Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, is insisting that Peter Obi, candidate of Labour Party in the 2023 Presidential election, defeated President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Lawal had raised dust when he said the candidate who came third according to the results declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) won the election.

Felix Morka, National Publicity Secretary of the APC, had asked Lawal to refrain from peddling falsehood.

Morka, who described Lawal as a burden to himself, said the former SGF was in need of counselling.

In a lengthy statement on Wednesday, the former SGF, who at a time was the APC National Vice Chairman, North East, said some key allies of Tinubu’s administration had reached out to him for peace.

The statement was titled: “Political Discourse: The APC reaction and its castigation of my person”.

While describing APC as a self-centered party, Lawal said, “The thief knows who stole the item”.

“I woke up this morning to a very pathetic social media trending write-up, apparently a response to my article on the current political discourse by one Felix allegedly of the APC. I suspect he was assigned this role because it is in the nature of sycophants and people consigned to second class status to be assigned roles that their masters are wary of taking on.

“Usually, the dirty, unsavoury jobs are contracted out to such. In the bible, a certain Felix ( after which this Felix was probably named), was a freed slave who had a reputation of cruelty as the ruler of Judea in order to please his master, the emperor Claudius (of whose mother Felix was a slave).

“When we founded APC way back in 2013/2014, we envisaged it would be a national party that would carry along all the different socio-political and religious tendencies of the nation. In those days, we were careful not to sideline any of the religions or tribes of the country in the composition of the membership and leadership of the party. We wanted a party that would embrace all Nigerians. It was this that informed the principle that both the National Chairman and Secretary would not be of the same religion, tribe or region.

“All that is now left for the party is a change of name, but even this may not take long since it already has the Kadmul Islam as its National Chairman, and a Muslim as National Secretary. The Deputy National Chairman North (who acts in the absence of the Chairman), National Organizing Secretary, National Legal Adviser, and three National Vice Chairmen and more, are Muslims. Good for them.

“And talking of electoral value, both the National Chairman and the National Secretary just dramatically lost in the May election. I suspect Mallam Felix didn’t do well in his own constituency either. Mark my words, all critical decisions will be taken behind his back during the afternoon prayers sessions which he will be unable to attend.

“As to the substance of the response itself, I find it deliberately obtuse, skirting around the real issues raised in my press statement. It was empty of substance and logic; a true product of a sycophantic mind that has no capacity to understand the subtle nuances underlying a message delivered to a discerning audience.

“Mallam Felix, your masters got the message loud and clear because some of them have reached out to me for dialogue on the issues raised. But in line with your lower status in the scheme of things you are not aware that all the issues I raised were designed in a manner to deliver a message to a discomfited government that is populated by longstanding friends of mine who appear to have abandoned common sense and patriotism for unbridled personal goals and filthy lucre. And they got the message; which you cannot. In this discourse, you are a remote outsider, so shut up.”

Daily Trust

Israel will let Egypt deliver some aid to Gaza, as doctors struggle to treat hospital blast victims

Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. The first crack in a punishing 10-day siege on the territory came one day after a blast at a hospital killed hundreds and put immense strain on Gaza’s struggling medical system.

The announcement to allow water, food and other supplies happened as fury over the blast at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Hospital spread across the Middle East, and as U.S. President Joe Biden visited Israel in hopes of preventing a wider conflict in the region.

There were conflicting claims of who was behind the explosion on Tuesday night, but protests flared quickly as many Arab leaders said Israel was responsible. Hamas officials in Gaza blamed an Israeli airstrike, saying hundreds were killed. Israel denied it was involved and released a flurry of video, audio and other information that it said showed the blast was instead due to a rocket misfire by Islamic Jihad, another militant group operating in Gaza. Islamic Jihad dismissed that claim.

The Associated Press has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence.

Israel shut off all supplies to Gaza soon after Hamas militants rampaged across communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7. As supplies run out, many families in Gaza have cut down to one meal a day and have been left to drink dirty water.

The bloody devastation at al-Ahli threw the siege’s impact into sharp relief. Video from the scene showed the hospital grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. Hundreds of wounded were rushed to Gaza City’s main hospital where doctors, already facing critical supply shortages, were sometimes forced to perform surgery on the floors, often without anesthesia.

A steady stream of ambulances, taxis, cars and at least one motorcycle also arrived at a hospital in Khan Younis. Men jumped from the vehicles and scrambled to open doors, with hospital staff and bystanders helping carry the injured.

One man rushed in carrying a limp child in his arms. A girl with her head wrapped with a makeshift bandage was helped from a car. Many injured had to be carried by multiple men or hoisted onto gurneys.

As soon as one vehicle was unloaded, another arrived to take its place.

Biden said Egypt’s president agreed to open the crossing and to let in an initial group of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. If Hamas confiscates aid, “it will end,” he said. The aid will start moving Friday at the earliest, White House officials said.

Egypt must still repair the road across the border that was cratered by Israeli airstrikes. More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid are positioned at or near the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only connection to Egypt, said the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai, Khalid Zayed.

Supplies will go in under supervision of the U.N., Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told Al-Arabiya TV. Asked if foreigners and dual nationals seeking to leave would be let through, he said: “As long as the crossing is operating normally and the (crossing) facility has been repaired.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the decision was approved after a request from Biden. It said Israel “will not thwart” deliveries of food, water or medicine from Egypt, as long as they are limited to civilians in the south of the Gaza Strip and don’t go to Hamas militants. The statement made no mention of fuel, which is badly needed for hospital generators.

Relatives of some of the roughly 200 people who were taken hostage and forced back to Gaza during the attack reacted in fury to the aid announcement.

“Children, infants, women, soldiers, men, and elderly, some with serious illnesses, wounded and shot, are held underground like animals,” said a statement from the Hostage and Missing Families Forum. But “the Israeli government pampers the murderers and kidnappers.”

Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel resumed Wednesday after a 12-hour lull. Israeli strikes on Gaza continued, including on cities in the south that Israel had described as “safe zones” for civilians.

In his brief visit, Biden tried to strike a balance between showing U.S. support for Israel, while containing growing alarm among Arab allies. Upon his arrival, Biden embraced Netanyahu, said the hospital blast appeared not to be Israel’s fault and expressed concern for the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. He also announced $100 million in humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Israeli military held a briefing Wednesday laying out its case for why it was not responsible for the explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital.

Spokesman Daniel Hagari said the military was not firing in the area when the blast occurred. He said Israeli radar confirmed a rocket barrage was fired by Islamic Jihad militants from a nearby cemetery at the time of the blast. Independent video showed one rocket in the barrage falling out of the sky, he said.

The misfired rocket hit the parking lot outside the hospital, he said. Were it an airstrike, there would have been a large crater there; instead, the fiery blast came from the misfired rocket’s warhead and its unspent propellant, he said.

Hamas called Tuesday’s hospital blast “a horrific massacre” caused by an Israeli strike.

Islamic Jihad said Israeli orders issued days before for al-Ahli to be evacuated, and a previous strike at the hospital, proved the hospital was an target. The group added that the scale of the explosion, the angle of the explosive’s fall and the extent of destruction all pointed to Israel.

The Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum, said the hospital, run by the Episcopal Church, received at least three Israeli military orders to evacuate in the days before the blast. Israeli shelling hit it Sunday, wounding four staff, he said. Israel ordered all 22 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate last week. The Israeli military accuses the militants of hiding among civilians.

Hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge in al-Ahli and other hospitals in Gaza City, hoping to be spared bombardment after Israel ordered all residents of the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south.

On Wednesday morning, the blast scene was littered with charred cars. One man who had been sheltering there with his family, Mohammed al-Hayek, said he was sitting with other men in a hospital stairwell Tuesday night when he stepped away for coffee.

“When I returned, they were torn to pieces,” he said.

The death toll was in dispute. The Health Ministry initially said at least 500 had died, but revised that number to 471 on Wednesday. Al-Ahli officials said the toll was in the hundreds.

The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,478 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, and more than 12,000 wounded, mostly women, children and the elderly. Another 1,300 people across Gaza are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians slain during Hamas’ deadly incursion. Militants in Gaza have launched rockets every day since toward cities across Israel.

Israel has been expected to launch a ground invasion into Gaza, though military officials say no decision has been made.

AP

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Drop the ‘theatrics’ if you want to talk, Putin tells Kiev

Western rhetoric on the Ukraine conflict appears to be shifting in the right direction, although Kiev must end its “theatrics” and remove legal obstacles before peace talks can resume, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

“If the Ukrainian side really wants negotiations to happen, it should be done without any theatrics,” the Russian leader told journalists on Wednesday at a press conference in China.

Putin stated that Ukraine must abolish a law which has declared peace talks impossible as long as he remains in power. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed the ban more than a year ago, as his government pursued a military victory over Russia with Western military assistance.

The Russian leader claimed that Kiev has little to show its foreign backers despite months of fighting, and that some Western officials are apparently deviating from their declared goal of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

“This transformation leads in the right direction,” Putin said. “I commend that. But it is not enough.”

The Russian president named EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell as an example of a Western figure shifting his stance.

On a visit to China last week, Borrell stated during a press conference with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that “we count on China to support Ukraine peace negotiations.”

China has long advocated a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine crisis.

Putin made the comments on Ukraine when asked by journalists to provide details of his discussions with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he met in Beijing on Tuesday.

The Russian leader said he had not told Orban anything that contradicted Moscow’s public stance on the Ukraine conflict.

Commenting on claims that Orban was “pro-Russian,” Putin said the prime minister was actually “pro-Hungarian,” and suggested that detractors are jealous of his “courage to defend the interests of his people,” unlike many European politicians today.

Putin and Orban both traveled to China to participate in the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, and met on the sidelines of the event.

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ten civilians killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine, Kyiv reports progress in south

Russian attacks overnight and on Wednesday killed at least 10 civilians in Ukraine, while senior Ukrainian military officials said their troops had made some headway in counteroffensive operations in the southern theatre.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, said the death toll had risen to five from four in a morning missile strike on a residential building in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.

Officials said a 31-year-old woman was killed in an attack on the village of Obukhivka in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk and a man and a woman were killed in an overnight attack on the southern region of Kherson.

On Wednesday evening, Ukraine's Interior Ministry said two bodies had been pulled out from under the rubble of a food shop hit by a Russian missile near the southern city of Mykolaiv.

Local officials in Sumy region, on the Russian border, said an "infrastructure site" had been hit in a drone attack, but provided no further details.

"The evil state continues to use terror and wage war on civilians. Russian terror must be defeated," Zelenskiy wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

The apartment building in Zaporizhzhia suffered serious damage to one entrance from the third to the fifth storeys, he said. A picture posted by Zelenskiy on Telegram showed the building with a gaping hole in the middle, its entrance destroyed and windows smashed.

In Obukhivka, near the city of Dnipro, residents said a strong explosion blew out windows and knocked people to the ground. Officials said about 20 houses were damaged.

"A woman all covered in blood ran out from one of the houses, shouting and crying. I think that her daughter died," Victor, 32, a construction worker, told Reuters television. "We entered the house and saw a dead girl."

SOUTHERN ADVANCE CONTINUES: GENERAL

Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, in charge of Ukraine's operations in the south, said Ukrainian forces were proceeding with their planned advance towards the Sea of Azov.

Troops from the Tavria, or southern, group of forces "are continuing their offensive. They have had partial success to the south of Robotyne," Tarnavskyi wrote on Telegram.

Robotyne is one of a group of villages in the south that Ukraine wants to secure as part of the advance - aimed at severing a land bridge linking Russian positions in the south and east.

Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for southern troops, also reported progress near Robotyne.

Shtupun told national television that shelling had eased around the town of Avdiivka, the focus of fierce Russian attacks in the past week west of the Russian-held town of Donetsk. But troops in the sector were preparing for a variety of scenarios.

Ukrainian troops are also trying to recapture land in eastern regions.

The General Staff, in its evening report, said its forces had repelled attacks in several areas of the 1,000-km (620-mile) front line - including 15 around the long-contested town of Maryinka in Donetsk region and 10 further north near Kupiansk.

Russia's Defence Ministry gave few details of its troops' operations, but said a depot of Ukrainian aviation equipment had been destroyed in central Dnipropetrovsk region.

Reuters could not verify accounts from either side.

World leaders attending the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Marrakesh this week have some difficult decisions to make.

For starters, numerous developing economies – including Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Zambia – are teetering on the edge of default or have already defaulted. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ recent “global stocktake” climate report shows that we are far from reaching the 1.5º Celsius target for global warming.

While robust economic growth could provide the necessary resources to tackle these challenges, the IMF foresees global sluggishness and a prolonged fight against inflation. Without international cooperation, countries may become ensnared in a slow, messy, and expensive effort to manage their debts, combat climate change, and stimulate growth.

This is not the first time that the world has faced such a crisis. As economic historian Martin Daunton notes in his forthcoming book, The Economic Government of the World 1933-2023, policymakers from 66 countries convened at the 1933 London Economic Conference to address challenges eerily similar to the ones we face today: debt, protectionism, financial instability, and polarization. With the world economy in freefall and commodity prices crashing, demand for industrial goods evaporated. As unemployment surged, so did the tensions between domestic political agendas and international economic concerns.

The London conference seemed doomed from the start, as political and economic turmoil elevated extremist leaders. In Italy, the post-World War I economic downturn facilitated Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. In Germany, Adolf Hitler had recently been appointed Chancellor. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist, and China was embroiled in a civil war, having been invaded by Imperial Japan just two years earlier.

There were deep disagreements within both the United States and the United Kingdom over the appropriate response to the crisis. As tensions escalated between the US, the UK, and France over wartime debt, an American journalist labeled the conference a “plot to cancel debts owed to America.”

The London conference oscillated between calls for international cooperation and their dismissal by those who, in the words of US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, were “futilely and foolishly striving to live a hermit’s life.” Despite more than a month of wrangling, participants left without any resolutions. Daunton attributes this to disagreements between politicians, central bankers, and the “motley collection” of experts in attendance over the problems facing the world economy and how to address them.

In Marrakesh, representatives of 190 countries, each grappling with its own internal disputes, will attempt to strike a balance between international cooperation and domestic politics. Daunton’s book offers several cautionary tales for them to consider.

While the first part of Daunton’s book, which focuses on the response to the Great Depression, offers little encouragement, the second, which covers the Bretton Woods era, features more successful examples of effective international cooperation. The creation of multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank facilitated a greater understanding of global economic problems and potential solutions, as experts could aggregate and analyze data from all member countries.

In contrast to many other works, Daunton highlights those relegated to the periphery of this emerging order, as his narrative delves into the politics of Ghana, India, and the developing world during the Cold War. In the 1960s, the Kennedy Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (which was succeeded by the World Trade Organization) reduced industrial tariffs. With their concerns and interests sidelined, developing countries turned to alternative international forums such as the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the New International Economic Order.

The third part of Daunton’s book charts the rise of the “hyper-global” and “neoliberal” Washington Consensus. As the IMF and World Bank became agents of globalization, the WTO was established, and rentier capitalism spread across economies, reaching deep into the European Union.

The final part of Daunton’s narrative begins with the 2008 financial crisis and explores the threats to today’s global order. Daunton then proposes a range of potential paths to a “fairer, more inclusive capitalism,” including tougher competition enforcement, progressive taxation, job initiatives, leveling-up, de-financialization, and implementing a Green New Deal.

A theme that runs throughout the book is the contentious nature of international cooperation. Early on, we learn that in the 1930s, US President Franklin Roosevelt’s “brain trust” presented him with a plethora of conflicting views on foreign economic policy. It was not until FDR sided with his more internationalist officials that the protectionism and currency instability of the Great Depression began to subside.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the UK considered three competing global economic visions. The first emphasized full employment, which required countercyclical policies, international buffer stocks to maintain stable demand and prices, and public works financed by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank’s lending arm) to offset labor-market fluctuations.

The second vision focused on the sterling area, imagining a world divided between the US dollar and the pound in which the UK would maintain imperial preferences and look to Africa as an expanding market. At the heart of the third perspective was the Anglo-American relationship, suggesting that Britain should align neither with its own empire nor with Europe, but instead collaborate with the US within a dollar-based economy. Contemporary British politics echoes these discussions, as officials debate whether to strengthen relations with Europe, the Commonwealth (as part of its Indo-Pacific strategy), or the US.

In every era explored, Daunton presents readers with a rich tapestry of competing ideas, underscoring the challenge of forging multilateral agreements between dozens of countries, each with its own internal disputes. As Daunton observes, we again find ourselves in an era of uncertainty and debate over the structure of the global political economy.

Over the past 30 years, international cooperation has often been conflated with globalization, market liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and capital flows. But domestic and international debates are now characterized by other issues, including job quality and social welfare, climate change, the geostrategic implications of global supply chains, technological competition driven by national-security considerations, and the growing normalization of sanctions and economic warfare.

While these priorities are at odds with the globalization-facilitating cooperation that Daunton describes, the agreements and institutions forged over the past century enable us to achieve a new and different form of cooperation. Policymakers and the representatives of international organizations attending the Marrakesh meetings have studied both domestic and international challenges, allowing them to explore collaborative solutions and highlight the concerns of member countries during negotiations.

Though this process may appear inefficient and laborious, it remains indispensable to a world that values state sovereignty and fosters international cooperation. While Daunton’s book underscores the numerous obstacles facing such efforts, it also illuminates the myriad ways a functional international order can emerge.

Project Syndicate

• In 2012, someone stole 50,000 bitcoin from the Silk Road, an illegal dark web marketplace. Over time, the value of the stolen bitcoin skyrocketed to more than $3 billion dollars and for years it remained one of the biggest mysteries in the world of cryptocurrency.
• Almost a decade after the 2012 hack, the thief made a critical mistake that allowed the IRS-CI to crack the case.
• CNBC obtained never-before-seen footage that shows how investigators linked the thief to the crypto heist.

Athens, Georgia, is home to the University of Georgia, and the police there are used to college town-type crimes: break-ins, bar fights and assorted rowdiness. That kind of thing.

But the 911 call that came in on the night of March 13, 2019, was unlike anything the Athens-Clarke County Police Department had ever encountered.

On the phone was 28-year-old Jimmy Zhong, a local party boy and Georgia alum who frequented Athens’ drinking establishments. He wasn’t like the other town rowdies – Zhong was also a computer expert who had an unusually robust digital home surveillance system.

Now, he was calling to report a crime: hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto currency that he said had been stolen from his home. Thinking of all that lost money, Zhong was distressed.

“I’m having a panic attack,” Zhong told the dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by CNBC.

Zhong turned down the dispatcher’s offer of an ambulance, and began trying to explain the situation. “I’m an investor in bitcoin, which is like an online thing,” he said.

What happened next would bring an end to a nearly decade long manhunt and solve one of the biggest crimes of the crypto era. And it also would lead to the largest seizure of cryptocurrency from an individual in the history of the Department of Justice.

Zhong’s emergency call that winter evening sent investigators down a long digital trail that led back to the earliest days of bitcoin and revealed a dark truth about the universe of hackers and coders responsible for the creation of cryptocurrencies. It’s a world where heroes and villains traded places and could even be the same people.

None of it would go at all the way Zhong wanted.

The 911 call didn’t produce a suspect in the theft from Zhong’s house. Athens police were dealing with one of their first crypto cases and unfamiliar with the shadowy underworld, and they failed to make progress in the case.

So Zhong turned to local private investigator Robin Martinelli, who owns and operates Martinelli Investigations in nearby Loganville, Georgia.

A former sheriff’s deputy turned PI, Martinelli was far from an expert in crypto. She specialized in process serving, cheating spouses and custody investigations, the type of probes that once got her firm featured on an episode of “The Montel Williams Show.”

Martinelli had recently undergone surgery to amputate one leg, leaving her to conduct her surveillance operations with the help of a prosthetic.

Still, she was motivated to solve Zhong’s case.

“When you wake up and don’t put two feet on the ground, but you still have to run a company, you got to get out there and kick ass,” Martinelli told CNBC in an interview for the new documentary, “Crypto 911: Exposing a Bitcoin Billionaire.”

She began by examining Zhong’s robust surveillance video archive of his home. In looking at footage from the night of the crime, Martinelli spotted a slender male figure.

“We could tell that they had like a hood on – a gray hood – but then they had almost like a black ski mask,” Martinelli said.

The suspect appeared to know his way around Zhong’s house, which led Martinelli to believe that he was a friend or at least someone who had heard Zhong boast about his bitcoin stash. From the video, Martinelli was able to determine the suspect’s height and even the size of his hands.

She said she began her investigation by putting Zhong’s friends under surveillance, following them to their homes and downtown bars on Broad Street and College Avenue. She put trackers on cars and scoured social media and conducted background checks.

As she watched Zhong’s bar friends come and go, Martinelli formed a low opinion of the group. She described them as “very, very casual, plastic, not really caring, maybe using Jimmy a little bit.”

Martinelli said Zhong appeared resistant to her theories, especially when they began to focus on his circle of friends. Martinelli eventually settled on one suspect in particular who she believed had stolen 150 bitcoins from Jimmy. At the time, that amount of the digital currency was worth nearly $600,000.

Zhong didn’t want to hear it, she said.

“He would get upset when I would kind of mention somebody would had to have known where this cash was,” Martinelli said. And she understood why Zhong was so hurt by the idea that someone close to him could have betrayed him.

“Jimmy wanted to be loved,” she said. “Jimmy wanted friends.”

Even as Martinelli soured on the friend group, she was warming up to her client, who she perceived as an odd man in search of friends.

“Jimmy was a good guy,” she said. 

A lot of people around Athens felt similarly about him.

In the years before the theft, Zhong was known for throwing a lot of money around town. He was the kind of guy who would buy a round of expensive shots for the whole bar, hundreds of dollars vanishing in seconds down eager throats.

Although he lived in a modest off-campus bungalow, near student housing and the downtown college bar scene, he stayed at fancy hotels, including the Ritz Carlton, the Plaza and the Waldorf Astoria, according to court documents CNBC reviewed. He shopped at high-end stores such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Jimmy Choo. He drove fancy cars, including a Tesla.

He bought a second home, a lake house with a dock in Gainesville, Georgia, a short drive from Athens. He stocked it with jet skis, boats, a stripper pole, and lots and lots of liquor.

His parties were epic.

Zhong was living his best life with no visible source of income. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t really have a job. He told his friends that he’d gotten into bitcoin early, mining thousands of coins in the earliest days of the technology. Zhong told people he dabbled in crypto as far back as 2009, the year bitcoin was invented by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto and a small crew of developers tied online to the anonymous crypto creator.

Whatever Zhong was doing, he was making mountains of cash. And he was willing to splurge.

In 2018, when his beloved Georgia Bulldogs football team made the Rose Bowl, Zhong rounded up a small group of friends for a pilgrimage to Los Angeles. 

“It really felt like with Jimmy, there were no limits,” Stefana Masic, a Georgia alum and one of the friends on the trip, told CNBC. 

Masic said not only did Zhong pay for all the tickets, but he also rented a private jet for the cross-country flight. And he gave each friend up to $10,000 for a Beverly Hills shopping spree on Rodeo Drive. They spent it on outfits, accessories and baubles to wear in the city.

“I had never flown private before, and I never stayed in such a nice Airbnb

. It was cool because, you know, I got to experience a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t.”

As he was cheering on his team in LA, Zhong couldn’t have known that a small group of agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, led by officials in the same city, were painstakingly trying to solve a crime that dated back years. 

What had captured the investigators’ attention was a 2012 hack in which someone had stolen 50,000 bitcoins from a site on the dark web called Silk Road, according to court documents CNBC reviewed. That site was one of the earliest crypto marketplaces, where anonymous buyers and sellers exchanged all manner of illicit material. It was full of drugs, guns, pornography and other stuff people wanted to keep secret.

Over the years, the value of the bitcoin stolen by the Silk Road hacker had soared to more than $3 billion, according to court documents. Investigators could track the location of the currency on the blockchain, which is a public ledger of all transactions. But they couldn’t see the identity of the new owner of the funds. So they watched and waited for years as the hacker transferred funds from account to account, peeled some away, and pushed some of it through crypto “mixers” designed to obscure the source of the money.

Finally, Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics company that was tracing the digital wallets containing the stolen Silk Road assets, saw the hacker made a tiny mistake. He transferred around $800 worth to a crypto exchange that followed established banking rules, including so-called know your customer processes, requiring real names and addresses of account holders.

The account was registered in Zhong’s name. The transaction took place in September 2019, six months after Zhong’s 911 call to the local police.

That alone wasn’t enough to prove Zhong was the hacker. They had to be sure.

So the IRS called the Athens-Clarke County Police Department and asked for some help, according to sources at both agencies. At the time, the police investigation into Zhong’s own crime report had been languishing.

“I got a call from an IRS agent,” Lt. Jody Thompson, who leads the local property and financial crimes unit, told CNBC.  “And he said, ‘can I come by and speak to you about Jimmy?’ And I was like, sure, I remember this case.”

After that, Thompson joined forces with IRS-CI special agent Trevor McAleenan and Shaun MaGruder, CEO of a cyber intelligence company called BlockTrace. MaGruder’s company works with the IRS as an embedded contractor and was hired for its experience untangling complicated blockchain transactions. 

Together, the three investigators said they devised a plan. They would approach Zhong using a ruse, telling him they were investigating the crime that he’d called about, the one in which a thief had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars of his bitcoin.

In reality, they were investigating Zhong for a crime they believed he had committed. A crime whose proceeds were now worth billions of dollars. 

When the three men knocked on the door of his lake home in Gainesville, Zhong opened it enthusiastically, according to body camera footage CNBC exclusively obtained. He believed the police officer and the two specialists were there to help solve his crypto cold case.

“If you guys solve this for me, I will invite you out for a party,” Zhong told the trio on the body camera footage.

The video shows the officers pouring on the praise. They called his front door “beautiful.” They called his speakers “crazy,” and they complimented his dog, Chad. They asked for a tour of the house. Body camera footage shows the men tapping on stone floors, looking in closets and checking out wood paneling. Zhong didn’t know it, but they were scouring for secret compartments. 

Zhong brought investigators to his basement, equipped with a full bar and a stripper pole.

“Is this your workout?” McAleenan asked Zhong.

“Nope, that’s for girls,” Zhong replied.

The body camera footage also shows they got a good look at Zhong’s security system, asking him to explain each of its features and capabilities. Zhong is also captured showing them a metal case he said he once used to store $1 million in cash so he could impress a woman.

“Did it work?” asked Lt. Thompson.

“Nope,” Zhong said.

“It never does,” Thompson replied.

The law enforcement officers learned that Zhong had a flamethrower on the premises. And they saw his AR-15 rifle hanging on the wall.

MaGruder said Zhong’s level of sophistication was apparent.

“He was navigating that keyboard like I’ve never seen someone navigate a keyboard,” MaGruder said. “He didn’t have to use a mouse because he knew all the hotkeys.”

Playing on the ruse, the officers asked Zhong to open his laptop and explain how he came to have the bitcoin in the first place. Zhong sat on the couch next to the investigators and entered his password, asking them to turn away as he typed.

When he opened the laptop, law enforcement could see his bitcoin wallet.

“Lo and behold, he had $60 or $70 million worth of bitcoins right there next to us,” MaGruder told CNBC in an interview. 

The evidence was enough to convince the investigators they were on the right track. As he exited Zhong’s lake house, MaGruder told CNBC he thought to himself, “This is incredible. I think we found our guy.”

The first visit allowed the investigators to obtain a federal search warrant for Zhong’s home, McAleenan said. McAleenan, MaGruder, and Thompson returned with an enormous team of officers on Nov. 9, 2021.

Before the officers raided the house, McAleenan had to explain to Zhong that he wasn’t really trying to help him. He was trying to convict him.

“I said, Jimmy, you know me as ‘Trevor.’ I’m actually Trevor McAleenan. I’m a special agent with IRS Criminal Investigation, and we’re here to execute a federal-approved warrant on your house,” McAleenan said.

“And he kind of had this look like, ‘Am I being punked?’” McAleenan added.

At that moment, another officer slid a device known as a “jiggler” into Zhong’s laptop, causing the cursor to continually move and giving law enforcement access to the password-protected contents of the computer, McAleenan said.

Officers flooded into the home, cracking open every crevice in search of evidence. McAleenan said in an upstairs closet, they found a popcorn tin with a computer hidden inside that held millions of dollars worth of bitcoin.

Using sniffer dogs trained to detect electronics, McAleenan said they found a safe buried in concrete under some basement floor tile. Court documents said the safe contained precious metals, stacks of cash and physical bitcoins minted in the early years of crypto. They also found a wallet with bitcoin from the original hack of Silk Road in 2012.

Zhong was busted.

“Really late at night we were able to say we were successful,” McAleenan said. “We found the evidence that we were looking for. And the house lit up. I mean, every agent on the site cheered.”

As they sorted through the evidence, agents discovered something else about the unusual Mr. Zhong. He was, in crypto slang, an “original gangster,” or OG.

Investigators discovered that as far back as 2009, the year bitcoin was invented, Zhong was among a small group of early coders who worked to develop and perfect the technology. He was a smaller contributor than some of the other OG players who have since become famous in the bitcoin community, McAleenan said. But investigators concluded that he made contributions to the original bitcoin code and offered ideas to the early developers on key topics like how to reduce blockchain size.

In other words, a hacker who had been involved in the development of bitcoin itself went on to become one of the biggest bitcoin thieves of all time.

“He is one of the, as we dubbed it, the original gangsters, OGs, as far as bitcoin core software developers,” McAleenan said. “He had been in this space for quite a while.”

The irony of Zhong’s role in the history of bitcoin is emblematic of the culture that built the cryptocurrency in the first place, said Nathaniel Popper, author of “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.”

“Everybody came to this for their own reason,” Popper told CNBC. “And it was, as a result of that, a very sort of eclectic and eccentric group of people.”

“Bitcoin was always shot through with irony,” Popper said. “Yes, there was something ironic about a bitcoin proponent stealing bitcoin from another bitcoin proponent. But I think that was also in some ways a part of what defined bitcoin.” 

Zhong was charged with wire fraud. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison. Zhong, now 33 years old, began his sentence at the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama, on July 14, 2023.

In the end, Zhong didn’t get to keep the stolen bitcoin. The U.S. government seized those assets. Officials opened a process that allowed victims of the hack to apply to get their bitcoin back, according to a forfeiture document CNBC reviewed.

Nobody came forward to claim the loot. That’s not surprising, given that users of Silk Road in 2012 were largely drug dealers and their customers. The federal government simply sold off the stolen bitcoin and will keep the proceeds. Some of the revenue generated will likely be shared with the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, in recognition of the local officers’ help in the case, according to the IRS-CI.

As he left the courthouse after his sentencing on April 14, CNBC attempted to question Zhong about his role in the crime. Zhong covered his head with his coat and left without saying a word. 

In his statement to the judge before sentencing, Zhong said having billions in stolen bitcoin made him feel important. 

Zhong’s attorney, Michael Bachner, says the theft never actually damaged the U.S. government.

“The government has certainly not been hurt by Jimmy’s conduct whatsoever,” Bachner told CNBC. “If Jimmy had not stolen the coins and the government had in fact seized them from [Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht] they would have sold them two years later in 2014 as they did with other coins.”

At that point, the government “would have gotten $320 a coin or made somewhere about $14 million,” Bachner said. “Now, as a result of Jimmy having them, the government has gotten a $3 billion profit.”

Zhong asked for no jail time because he was concerned about the fate of Chad, his 13-year-old dog. Zhong has had a difficult life. On the autism spectrum, Bachner said he was severely bullied at school. And he found solace over the years in an online community where he could deploy his computing skills. 

As for the original crime against Jimmy Zhong — the bitcoin theft in Athens that led him to the 911 call in March 2019 — that crime has never been solved. The perpetrator remains at large.

Zhong’s dog, Chad, is staying with a friend.

CNBC

Nigeria’s naira plunged the most in almost four months to an unprecedented level in the official market as the West African nation’s move to a more flexible exchange rate puts pressure on the currency.

The naira weakened 8.9% to 848.12 to the dollar in the official market on Tuesday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The drop was the most since June 20. The currency was little changed at 1,052 a dollar on the street, according to Abubakar Mohammed, chief executive officer of the Forward Marketing Bureau de Change Ltd.

The Central Bank of Nigeria eased foreign exchange controls in mid-June after newly elected President Bola Tinubu criticized the bank’s monetary policy measures and pledged an end to the nation’s multiple exchange-rate regime. That saw the official rate plunge 40%, briefly aligning with the illegal market before the spread began to widen again. Until Tuesday, the official rate stayed near 800 to the dollar even as the street rate weakened past 1,000 naira.

“Illiquidity persists in the market in the absence of central bank intervention, ”Tajudeen Ibrahim, head of research at Chapel Hill said by phone.

The widening premium between the official rate and the parallel market “indicates that the exchange rate has not been setting a clearing price,” the central bank said on Monday after it scrapped restrictions put in place eight years ago to manage demand for dollars.

Nigeria, Africa’s biggest crude producer, has been struggling to boost supply of dollars for years after falling oil revenue left its foreign-exchange reserves in a perilous state. That prompted authorities to stop selling foreign currency to importers of products such as rice, vegetables and chicken in a bid to encourage local production.

The move only pushed demand for dollars to the unauthorized market.

Oil prices surged on Wednesday as tension escalated in the Middle East after hundreds were killed in a blast at a Gaza hospital, sparking concerns about potential oil supply disruptions from the region.

Brent crude futures advanced $1.69, or 1.9%, to $91.59 a barrel at 0347 GMT. West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI) futures were up $1.84, or 2.1%, at $88.50 a barrel.

In earlier trade, both benchmarks gained more than $2 to touch their highest levels in two weeks.

Markets factored in risk premiums after about 500 Palestinians were killedin a blast at a Gaza City hospital on Tuesday that Israeli and Palestinian officials blamed on each other.

Jordan then cancelled a summit it was to host with U.S. President Joe Biden and Egyptian and Palestinian leaders.

"The cancellation of a summit between Biden and Arab leaders reduces the likelihood of a diplomatic solution to the Israel Hamas conflict," Vivek Dhar, an analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, said in a client note.

Markets are nervous about a threatened Israeli ground offensive in Gaza.

"A long occupation looms as the scenario that pushes Brent oil futures above $US100/bbl because it raises the risk that the Israel Hamas conflict expands and potentially draws in Iran directly," Dhar said.

Biden is set to visit Israel on Wednesday to show support for the country in its war with Islamist militant group Hamas. The White House said he will make clear he does not want the conflict to expand.

Also supporting oil prices, U.S. crude stocks fell by about 4.4 million barrels in the week ended Oct. 13, according to market sources citing American Petroleum Institute figures on Tuesday. That was much steeper than a 300,000 barrel draw that analysts had forecast.

Official U.S. government data is due later on Wednesday.

On the demand side, China's economy grew faster than expected in the third quarter, official data on Wednesday showed, suggesting a recent flurry of policy measures is helping to bolster a tentative recovery.

China's official data also showed that the country's oil refinery throughput in September hit a record daily rate, up 12% from a year earlier as refiners increased run rates to cater for strong demand for transport fuel over the Golden Week holiday and improving manufacturing.

But analysts sounded cautious on China's economic growth as the real estate sector remains a drag.

"The September data likely guarantee that China will hit its 'around 5%' growth target this year. That said, it will struggle to better it. The economic recovery is still in its infancy," Moody's Analytics economist Harry Murphy Cruise said in a note.

Meanwhile, U.S. retail sales increased more than expected in September, spurring expectations of another interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve by year-end. Interest rate hikes to curb inflation can slow economic growth and reduce oil demand.

Venezuela's government and its political opposition on Tuesday agreed to electoral guarantees for 2024 presidential elections, paving the way for possible U.S. sanctions relief that could eventually boost oil supplies.

Reuters

Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says its results viewing portal is to enhance election transparency and not a result collation or transmission system.

INEC director of ICT, Paul Omokore, gave the clarification in his presentation titled, “The role of BVAS, IReV for Bayelsa, Kogi and Imo governorship elections” at a two-day capacity workshop for journalists in Akwanga, headquarters of Akwanga Local Government Area of Nasarawa State.

Omokore called on journalists and members of the public not to confuse uploading of polling unit results to INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), with electronic transmission of results.

He said INEC Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is only used to upload pictures of polling unit results on form EC8A to IReV, which does not translate to electronic transmission of results.

He said, “Form EC8A is the result that we collated at the polling units. We use BVAS to snap this form and upload the same thing to the IReV portal for public viewing. This is not a collecting system. It does not tally a system. What it does is to snap the EC8A which is the result at the polling unit and upload the same to the public view. That is all.

“I know that 70 per cent of the populace think that the others have collected the figures. No! All it does is snapping the EC8A that the presiding officers have collected all the scores of the parties, signed and stamped and then sent this same picture to the IReV for public viewing. That is all. So, it is not a collecting system.”

Daily Trust

Babachir Lawal, a former secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), says Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) won the 2023 presidential election.

Lawal, in a statement on Tuesday, said Atiku Abubakar, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), came second, while Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) came a distant third in the poll.

“I have resisted the temptation to engage in the contemporary political discourse since the February 2023 election faux pas,” the statement reads.

“I did this for two reasons; the first being that as an active player in the drama, I needed time to analyze and digest the data that led to the outcome(s), so I could arrive at an informed decision; the second, being that the rainy season had just set in and it was necessary that I focused my attention on my farms which are the mainstay of my livelihood.

“The current topical issues for political discourse and inquiry are whether or not Bola Tinubu won the presidential election and/or that he was a priori, qualified to participate in the election given his murky biodata as is now being publicly unveiled daily in an avalanche.

“My answer to the first inquiry is that regardless of whatever INEC or Appeal Court said or did, Bola did not win the election.

“Right from the start of the campaigns, Bola knew he was not going to win the election in a free and fair contest so he decided to go by all means.

“Available factual data as aggregated from several independent sources indicate that Obi got the majority votes while Atiku came second. Bola came a distant third in the number of votes scored.

“My answer to the second inquiry is that given the now unfolding deluge of uncomplimentary information about who or what he actually is, ordinarily, sound ethics and morality should have convinced him to voluntarily excuse himself from participation in the election.”

“RESIGN AND GIVE ATTENTION TO YOUR HEALTH”

The ex-SGF called on Tinubu to resign as president to attend to his health.

Lawal said six months into Tinubu’s administration, Nigerians have realised that what they have is not what they deserve politically.

“But this, notwithstanding, I believe he still has time and opportunity to save himself this public humiliation and embarrassment to his person, both locally and internationally by resigning so that he can give more attention to his health,” he said.

“After all, no one knows about the truism of these severely embarrassing and humiliating exposures about his person than the man himself.

“Leadership is all about integrity; sound pedigree, trustworthiness, and the ability to unite and instil hope and confidence in the people one seeks to lead. In these qualities, most Nigerians are in total agreement that Bola has them in very very short supply indeed.

“But now, six months down the line, the chicken has come home to roost as Nigerians have come to the realization that we have not got what we deserve politically.

“Confusion and despondency are now all over the nation as no one trusts the government to do what it says it will do.

“No one trusts the leader, and no one trusts appointees who are appointed as rewards for their roles in the election or who had in the past helped him in his life.”

Lawal also alleged that the appointments made by Tinubu were compensations to those who helped him to get into office.

“Bola the President and his group are now in government and are in full control of Nigeria’s vast resources and opportunities. They are enjoying their offices while Nigerians languish in insecurity, poverty, and hopelessness,” he said.

“It seems more like he is rewarding people who supported him to get the Presidency at all costs. This band of appointees that Bola is assembling into his government don’t care about Nigeria at all.”

The Cable

All Progressives Congress (APC) says Babachir Lawal, a former secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), needs “counselling” because he is “disconnected from reality”.

The ruling party was reacting to a statement by Lawal where he claimed that Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party (LP), won the presidential poll.

He said President Bola Tinubu, who was declared as winner of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), came “a distant third”.

In a statement on Tuesday, Felix Morka, APC spokesperson, said the former SGF is peddling “gibberish” because Obi lost the election.

“Clearly, the defeat of his principal, Peter Obi, at the poll has done incalculable damage to Lawal’s psyche and his capacity for rational thought as evident in his analysis based entirely on the figment of his warped imagination rather than on hard facts and figures,” he said.

“A clear sign of his disconnect from reality was his reference to the election held in May 2023, rather than February.

“We challenge Babachir Lawal to give a detailed breakdown of his so-called ‘aggregated facts sourced from independent sources,’ which he claimed proved that Obi won the election or forever remain mute.

“That he did not provide these facts to help Obi prove his case before the Presidential Elections Petitions Court is a massive disservice if not betrayal of his political principal.

“Babachir Lawal ought to have known that running a jaundiced commentary on a matter before the Supreme Court is the height of irresponsibility.

“But he is still nursing bitterness and vindictiveness over his failed dream of running on a joint ticket with Tinubu.”

Morka described Lawal as a “lightweight” individual who has failed as a politician in Adamawa.

“Despite his legendary failure as a politician, former President Muhammadu Buhari in deference to diversity appointed him to the high office of SGF where he was unceremoniously sacked on account of very poor performance and dishonorable conduct,” he said.

“A man like Babachir Lawal is in no position to offer an opinion on the competence of Tinubu’s appointees.”

The APC spokesperson said Lawal should mind his farm “and stop constituting himself into a needless distraction”.

The Cable