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To: CWI To the International Secretariat Dear comrades We send to you a third time our email of 9 September, to which we do not appear to have had a reply. We now regard this communication as public, and send it also to some interested organisations on the left. Comradely ----- Original Message ----- To: CWI To the International Secretariat Dear comrades We seem not to have received any reply to the email below. Comradely ----- Original Message ----- To: CWI To the International Secretariat Dear comrades We have read your statement of 29 August admitting that the leadership of your Ukraine organisation conspired to defraud a number of organisations of the international workers movement. You say: "We would also add that if any organisation believes they have been duped by these individuals and requires further information we would be prepared to discuss in complete confidence and supply, where possible, information which would help them to clarify their position in these events." We appreciate this offer. You will see on our website www.bolshevik.org a series of photographs and other information available to us. Can you confirm or expand on that information? Can you name the individuals involved. Can you supply any further information about their roles? Are there other people significantly involved? We would like full information on the Ukrainian section of the CWI and its Kiev Branch. How many members did each have? What were the addresses of the CWI Kiev office at various times? What activities has the section undertaken since 1999. What publications (newspapers, leaflets) has the section produced? Are there any photographs available of them, for example on demonstrations? We are curious about your initial investigation "some nine months ago". Your account is that charges of fraud were made and investigated but not proven at that time, and that the original source of the charges actually denied having made them. Who was that person? It was clear at that time that someone in your organisation had lied over a very serious matter. (At least either the person who laid and withdrew the charges or alternatively a person who falsely claimed the charges had been laid.) What measures did you take to establish who had lied? Did this incident not put your organisation on alert? Who conducted this investigation? Is it likely they are complicit in the corruption? Can you give any information as to how far this conspiracy extended. Certainly it extended rather further than your statement admits, and was by no means confined to the Kiev branch of your organisation. It is clear that Ilya Budraitskis, perhaps the most prominent Moscow-based representative of your tendency, was an integral part of this scam. He made numerous trips to Kiev to participate in the fraud. What did other leading members of the CWI in Moscow make of these visits? How did they believe these trips were financed? Were the suspicions of your representative Robert Jones not aroused? What did he think Ilya Budraitskis was doing in Kiev so frequently? How did he think Ilya Budraitskis could afford those trips? Has comrade Jones visited Kiev in the last four years? How often? Did he not notice anything untoward? It is clear that the conspirators at least hoped to gain access to Libyan money as well as money from the workers' movement. Has your organisation investigated this Libyan dimension of the matter? With what results? Formulations in your statement give rise to the possibility that you are considering that some members of your organisation in Kiev will not be expelled from your organisation. How is it possible that any member of your organisation in Kiev could have been unaware of this scam? Has your organisation yet sought to prepare accounts (with whatever precision may be possible) of incoming and outgoing money and other resources in this scam? If this has not yet been done, when will it be done? When will those accounts be made available to the wider workers movement which has been defrauded? The CWI is, by reason of its size, resources and language capacity, better placed to effectively investigate these matters than the relatively small groups that have been defrauded, yet the CWI has not so far supplied any information on the matter. It has merely admitted what could no longer be denied. Your credibility as an organisation depends on your willingness to change course, to leave behind a policy of carefully calibrated admissions, and instead actively to seek out the evidence and to put it all--fully, frankly and openly--before the workers' movement. Comradely |
Posted: 30 September 2003 |