GABOR SANDOR ACS HUNGARIAN PHILANTHROPIST HEADS UP PARALEGAL AND PRO BONO NETWORK FOR INTERNATIONAL BANK ACTIVITIES REFORM COMMISSION

Washington D.C. December 26 2003---Free and Clear Press Corps.- Hungarian born financier and philanthropist, Founder of the Free and Clear Foundations of Earth, is heading up the international coordination efforts of paralegals and pro bono lawyers for the International Bank Activities Reform Commission. (IBARC)

So far, the American Bank Activities Reform Commission (ABARC) in Washington D.C. and the Bank Activities Reform Commission (BARC) in Portland, Oregon, both sponsored by IBARC, have taken on several major supportive projects in the United States with many more to follow.

In Portland, Oregon, BARC volunteers have prepared a joinder to the $80 million class action of Remenar vs. the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for failing to exchange "Federal Reserve Notes" for gold, lawful money of the Untied States, presented for redemption at the Portland Branch by a homeless person who has been granted "in forma pauperis" status by Oregon District Court Judge Garr M. King.

As the case being supported by both the Free and Clear Foundations of America (FCFA) and the We the People Foundation evolves, FCFA recently announced it is pledging $200,000 to the cause from existing legal funding pledges. The entire case file can be downloaded from: http://www.supremalex.org/lawsuit/

In Washington D.C. ABARC volunteers are coordinating the preparation of a $5 trillion class action against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of 100 million American investors and are approaching CalPERS, one of Wall Street's largest customers with a $154 billion portfolio, for additional legal, technical, financial and evidentiary support. Calpers recently filed suit against the New York Stock Exchange.

CalPERS President Sean Harrigan said at a news conference that the NYSE had "looked the other way" when trading rules were violated. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, comes three months after CalPERS' protests helped oust former NYSE Chairman Richard Grasso after the disclosure of his $188 million compensation package.

CalPERS said it would seek to expand its lawsuit into a class-action case involving potentially millions of investors who bought or sold shares in NYSE-listed companies during the past five years.

CalPERS is represented by Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, the leading U.S. class-action law firm. The firm's most prominent class-action attorney, William Lerach, is based in its San Diego office, which also prepared the CalPERS complaint.

The ABARC suit will name the SEC, 47 State Attorney Generals, Attorney General John Ashcroft, individuals as past and present employees and agents of the agency charged with the fiduciary responsibility of protecting American investors as Defendants.

The suit will seek triple damages under RICO and ask for a full public disclosure of President Bush's involvement with Harken Energy and Halliburton among other matters related to the securities industry.

Two senior Democratic lawmakers have stated that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is gouging U.S. taxpayers while importing gasoline into Iraq. The Houston-based company contends it is paying the best price possible.

The New York Times has reported that in a letter to the White House budget office, Reps. Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan contended that, "Halliburton seems to be inflating gasoline prices at a great cost to American taxpayers."

ABARC has been supportive of the activities of thousands of internatioinal individual investors and literally hundreds of public corporations in seeking to bring an end to the practice of naked short selling of publicly traded stocks.

Almost a thousand individuals and at least a dozen publicly traded firms have signed a petition at a public web site www.investigatethesec.com in order to address the abuses while the Securities and Exchange Commission takes commentary on the proposed Regulation SHO, an action which Gabor S. Acs says is "too little too late".

"Wherever you see Bill Lerach involved as lead counsel, you're talking about real money," said Patrick McGurn, special counsel for Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises large institutional investors, including CalPERS, on corporate governance matters. McGurn noted that many large investors, including mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments, are dissatisfied with efforts by the NYSE to reform itself.

"People are giving up on enforcement by the SEC and taking the law into their own hands," said Frank Partnoy, professor of law at the University of San Diego and author of the recently published "Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted Financial Markets."

"This means that people like (New York state Attorney General) Eliot Spitzer and Bill Lerach are now the enforcers of securities law."

Partnoy said abuses by NYSE specialists had cost investors billions of dollars and predicted that revelations of more Wall Street scandals will be forthcoming.

Over the past two years, those scandals have included massive accounting fraud at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other large companies, as well as more recent revelations of illegal insider trading in the mutual-fund industry.

"The Parmalat collapse is the most recent result of a growing international network of whistle blowers providing and exchanging information over the Internet", said a volunteer who didn't want to call it treason.

"The financial markets are corrupt and have been out of control for years," Partnoy said. "The problems have been swept under the rug by a weak SEC, no enforcement, no punishment and very little in the way of lawsuits. This is the price we pay for looking the other way for a decade."

The CalPERS complaint also noted that the price of a seat on the NYSE has plummeted by as much as 35 percent since revelations of apparent wrongdoing by specialist firms surfaced.

The pension fund said the decline was caused by the awareness that profits have been bloated by illegal conduct.

In Italy, IBARC volunteers are organizing campaigns to have Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Bank of Italy Governor Antonio Fazio tender their resignations following the $12.5 billion bankruptcy filing of Parmalat whose former CEO, Calisto Tanzi, has disappeared.

"Parmalat shares have collapsed to less than twelve cents with no compensation so far to the investors who were milked of several billion in lost equity due to false and misleading financial statements which the SEC should have known about over a year ago", another volunteer in Maryland said.

Silvio Berlusconi sent his own warning signal to banks. Speaking about the Parmalat crisis, he told La Repubblica in an interview: "The problem is that a group of banks, all friends among themselves, which have permission to do that which has occurred. There is a system that obviously doesn't work."

The crisis at Parmalat, which recently filed for bankruptcy protection, exploded when it said a document certifying that Bank of America held a 3.95 billion euros account for the food maker's Cayman Islands-based unit Bonlat, had been rejected as false by the bank. Grant Thornton SpA, the Italian unit of Grant Thornton, had signed off on Bonlat's 2002 books on the basis of that letter.

The revelation has left many scratching their heads as to how Grant Thornton could have been duped into thinking an account of that size existed on the apparent basis of just one forged document.

"It just blows my mind," Melvyn Weiss, co-founder of powerhouse class-action law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP told Reuters from Italy, where he is vacationing. "How can you merely rely upon a letter confirmation on an account so suspect in the Cayman Islands with about $5 billon in cash? It just doesn't make any sense to me."

Weiss says he is currently not working on a lawsuit over the case, but could likely find a way to represent Parmalat investors by filing a lawsuit in the U.S. against American banks involved with Parmalat or Grant Thornton.

Grant Thornton member firms operate as separate legal entities worldwide, making it harder to sue the firm in the U.S. if only the Italian unit is involved.

But Weiss says that defense has been pierced before since accounting firms portray themselves as global organizations, sometimes even carrying a common insurance policy.

A Citigroup Inc. entity incorporated in Delaware called Buconero ("Black Hole" when translated from the Italian) invested in a Parmalat unit that loaned money to other parts of the Italian firm.

Ongoing investigations by IBARC in New York, Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands, Grand Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, United Kingdom, and Switzerland into the Laurus Master Fund Ltd., The Keshet Fund L.P., Keshet L.P., Nesher Ltd., Talbiya B. Investments Ltd. and Esquire Trade & Finance Inc., and dozens of others are turning up evidence related to over two hundred companies in the United States whose stockholders have lost over a billion dollars in value over the past three years through toxic financing schemes arranged by the apparent organized crime syndicate managed by the Grin brothers of New York City.

Regulators at NY Attorney General Spitzer's office, as well as the IRS have been asked to look into the case for further potential evidence of money laundering and income tax evasion.

The first Bank Activities Reform Commission was started in 1993 in Portland, Oregon by a group of disgruntled homeless people who had lost their economic means due to inflation, abusive banking practices, and corruption in the global financial system.

After ten years of research and development, the group has grown international in scope and has gathered sufficient evidence on many different fronts that it believes will support the radical reform of the entire banking establishment in the United States making it far more transparent than it currently exists.





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