Two Stories on Robertson and his Business Buddies

The MSM needs to be reminded of Pat Robertson's dealing with Thugs, Dictators, and Abortion Demanding Communist China.

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NORFOLK, Virginia, July 11, 2003

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson accused President Bush of “undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels” by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.

“How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'" Robertson said Monday on “The 700 Club,” broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.
Robertson, a Bush supporter who has financial interests in Liberia, said he believes the State Department has “mismanaged the situation in nation after nation after nation” in Africa.

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Pat Robertson and His Business Buddies

Joseph Mathews is Pat Robertson's point man in a Liberian mining venture called Freedom Gold Limited. Mathews doesn't much care for what has appeared in this column about his boss's business dealings in Liberia, so he's trying to put a little distance between the televangelist and that West African nation's strongman, Charles Taylor.

This much is known, however, based primarily on information obtained from Freedom Gold Limited. Pat Robertson did learn about the gold mining investment opportunity from a visiting Liberian delegation. Robertson did subsequently create the for-profit Freedom Gold Limited in the Cayman Islands in December 1998 in which he was listed as the president and the company's sole director. He did conclude a mining agreement signed personally by him, Charles Taylor and key members of Taylor's cabinet on May 18, 1999. And the deal does give the Taylor regime a cut of the action. Speaking of relationships, what about Robertson's? I'll say this for him: There's nothing Eurocentric in his choice of business buddies.

Before Taylor, Robertson was in cahoots with the late brutal and rapacious dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, alias the "President of Kleptocracy." Mobutu gave Robertson's privately formed African Development Co. concessions to hunt for diamonds and gold in Zaire in the '90s. That venture, alas, went bust.

Undeterred, Robertson has formed a for-profit Internet portal, Global Business Development Network, that's out to make big bucks in that great bastion of liberty, religious freedom and land of forced abortions, the People's Republic of China.

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