I recommend you read

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

The style of approach being used here is quite similar to the one applied in Romania. 

Richard Tonkin: "...a stageplay underway... The name ...Cheney comes to mind...sabotage of the gas pipeline to Romania...now apparently an opening move in a Halliburton-partnered national take over...a blatant move by Cheney  manipulating local resources to increase his profits. Would such a code of ethics have been  applied to  Australia.  Perhaps someone should ask  Cheney when he comes to Australia in a couple of weeks".

Well, all this talk of  Halliburton, pipelines and privatisation had me re-reading  Dr. Susan Hawthorne's article, "Unbundling water from land", in "Online  opinion",15/1/07 ( yes, I know I said  I wouldn't post  again, but this is a different thread,  Richard has my respect and I can hope Kingston allows me a fair go since she appears to be "back", so here we are).

The Hawthorne article has much to say on privatisation of water, "concessions", the  AUSFTA and asociated possible legal changes favourable to Bechtel/Halliburton/KBR at the expense of other international water-giants and much to say on the legal mumbo-jumbo that ruins previous rules of access to and control of water, that protected Australians and their environment. 

Given the recent noises involving water policy, perhaps Tricky Dicky Cheney has another item on his agenda; another reason for visiting our fair shores at this time of times? 

Crikey's Michael Pascoe has had a look at Firepower's substantiative documentation and found it, shall we say, lacking a little.

Instead of the stack of documents 30 centimetres thick indicated by CEO John Finnin, it was a much thinner file and most of it was irrelevant.

The promised tests by DEKRA and San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute weren’t about fuel efficiency and emissions, just showing Firepower’s additives didn’t change the fuel’s ratings, i.e. fuel with the additive still met engine specifications.

Which left three making fuel efficiency claims. Firepower would only allow the documents to be sighted, not copied or taken away. (Apparently Firepower is concerned that its competitors would copy the documents and change the name to their own – that’s the sort of business this magic fuel pill is.)

 Meanwhile, over at the SMH Gerard Ryle has, apart from finding out the same stuff as Crikey, been doing some digging into that George Teleman bloke I mentioned two weeks back.  It turns out that Teleman did more than act on Equest's behalf to set up Firepower's Romanian deals.  He was, in fact, the 90% owner of Firepower Romania,  the other 10% owned from Australia.  He was also, Ryle learned from the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, a close relative of a couple of Ceaucescus.

Teleman also was a financial consultant to Regal, the company headed by the German Halliburton (now Firepower) chiefl  Regal, Halliburton and Timmin's (the bloke who was putting Australian money into Regal) Canadian company failed to get control of the privatisation of Romanian petroleum.

Given the level of nepotism at play here you have to wonder at how high a level this activity is being co-ordinated.  It now appears likely that the Halliburton chief was also acting as a "front".  If so Note could be acting for other powers than the Russian mob.  So could Tinnis.  The fact that after such chessmanship these gentlemen became the head honchos of Firepower suggests to me that there has been a stageplay under way.

The name Dick Cheney springs to mind.  

If,as  the Russians thought, Regal was funding the sabotage of the the gas pipeline to Romania, now apparently an opening move in a Halliburton-partnered national takeover, then you're probably  looking at a blatant example of Cheney manipulating local resources to maximise his profits.

Would such a code of ethics have been applied to Australia?  Perhaps somebody should ask Cheney when he comes to Australia in a couple of weeks to discuss Asian security and the War On Terror.

I've finally watched the World's Fastest Indian.   Anthony Hopkins plays a crusty old New Zealand enginesmith who drops a nitroglycerine tablet in his bike engine just before his record-breaking ride at Bonneville. This  review extract sums up what caught my eye:

Before he starts a speed run, he takes two pills out of the bottle. He sticks one under his tongue to ward off a heart attack. He drops the other one into the gas tank to give the motorcycle an extra burst of power.

It set me wondering whether Firepower's fuel additive was something so simple, or almost.  On my first search I came up with this US patent application, an new process to make a fuel additive.  It notes:

Numerous patents have been granted for processes which utilize picric acid, some form of iron, and a solvent to produce an additive for hydrocarbon fuels which increases the efficiency of the combustion of such fuels, resulting in better mileage, reduced deposits within the engine, and a smaller quantity of pollutants in the exhaust.

Picric acid was used commonly as an military explosive before TNT

The ingredient that appears often in the process under application here , hydroquinone, is a bleaching agent used in beauty products.   Apparently it has a stabilising effect in the process. Could it also be used to "whitewash" black smoke.?   If somebody's thought this much about putting it in engines. bet that it does.  Unfortunately it appears to be toxic if taken internally, so I guess you wouldn't want to much of it in the air. 

What relationship has all this  to the Romanian Rosia Montana mine's cyanide sludge?l.  A "solution" for the problem, perhaps?   There was scientific work going on in Romania in the '60s.

[extract]

An improved spectrophotometric assay of hydrocyanic acid and cyanide ions with picric acid and resorcinol is described. Cyanides at low concentrations in water (0-10 μg mL[-][1] CN-) and hydrocyanic acid collected in dilutesodium hydroxide solution react with a solution of 2% sodium carbonate containing 210 μg mL[-][1] of picric acid and 100 μg mL[-][1] of resorcinol to form a novel indophenol compound,

 One such compound, dichlorophenolindophenol, or DCPI,  can be used as an oxidation-reduction indicator that undergoes a definite colour change at a specific electrode potential.  Something like this is bound to make your factory and engine smoke whiter.

Come to think of it, is the Rosia Montana one big Firepower Factory, a "natural" combiner of the "energy pill" ingredients?

It's ironic, isn't it, that the World's Fastest Indian's additive (nitroglycerine to methanol being another thing altogether ?) and Firepower are probably two of the best known fuel additive stories in the wold today,  and yet the geographical corellation ()Firepower having originally been PowerMax from New Zealand) goes unmentioned in the blurbs.  You'd think it would be a publicists' "gold mine."

I know I'm not quite there yet, but this feels closer.

Firepower's website is webmastered from Dubai. Suspicions?  Does this mean that any false claims that might be made therin aren't prosecutable under Australian law?  I picked up this info from a motorsport forum on which the some of  petrolheads have made the assumption that the name is some kind of inside joke for activities involving arms deals laundering.  One bright spark has pointed out that USSR-favourable deals in third world countries were carried out by front companies on behalf of the KGB.

 I begin to wonder, reading this convolutedly Google-translated report.  if Firepowers products have been more successful in Russia because of what is/was going into Russian engines.

[extract]

For sulphur engine is both useful and harmful. Reducing its concentration in the summer without compensation dramatically increases the speed of wear .Incidentally, it was mud and water in the fuel, the main causes of failure for numerous brand service stations. On the other hand, a surplus of sulphur in the fuel significantly accelerates corrosion work surfaces capacity and the pace of ageing engine oil. .... The composition of the fuel should be made to European standards : there regulate and cetane number, and sulphur content, as well as low temperature properties, etc. But the essential thing is sulphur and diesel.

 I notice that Firepower is no longer  a success story on Austrade's Russian website. 

There is another Firepower site than the one from Dubai with the Russian translation.  If you put firepowergroup.ru through the Google translator you get a clean job, and a much more comprehensive website than the one we've been looking at.  The translation may be a bit dodgy where Firepower claims to be the owner of the technology's patents.  Especially when Mr Finnen says that the tecnology is patent free.  Anybody out there who can read Russian?

From the Russian site  it looks like the stuff takes out the water in the air in engines.  Whether or not this does more that deny the black stuff in smoke something to cling to remains to be seen. 

When you go back to "our" Firepower site, it's  obvious that provision of information is much more  important in Russia than here.  In Australia it's only important that the group looks big. We don't have so much mud in our fuel.

Firepower are investing in Romania under their own steam, through The Isle Of Man based Balkan subsidiary of London investment advisors  Equest.   They're the ones who set up the Firepower/BAE partnership, I don't yet know what else was in the portfolio Equest's George Teleman developed for Firepower.  besides the $34.5 million Euro shopping mall 

I do know the same Romanian legal firm looking after the shopping mall deal over the last two years handled: 

A US$850 million investment related to a mining project following the joint venture between Gabriel Resources Ltd [Aussie  Tinnis' ]., a Canadian mining group, and the Romanian state-owned company Minvest, for the purpose of exploration and exploitation of the biggest gold and silver mining site in Europe, Rosia Montana

Do you wonder how much of this $US 850 million ends up in the hands of Halliburton?  And what's the chance of a chunk of the cash being Saddam's ?

Now I'm wondering how much Australian sport sponsorship money is tax deductible.

Hang on, I've just found this Romanian Daily report on the total 100 million Euros that Equest has invested in Romania

Equest Balkan expects 9-10 percent yearly yield for their investment and the first acquisitions target properties are in Bucharest and Iasi (north-east; 406 km from Bucharest).

The company is already operating on the real estate market in Bulgaria, with the latest project in which it was involved being a major shopping complex.

Equest Balkan also focuses on the real estate markets in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Fyrom, Serbia and Montenegro, and Turkey.

The capital of the company raised through an issue of shares in the London Stock Exchange that was oversubscribed.

You realise, of course, that this money chain makes it look much worse that Austrade/Firepower's Finnin was having a cuppa with Alia?

That's all for tonight. 

PS Bet your bottom dollar that Russell Crowe knew none of this when he announced the Firepower sponsorship on  Jay Leno's show. 

From Alexander's Oil and Gas Connections, March 2004:

Last autumn, the British operator even tried to enter the race for the takeover of SNP (National Oil Company) Petrom, Romania's biggest company and submitted a joint letter of intent together with US-based Halliburton and Romanian company Tender.
However, the Romanian authorities rejected the bid of the three companies, arguing they failed to meet the criteria included in the privatisation announcement.

I found a bit more on the Halliburton connection Ryle reports in the SMH today on the website of the Romanian Centre For Investigative Journalism:

The name of the “REGAL Petroleum” company is mentioned in a letter addressed in 1999 by the Russian giant company GAZPROM to the then Romanian prime minister, Mugur Isarescu. GAZPROM says in the letter that “REGAL Petroleum” works together with the Ukrainian organized crime groups that steal gas from GAZPROM pipelines and sell it afterwards to Romania.
At this very moment, Regal has activities in Ukraine and Romania where its partner is the “Prospectiuni SA” company that belongs to Ovidiu Tender .

Ovidiu Tender told us in an interview that he met Guenter Nolte, the general manager of Halliburton Germany, in 2000 but he denies that Nolte facilitated his alliance with the Halliburton group for the privatization of PETROM. He said we should talk to Frank Timis.
A very important fact in this context is that the branch of Halliburton in Romania is the “Halliburton Energy Services Romania SRL” which has as sole representative the Dutch citizen Tako Jan Kremer. Kremer is in the meantime a director of Halliburton Germany where until March he was a colleague of Guenter Nolte. Ovidiu Tender told us that he doesn’t know any Tako Jan Kremer the representative of Halliburton in Romania. Besides representing Halliburton in Romania, Kremer is a director in the following companies, all tied to the Halliburton group: “Halliburton Company Austria Gmbh”, “Baroid Gmbh” from Germany and “Kellog Brown & Root Gmbh”(KBR)

Ryle quotes The Independent as reporting that Regal was initially funded by a group of  private Australian investors.  who, it would seem, bailed out after the initial float, but not before the ex-Halliburton chief resigned from Regal to represent Firepower.

The question is whether Nolte was so close to mob money before or after his tenure at Regal.

Aside: Isn't it funny how this has all happened just after the Romanians privatised their energy?  I hope Hugo Chavez is taking notes.

Actually, following it through you've appear to have group of Australians financing the infrastructure for local crime lords to comprise the  Romanian energy system.  I wonder who's funding that of ours?

I also wonder what blueprints for Romania were on file at Halliburton's  Global Infrastructure Headquarters in Adelaide? 

 Oddly my mind turns back to the hazelnut farm that KBR has just constructed on the banks of the Murray to attract overseas investors.  It seemed odd enough already, what  with the water crisis and the same engineer who did the Twin Lakes water reclamation plan.

Hell, if they can do it to the Romanians....

At any rate, the links from Firepower to drug money have just become much more substantial.

All these articles do is show us that, in spite of the brainwashings we're consistently subjected to telling us that living in our democracy means living in an open society where both public opinion and accountability matter , we are far away from that.

How can we change that?

Can anyone tell me how I could find out how much money Firepower gave Austrade as a major sponsor to 2005's Australia Week in Moscow?  I can't work out this financial looping in which Austrade gives Firepower money, iand then Firepower reciprocate.  When Austrade says that Firepower paid for the bodyguards that Austrade hired for Johnston, with such a set of interchangeable funds how could they tell?

Inadvertently my mind has flipped across to Australia Week in the USA., and I'm now wondering if Austrade might be pulling a similar scam there.  There'd be a lot more roublesi involved if they were.   For starters, there's now a shadow over f DFAT's employment  of Firepower's Rabbitohs co-owner..

(Crowe's Rabbitohs partner is WA businessman Peter Holmes a Courte.)

Hypothetically it's possible that Downer is hosting an event funded by Australian Government laundered Russian mob money.  I wonder what Russell would think of this?  You'd also think that Mr Holmes a Court would 've done  more homework on a  business from his home patch before he took their money.

There were no doubt other places than the US in which the Russian mob were interested in doing their laundry. There's no reason to presume that WA isn't one of them.

I should use the ilk of Coca- Cola as fuel for my car (if I owned one)?

Although, I remember a lad we knew back in the old days who had made enemies having his car shagged after someone put some sugar in its petrol tank. So much to ponder, so will stick to a couple of obvious simple issues.

Firstly, can I applaud the obviously systematic and thorough rigour with which the Trade folk assess candidates for dollops of largesse? Wish someone would hand ME a fat sum like $400,000, simply for the way I held my face. In this most just of countries, of course.

Pascoe was right when he said the country remains "asleep" and it seems the malignant tsetse-tsetse may be rife at Austrade. I share Richard Tonkin's alarm. If this can get up, how many other lurks are being bled out this sector alone, let alone the rest of the system, this very same economy that we're told monotonously can't afford hospitals, universities and schools, or conservation, to name but a few of many goods.

I recall a conservative contributor here, Jay White alluding obliquely somewhere recently to the old and majestic Bottom of the Harbour rorts of the early 'eighties. It's always fascinating to watch how the system morphs rather than reforms.

$400,000!

On the outrageous criteria demonstrated, by example at the press conference and websites, including nil documentation, verification of product detail, let alone corporate structure and bookwork or relevant accreditation.

Why are more of the press not demanding some sort of enquiry into the way the Department runs its affairs on behalf of that already egregiously abused source, the financially outraged and intellectually insulted Australian public?

Where are the politicians responsible, at this time when reassurance is needed?

The number of hits the last few days must have someone in Austrade cacking 'em. When s/he learns that a Google cache can still be seen, well ... there's likely to be a big stink ... know what I mean.

I wonder what was on that webpage that they are worried about. Was it this bit?

"Firepower Group has signed a three-year contract with Astana Oil (Kazakhstan), which plans to use Firepower technology to improve fuel quality and to prevent diesel fuel from freezing during the cold winters of Central Asia, where temperatures can drop as low as 40° C below zero."

Were they worried about this because it may be the same Astana Oil appearing on the bankrupt list last year?

Further ruminations: 

The combination of the quick-smart calling of Finnin's media conference and the rapid removal of Firepower from the Austrade site is a beauty of a "coincidence".   All it took was the mention of the words Alia and Austrade in the same SMH piece and abracadbra!

Who gave the order - Howard, Downer or Vaile?  To get everyone jumping through hoops so quickly would require a magician of particular prestidigitatory prowess.  If not these three, then some very senior 'helpers" at least.

My suspicion is that there's much more to the Alia connection,  especially when you consider that Finnin's chat with the honchos was six months after the invasion, and after (if not at) the time when the CPA became aware of what AWB were doing.

I keep on coming back to a difficulty in believing, if such a senior representative of Austrade was aware of Alia so far before the Volcker Inquiry, that his superiors did not.  Finnin, operating at his level, wouldn't have had a hell of a lot of superiors.

Which leads to my next question: as the most senior Austrade representative in the region, for how long had Finnin been aware of Alia, and how much did he know?  Was he aware of the US embassy gossip that had been around for years?  Supplementary question: why was he talking to Alia ?

Finnin's departure from Austrade to Firepower occurred roughly around the end of the Volcker Inquiry.  Might this have been the "circuit breaker" that allowed Messers H, D and V to swear on the Bible that they didn't know anything about the AWB kickbacks?   I'd bet that the departure from public service of such a person could be the stuff of potential political salvation, and worthy of a considerable price, in barter if not banknotes.

It's not a good look when someone with strong links to money launderers is talking to people with dirty money,  when that someone is the Australian Government's most important local sales rep.

This could be a bumper year for brown trousers sales in Canberra, I reckon.