January 7th, 2006.

Prince Albert and I had just finished discussing Philippe NARMINO and the pressure the Prince felt to appoint NARMINO chief of judicial services.

Now we moved onto other items on my agenda:

The Prince was astonished to hear that SIGER could not access records from Monaco’s maritime registry, or other such registries, and had to pull favors from officers to gain documentary evidence against NARMINO and others.

The Prince vowed to proceed with my plan to reorganize and strengthen SIGER with wider powers.

Next, we discussed the police chief, who, I insisted, had to go because of poor morale and a general lack of direction within the police department.

The Prince agreed, confirming that he would not renew the chief’s tenure in July.

Igor YOURGENS: The Prince shared my incredulity that the external affairs ministry did not possess a dossier on the man who had supposedly become Monaco’s consul to Moscow.

Thus, I briefed the Prince on Igor Yourevitch YOURGENS, born November 6th, 1962 in Moscow, nominated (nobody knew by whom) on November 4th, 2005, to be Consul General de Monaco to Moscow. He worked in Paris in the mid-1980s, as an interpreter for UNESCO, but in fact was a KGB officer, operating undercover, whose specialties were labor unions and disinformation. In Monaco, YOURGENS linked to a Russian company on our radar screen that connected to money laundering and Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.

I advised the Prince that former employment with the KGB should disqualify YOURGENS from representing Monaco in Moscow.

David IAKOBACHVILI: Born March 2nd, 1957, in Tblissi, Georgia, with Swedish nationality, IAKOBACHVILI linked, since the 1990s, to Baumanskaya, a branch of the Solntsevo organized crime group. In 1995, IAKOBACHVILI was questioned in France on behalf of the Kazakhstan Republic in a case of corruption and embezzlement of public funds through a company in Nice called Mediterranean Trade Invest, set up in Valbonne in 1990. IAKOBACHVILI had been in a partner in two Russian companies--Cherri Casino and Trinity Motors--linked to organized crime figures; his partner at Trinity Motors, Vladislas VIGORBIN, was murdered in 1995 in Moscow by the Red Mafia. VIGORBIN had been an active member in the Baumanskaya organized crime group, which specialized in cocaine traffic and money laundering.

Furthermore, intelligence collection suggested IACOBACHVILI had deposited money into an investment fund in Geneva called Ficogex SA, which then passed money to a Geneva company--Atrax Properties Ltd--allegedly owned by Stephane VALERI, President of Monaco's Conseil National (General Assembly), in the name of Maurice CHRISTIE, a Swiss nominee and the company’s manager. Hence, it looked as though VALERI had received money from IAKOBACVILI to support his presence in Monaco. IAKOBACHVILI had wanted a bank account in Monaco, but was blocked until VALERI interceded on his behalf and got HSBC chairman Gerard COHEN to personally approve an account.

I advised the Prince against allowing IAKOBACHVILI to become Russia’s Consul to Monaco.

The New Zealand brothers, Richard and Christopher CHANDLER: Their Dubai move had not worked out and they had returned to Monaco. Apparently, even Dubai, the new money laundering capital of the world, had refused their company a license to do business! So, again, the CHANDLERS, with twenty-six employees, were conducting business illegally inside the principality. I recommended seizing their (mostly) empty apartment building in lieu of unpaid business taxes. Since they hated publicity in deference to an extremely low profile (for good reason), the brothers would likely walk rather than fight, and Monaco would be a hundred and fifty million euros richer. It would also serve as a lesson to others in Monaco not to conduct business without proper registration.

On Jean-Luc ALLAVENA (JLA): I sang his praises. JLA arrived at his office by seven-thirty each morning and remained until midnight most weeknights. The bureaucrats were upset because they finally had to work, and the government was upset because, for the first time in ten years, the Palace was running the principality, as Monaco’s Constitution intended.

“Try twenty,” the Prince drily commented.

At meeting’s end, the Prince delighted in telling me that while in Cape Town at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by Preston HASKINS, he had become reacquainted with a South African swimmer named Charlene WITTSTOCK.

The glint in the Prince’s eye suggested she meant more to him than most other women. Which suggested that his male entourage might soon be looking for ways to sabotage the relationship, as it would hinder the visiting of strip-clubs and brothels and womanizing on the Prince’s coattails.

(Five years earlier it was the same story, when the Prince had a girlfriend named Alicia WARLICK. Th" fellers" around the Prince conspired to keep him out all night following a Princess Grace Foundation gala in New York while Alicia waited alone in his hotel room. Finally, when he had not returned by morning, she instructed the Prince’s aide-de-camp to call her a taxi for the airport, terminating the relationship.)

Next day, JLA phoned me to say the Prince, again, leaned in favor of appointing NARMINO. This seemed to fit with what I knew about the Prince: He went along with whomever was last in his presence.

Two days later, another call from JLA: The Prince was anxious to sign the NARMINO appointment.

Two days after that, the Prince phoned me: The only thing in the Narmino report that concerned him, he said, was the alleged theft of the Red Cross painting. He stated he did not care about the Brianti/Ageprim valuation commissions, the expensive gifts or the lies about his personal life, which, in my mind, opened NARMINO to potential blackmail.

“Gifts are a way of life in Monaco,” the Prince told me. And he said this robotically, as if he had been reprogrammed since our last marathon meeting, presumably by whomever he’d last seen on this matter.

In any case, it was that unethical way of life the Prince had pledged to change.

The Prince signed NARMINO’s appointment that day, Friday, the 13th of January 2006.

(In deference to me, the Prince requested that I keep the NARMINO investigation alive. But it was simply Albert’s way of traveling the path of least resistance while speaking from both sides of his mouth.)

“I intend that ethics remain the backdrop for all the actions of the Monegasque authorities,” Albert had proclaimed at his investiture six months earlier. “Ethics are not divisible.”

The Prince’s signature on NARMINO’s appointment that Friday the 13th contradicted his proclamation and reaffirmed that ethics are indeed divisible in Monaco. As such, it marked the death of Albert’s promise to introduce a “new ethic” into the way “Monegasque authorities” govern.

It did not, however, preclude the Prince from continuing to promote--to his subjects and the world--his fraudulent stance on corruption, money laundering and unethical behavior.

For example, in October 2007, while opening a Monaco Embassy in the UK, Albert pronounced, “Ethics cannot be chopped and changed.”

In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined a term for this kind of deceptive lie: Truthspeak.