![]() ![]() Payments to at least one of the contractors, plus travel expenses and per diems etc. In March 2019, for example, Benjamin wrote that, “Since early February, a team of Council, an engineer, two contractors, and I have been on an active search for an airplane for KBE Tourism. The Guardian also reviewed correspondence between Benjamin and the trustees and found cases of controversial spending. When asked about the Bank of Guam account, Jibas said in a written statement that he had “no idea what you are talking about”. In 2019, for example, Jibas and Benjamin instructed trustees to disburse $15.36m to the Bank of Guam account. Because those disbursements were direct, they allowed the fund’s trustees to exercise a measure of oversight.īut the statements also show that Jibas and the council’s American lawyer, Gordon Benjamin, instructed trustees to disburse large sums of money to a Bank of Guam checking account that they said was being used for “council operations” but which the trustees could not scrutinise. In 2017, Douglas Domenech, who Donald Trump had appointed as assistant interior secretary, announced that the department would hand over control of the fund, which by then held $59m, to “restore trust and ensure that sovereignty means something”.Įarlier this month, the New York Times reported that the fund had been whittled down to about $100,000, largely through extravagant spending by Jibas on projects including land development in Hawaii, new ships and planes, and an apartment complex in the Marshall Islands.Īnnual bank statements reviewed by the Guardian show that some of the money was disbursed directly from the trust fund to the vendors with whom Jibas and other local officials were negotiating. In 2016, however, Anderson Jibas was elected mayor of the Bikinian council and began pushing the interior department to hand over control of the fund. ![]() Until recently, the fund provided several million dollars each year to a council that oversaw the displaced Bikinians, helping to provide housing, food and education in a country where the median income is $9,600 and almost half of households skip meals due to lack of money. The US government established the fund in the 1980s to support displaced residents of Bikini Atoll, a small reef in the Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands which the US left uninhabitable after it tested 23 nuclear weapons there between 19. Together, the criticism and confidential documents are likely to increase the pressure the interior department faces for its role in the fund’s exhaustion, which left thousands of nuclear survivors and their descendants bereft. Meanwhile, confidential bank documents reviewed by the Guardian reveal red flags that could have alerted the department to potential issues had it been scrutinising the fund, including the transfer of millions of dollars to two personal checking accounts over which the fund’s trustees had no oversight. ![]()
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