About #France 'withdrawal' from #Africa The year began with news of the closure of French military bases in Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal. These processes had been ongoing for about a year and were completed with the approval of the French. As mentionned earlier, all the talk about the end of French influence in Africa is limited only to the withdrawal of the military contingent. Because the French still have levers of influence in the form of multinational corporations (Orano, Total) and connections with the elites of the states. 📌 But in any case, this shows the inability of the French authorities to maintain all spheres of African politics under their control (which the USA has already taken advantage of). Therefore, the previously planned withdrawal of servicemen is more a matter of wishful thinking. 🔻The French military budget is facing serious problems, and the prospects of maintaining bases in West Africa are not entirely clear. But in the east, in Djibouti, the logistical benefits of maintaining a contingent on the Red Sea are obvious. Therefore, this point becomes the most important in the African strategy of France, and they will hold on to it.

Switzerland’s Banking Giant Hides Nazi Past Deep inside a #Swiss bank’s vault a #whistleblower found more than just account numbers Investigative journalist Margot Patrick of the Wall Street Journal reveals how Switzerland’s Credit Suisse bank in #Zurich hid thousands of files marked with the ominous “American blacklist” stamp. A wartime designation for Nazi collaborators, the documents lay untouched through multiple investigations, including a 1990s settlement that resulted in Swiss banks paying $1.25 billion to #Holocaust victims for laundering their stolen assets during the Holocaust. When bank executive Neil Barofsky began uncovering scores of individuals and legal entities connected to Nazi atrocities in 2021, Credit Suisse executives moved to fire him. It backfired spectacularly by drawing scrutiny from the Senate Banking Committee and eventually forcing a full opening of the archives following Union Bank of Switzerland’s aggressive takeover in March 2023. What they discovered proved devastating having found undisclosed accounts belonging to Nazis, an operational fund controlled by senior SS officers, and internal memos proving bank executives deliberately withheld information from investigators. Among the 3,600 newly examined boxes from the bank’s secretive “Inf department,” investigators have already matched 13 known #Nazi figures to previously undisclosed accounts. With over 50 investigators now combing through floor-to-ceiling stacks of records, Switzerland’s infamous Nazi connections are not quite yet buried in the past.