Businessman Ari Ben-Menashe and his Montreal-based lobbying firm Dickens & Madson were hired to “help explain the real situation in the country,” according to a consultancy contract dated Thursday.
The Foreign Lobby reported that the company has the task of lobbying figures in the US Congress and in the administration of Joe Biden, as well as in the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Russia, in addition to the United Nations, the African Union and other international organizations and NGOs.
Ben-Menashe told the Foreign Lobby in a phone call on Friday that he hopes to enter into a formal lobbying contract with the U.S. Department of Justice early next week, for an unspecified “large sum”.
Ben-Menashe appears to be planning to present the country’s military rulers as a counterattack to what he claimed to be the growing Chinese influence in the country under the leadership of Myanmar, currently a prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi.
“Aung San Suu Kyi as a leader was the one who did this to the Rohingyas, not the army,” he insisted.
The MFA said the ambassadors who served in Yangon received two army helicopter tours in October 2017 and February 2018, in which Myanmar officials tried – unsuccessfully, according to the MFA – to shift the blame from the burnt villages to the local Rohingya resistance movements.
According to the MFA, helicopter tours revealed traces of old villages that were “completely erased. The terrain was level and there was no way to know if there was ever a village there.
Ben-Menashe said he based his claims on his time as an adviser to the military dictatorship in Myanmar in the late 1990s. He said he warned the country’s rulers at the time that Suu Kyii had shown anti-Muslim animosity.
Ben-Menashe has been an infamous character in the world of arms trading and lobbying. After immigrating to Israel with his parents in the 1960s, he was enlisted as a translator for IDF intelligence, later being promoted to work on IDF international intelligence relations.
While Time was unable to corroborate the allegations, and Ben-Menashe subsequently passed the information on to the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa, which published it in November 1986, leading to congressional investigations that corroborated the information.
He gained prominence in 1989 after being arrested in the United States for violating the Arms Export Control Act for trying to sell three Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to Iran that used fake end-user certificates.
Although a 1990 article in The Jerusalem Post he claimed that ‘the Defense establishment’ never had any contact with Ari Ben-Menashe and his activities’, both the complaint and the charges against him were later dropped after Ben-Moshe proved that he had indeed worked for Israeli intelligence.
He claimed that he was personally involved in assisting Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign with his “October surprise” of preventing American hostages from being released before the 1980 election, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter.
His claims of helping the Reagan campaign and helping with the negotiations that helped to free the United States embassy staff were refuted in the years that followed.
He also claimed that he had worked for Mossad and as a special adviser to then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. These statements would also prove to be false and full of inconsistencies.
His stories managed to mislead several major news outlets around the world, even leading him to testify as an expert witness in hearings in the United States Congress in the early 1990s, before being totally discredited in the United States.
After being discredited in the United States, Ben-Menashe moved to Australia, where he repeated similar patterns of delivering inaccurate information to journalists before his asylum applications were denied.
He eventually moved to Canada, where he started his controversial lobbying firm, lobbying for many of the most brutal dictatorships in the past three decades.
In addition to his previous representation of the military dictatorship of Myanmar, he was also responsible for the campaign of disinformation against the political opponent of the then embargoed dictator and President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.
More recently, the Montreal-based Ben-Menashe lobbying firm was hired by Sudanese general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in a $ 6 million deal, which critics dubbed “blood money”, accusing Dagalo of plundering the money during the country’s civil war.