Epstein associate wanted to make $50m from e-waste in Ghana and said he sat next to a goat on a flight in Nigeria
An associate of Jeffrey Epstein wanted to come to Ghana and make $50 million from e-waste, and said he wouldn’t go back to Nigeria because on one trip to that country, he sat next to a goat on a plane.
Since the US Department of Justice began releasing the heavily redacted Epstein files, we at Ghana Business News have been digging into the documents to find links to Ghana or any Ghanaians. We have found some emails mentioning Ghana, Ghanaians and a comment about a Ghanaian president.
One associate whose name has been redacted told Epstein in an email dated April 24, 2011, that he had done big financial analysis of 17 solid waste technologies and wanted to ask someone named Bill if he could do that business and reinvest the profits as grants instead of making grants to a foundation, that he didn’t mention.
He said: “I’m just diving into the e-waste stuff (which all goes to Ghana and Nigeria) which is an amazing stockpile of copper, etc. I think I can probably pull in another $50M just from Ghana, Nigeria too hard. Plus last time I went to visit one of the sites, I was on an airplane, seated next to a goat. No thanks.”
In the email the sender tells Epstein he knows he doesn’t like this stuff but in 2010 he made $170 million “and this year on track to make a little more. I reinvested $16 million into 10 cities (each) and used $1 million to set up a little charitable institution in the UK that could handle the resources (foundation too hard). My favorite new technologies relate to fossil fuel recapture from plastics, and harvesting NPK from muni (municipal) sanitation (can only obviously do this one in countries where the muni sewerage actually works).”
A comprehensive assessment report of the e-waste situation in Ghana in 2011 found that 171,000 tons of e-waste reaches the country’s informal recycling sector. Ghana became a major destination of e-waste from the West to an extent that the country was once described as “the world’s e-waste graveyard.”
The trove of emails show that Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in prison in August 2019 under mysterious circumstances, but attributed to suicide, was deeply connected to the highest echelons of global power, including having the ability to influence global affairs. The emails show that Epstein and his associates have varied interests in Ghana – including in gold, telecommunications and e-waste. Epstein also appears to have had highly confidential information on the two visits of former US president Bill Clinton to Ghana including the list of the delegation ahead of the trips. Clinton visited Ghana as sitting president in 1998 and as a former president in 2002.
In one of the emails sent to his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell by David Slade a former Clinton fundraiser and administration official, it said Clinton wasn’t going to Kumasi while in Ghana. No reason or reasons were assigned for cancelling the Kumasi trip.
“FYI, President Clinton is no longer traveling to Kumasi, Ghana as part of his upcoming Africa trip. Here is the revised plane manifest for the trip.” The email addressed to Maxwell said.
On his first visit to Ghana, Clinton met with then President JJ Rawlings, and on his second visit, he met with then President John Kufour. There were even some rumours that some people within the Kufour administration didn’t want him to meet with Rawlings at that time, but he did. An act that allegedly infuriated the people in government.
Another email to Epstein in 2011 described Ghana’s then President John Atta Mills as “nice but undynamic.”
In one email talking about a launch of a project that wasn’t mentioned, the sender to Epstein said, Ghana was a better place to launch than Senegal or Nigeria.
“ghana is a better place to launch than senegal or nigeria there is only *ONE’ elected officer in the entire country (he appoints everyone else down to the mayors) easier to get stuff through decent rule of law lots of $ with new oil find speakie english there decent universities only w african nation with brit roots, less dysfunctional than all the rest,” the person wrote.
By Emmanuel K Dogbevi
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