the miami herald 14 de octubre

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HOTEL COPIES: A copy of The Miami Herald will bedelivered to your room. A credit of US$0.25 will beposted to your account if delivery is declined. INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2011

108TH YEAR I ©2011 THE MIAMI HERALD

U.S. Congress ends 5-year standoff on trade deals

Prosecutors in France drop rape case against Strauss-Kahn

Mexico seen as unlikely launching pad for Iranian plot

INDEXTHE AMERICAS ...........4AOPINION ........................7A ACCENT .........................5BCOMICS & PUZZLES ...6B

PANETTA WARNS AGAINST CUTTING U.S. DEFENSE BUDGET, 3A

U.S. MISSILE KILLS HAQQANI MEMBER IN PAKISTAN, 6A

JPMORGAN REPORTS 4 PERCENT DIP IN PROFIT,BUSINESS FRONT

CARDINALS EDGE BREWERS IN GAME 3,SPORTS FRONT

PARIS — (AP) — The Paris prosecutor’s offi ce on Thursday dropped its investigation into a writer’s claim that Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her, though it said the former IMF chief admitted to behavior that could qualify as sexual assault.

In a dramatic legal twist for the high-profi le Strauss-Kahn, the pros-ecutor said it couldn’t put Strauss-Kahn on trial for the lesser sexual assault charge because the incident occurred too long ago. The stat-ute of limitations on that charge is three years; on attempted rape it’s 10 years.

During questioning into the French case, Strauss-Kahn admit-ted to what prosecutors described in a statement as sexual assault against writer Tristane Banon, dur-ing a 2003 interview for a book she was writing.

“For lack of suffi cient elements of evidence, prosecution cannot be undertaken on the charge of attempted rape,” the prosecutor’s offi ce said. However, it said, “facts that could be qualifi ed as sexual as-sault have been acknowledged.”

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Henri Leclerc, told The Associated Press that the former IMF chief admitted that he tried to kiss Banon without her consent and she refused.

“He admitted no assault, no vio-lence of any kind,” Leclerc said. He said he didn’t understand how the prosecutor could have interpreted the attempted kiss as sexual assault. Under French law, sexual assault is an attack that does not involve an attempt to penetrate the victim.

TURN TO STRAUSS-KAHN, 2A•

BY TIM JOHNSONMcClatchy News Service

MEXICO CITY — The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the Unit-ed States has cast Mexico into the news as a potential staging area for a terrorist operation.

But experts say the likelihood of such a plot going undetected in Mexico by U.S. authorities is low and that Mexico’s drug cartels would be unlikely to become in-volved in such a plot.

U.S. offi cials alleged this week that an Iranian-American and a member of Iran’s Quds Force sought to enlist a Mexican drug cartel in a plot to kill Saudi Ambassador Adel Al Jubeir in Washington, perhaps by bombing a restaurant he was known to frequent.

One of the men, Manssor Arb-absiar, 56, a naturalized U.S. citizen holding Iranian and U.S. passports, was said to have met in the Mexi-can border city of Reynosa with a Drug Enforcement Administration informant who he thought was a member of a violent drug cartel.

The barrage of 251,287 unre-dacted U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks released more than a month ago suggest that U.S. dip-lomats maintain a steady focus on Iran’s activities in Latin America. In Mexico, that meant keeping an eye on a mosque in Torreon, watch-ing the impact of Iran’s “dynamic” new ambassador, gauging public attitudes toward Iran and coaching agents at Mexico’s National Secu-rity and Investigation Center — CISEN in its Spanish initials — the domestic intelligence agency.

TURN TO MEXICO, 4A•

BY BINYAMIN APPELBAUM AND JENNIFER STEINHAUERNew York Times Service

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Congress passed three long-await-ed free trade agreements, end-ing a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.

The approval of the deals Wednesday with South Korea, Co-lombia and Panama is a victory

for U.S. President Barack Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive U.S. eco-nomic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the fi rst trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.

All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelm-ing Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Obama’s jobs bill.

The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political

achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying rela-tionships with strategic allies. The economic benefi ts are projected to be small. A federal agency es-timated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “neg-ligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.

The House voted to pass the Colombia measure, the most con-troversial of the three deals be-cause of concerns about the treat-ment of unions in that country, 262 to 167; the Panama measure passed

300 to 129, and the agreement con-cerning South Korea passed 278 to 151. The votes refl ected a clear partisan divide, with many Demo-crats voting against the president. In the Senate, the Colombia mea-sure passed 66 to 33, the Panama bill succeeded 77 to 22 and the South Korea measure passed 83 to 15. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, voted against all three measures.

The House also passed a mea-sure to expand a benefi ts pro-gram for workers who lose jobs to

TURN TO TRADE DEALS, 2A•

BY PETER LATTMANNew York Times Service

The fallen hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam received the longest prison sentence on record for insid-er trading on Thursday, a watershed moment in the government’s ag-gressive two-year campaign to root out the illegal exchange of confi den-tial information on Wall Street.

Judge Richard J. Holwell sen-tenced Rajaratnam, the former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, to 11 years in prison. Rajaratnam was also fi ned $10 million. A jury convicted him of securities fraud and conspiracy in May after a two-month trial.

Calling him “the modern face of illegal insider trading,” prosecutors accused Rajaratnam of using a cor-rupt network of well-placed tipsters — including former executives of Intel, IBM and the consulting fi rm McKinsey & Company — to illicitly gain about $64 million.

“We can only hope that this case will be the wake-up call we said it should be when Mr. Rajaratnam was arrested,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for Manhattan, said

in a statement. “Privileged profes-sionals do not get a free pass to pur-sue profi t through corrupt means.”

As Judge Holwell read his sen-tence in a packed courtroom, Raja-

ratnam stood stone-faced. His wife, who did not attend any of the trial proceedings, also showed no emo-tion. Their three daughters did not attend the sentencing.

Rajaratnam, 54, who did not tes-tify during his trial, did not speak in the courtroom.

The 11-year sentence was sig-nifi cantly lower than the range of roughly 19 to 24 years requested by the government. Judge Holwell cited Rajaratnam’s charitable works and his medical problems as reasons to give him a shorter sentence than prosecutors had requested.

The judge said Rajaratnam had advanced diabetes that was leading to kidney failure. Defense lawyers requested that their client to be sent to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., part of the federal pris-on complex where Bernard L. Mad-off is serving 150 years for cheating investors.

Rajaratnam’s prison sentence

continues a trend of ever-stiffer penalties against white-collar crimi-nals. Legal experts say the increased prison terms are in part a result of federal sentencing guidelines passed in 1987 that link the length of a sentence to the dollar amount involved in the fraud.

Historically, judges showed le-niency when penalizing corporate criminals because they were not seen as a threat to society and they might have empathized with people who often came from similar sta-tions as themselves. But gone, for the most part, are the days of slap-on-the-wrist sentences and “coun-try club” prisons where white-collar defendants would serve short stints in relatively comfortable quarters.

Corporate wrongdoers have re-ceived record-length sentences in recent years. In addition to Madoff, Lee B. Farkas, a former mortgage

TURN TO RAJARATNAM, 2A•

Hedge fund founder gets 11-year term in insider trading case

REMY DE LA MAUVINIERE/AP

Writer Tristane Banon, above, had claimed that Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her.

DEALING WITHDUVALIERISTSHaiti government’s links to old regime prompt scrutiny

ANDRES MARTINEZ CASARES/THE MIAMI HERALD

Former Haitian strongman Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier at his house in Port-au-Prince.

Former chief of

Galleon, Raj Rajaratnam,

left, leaves the federal

court in New York

with his lawyers

Thursday.

RICK MAIMAN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

BY TRENTON DANIELAssociated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Back from exile, former strongman Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duva-lier lives in a villa in the hills above Haiti’s capital. His son serves as a consultant to the country’s new president, Mi-chel Martelly, while others with links to Duvalier’s hat-ed and feared regime work for the administration.

Duvalier himself is ru-mored to be ill and appears too frail to return to power. But for many Haitians who re-member the former dictator’s brutal rule, the rise of his loyal-ists to the new president’s inner circle triggers suspicions about where Martelly’s loyalties lie.

Such developments might be shrugged off in many countries, but not in Haiti, where much of the politi-cal establishment for the past 15 years has consisted of people associated with the mass uprising that forced “Baby Doc” to fl ee the country for France in 1986.

Now, a former minister and am-bassador under the regime is serving as a close advisor to Martelly. And at least fi ve high-ranking members of the administration, including the new prime minister, are the chil-dren of senior dictatorship offi cials.

Sen. Moise Jean-Charles said he and others who lived through those years are uneasy that Duvalierists are aligned with a president with

TURN TO HAITI, 2A•

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the miami herald 14 de octubre

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