Well, this (from NPR) ought to be good:

A former Swiss banker said Monday that he has handed over to WikiLeaks two discs containing what he claims is information on 2,000 offshore bank account holders.

Rudolf Elmer, an ex-employee of Swiss-based bank Julius Baer, said the documents reveal case after case of tax evasion and involve 40 politicians as well as entertainers and multinationals from the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. He refused to name the account holders, but said the data span a period of at least 19 years and involve three banks.

Elmer was charged last week in Geneva with coercion and violating banking secrecy laws. Appearing with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange at London's Frontline Club yesterday, he told reporters, "I do think as a banker I have the right to stand up if something is wrong."

New Zealand has, less than shockingly, not been a major presence in the WikiLeaks saga so far. So congratulations are order for the U.S. embassy in Wellington, which made a strong showing in the Guardian yesterday with a tale of international espionage that somehow involves Mossad, Hamas, cerebral palsy, and mutton.

In 2004, New Zealand imposed diplomatic sanctions on Israel after two Mossad agents were found to have stolen the identity of a quadriplegic New Zealander in order to obtain a passport for a third Israeli spy.* "It is a sorry indictment of Israel that it has again taken such actions against a country with which it has friendly relations," New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said at the time. Visas were restricted, embassies were closed, and Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who was planning to visit the country, was disinvited. Then Hamas got involved. The organization put out a press release applauding New Zealand's actions, saying it "highly appreciated the daring position" Clark had taken against the "Zionist security apparatuses."

Clark's government made a show of rejecting Hamas's overtures, but American embassy officials in Wellington were apparently unconvinced. A July 19, 2004 cable about the incident, signed by political and economic counselor Timothy Zuniga-Brown, floats the theory that New Zealand may have had ulterior motives in making a big deal about the Mossad affair:

Its overly strong reaction to Israel over this issue suggests the [government of New Zealand] sees this flap as an opportunity to bolster its credibility with the Arab community, and by doing so, perhaps, help NZ lamb and other products gain greater access to a larger and more lucrative market.

Would the Kiwis really fan the flames of an international incident to ingratiate their way into Arab stomachs? It's certainly true that the economy of New Zealand -- which famously has 9 sheep for every human -- is unusually lamb-dependent: The country's lamb-heavy international meat sales accounted for $5.19 billion last year, or 13 percent of all exports. And while Europe and the United States are still the world's biggest lamb importers, the Middle East is the most promising growth market -- neighboring Australia's lamb exports to the region grew 25 percent from 1990 to 2008. In any case, the New Zealand media have been strangely silent on the allegations so far.

*What's with New Zealand and weird identity theft scandals?

Last week, you'll recall, WikiLeaks brought us the story of a meeting a year ago between Jerry Lanier, the U.S. ambassador to Uganda, and Tim O'Hanlon, an executive of Britain's Tullow Oil, which was trying to buy a stake in a pair of big Ugandan oil fields at the time. Lanier's cable paraphrases O'Hanlon as saying that two other companies had somehow swooped in and grabbed the deal out of Tullow's hands. The suggestion was that a Ugandan minister had been paid off.

Not so, say almost all of those mentioned in the Lanier cable. Last Friday, O'Hanlon wrote a letter to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, saying that Lanier got the story all wrong. He had heard the talk circulating of such backroom dealing, O'Hanlon wrote, but he never believed it. "I have no evidence implicating the honorable ministers in corruption and have no reason to believe that the rumors sweeping Kampala at the time were actually true," O'Hanlon wrote.

Amama Mbabazi (above), Uganda's security minister and the official named in Lanier's cable -- in which Lanier told his superiors that the United States might consider revoking Mbabazi's U.S. visa -- said he was equally perplexed by what the cable had to say about his relationship with Italy's Eni and Britain's Heritage Oil. He said:

These allegations are absolutely untrue. I have never received even an offer let alone payment from Heritage or ENI of that kind or for anything. However at that time there was report in The Times of London which did not name anyone but talked about corruption over the deal. What surprised me is that the embassy believes that the allegations are true and concluded that the deal showed signs of high level corruption in Uganda's oil sector. This is incredible. I am surprised they would make a statement like that without cross checking with me about my alleged involvement.

Eni also said that Lanier was far off the mark, and that it intended legal action against WikiLeaks. "ENI denies the serious allegations which are completely without foundation and has instructed its lawyers to initiate legal proceedings to compensate for any damage caused to the company's reputation," a spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

Italy's oil company Eni has long enjoyed a privileged position in oil and gas deals in both Russia and Kazakhstan. The company enabled Russia's dismantlement of Yukos, and has been Gazprom's top-tier partner in tightening its grip on gas supplies to Turkey and Europe. Allegations in one WikiLeaked cable that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and some pals have profited personally from this intimate relationship are not entirely surprising -- nor is it particularly shocking to read allegations of similar Eni activity in Uganda.

The details come in an unusually descriptive new cable released by WikiLeaks. The cable describes a Dec. 14, 2009 meeting between U.S. Ambassador Jerry Lanier and Tim O'Hanlon, vice president for Africa for Britain's Tullow Oil. We have written previously about scrappy Tullow, a serious player around Africa's Lake Albert region, which is believed to potentially contain more than 1 billion barrels of oil.

Here is the backdrop: Tullow was wishing to exercise a right of first refusal to buy the second half of two Ugandan oilfields in which it already held a 50 percent interest. But Eni somehow stepped in and, right around the time of the Lanier-O'Hanlon meeting, announced that it, and not Tullow, would secure the $1.35 billion purchase.  O'Hanlon asserted that he knew just how Eni had managed it -- the Italians had created a London shell company through which they were funneling money to Uganda's security minister, Amama Mbabazi.

This bit of news really irritated Lanier, who suggested that he was sick and tired of hearing of "corruption scandals" involving Mbabazi. From the cable:

Depending on the outcome of this major deal, we believe it could be time to consider tougher action - to include visa revocation - for senior officials like Mbabazi who are consistently linked to corruption scandals impacting the international activity of U.S. businesses, U.S. foreign assistance goals, and the stability of democratic institutions.

Lanier said in the cable that he planned to confer with the local British High Commission, plus the Irish ambassador, and talk about writing a joint letter to President Yoweri Museveni expressing their dismay "about these very troubling signs of high-level corruption in Uganda's oil sector, and advocating for the open and transparent sale of oil assets and management of future oil revenues."

We do not know if those meetings took place or if the letter was written. However, the deal was overturned just seven weeks later and given to Tullow under the same terms as Eni.

The latest WikiLeaks document dump is decidedly Africa-centric, and among other things includes a sizeable stack of cables from the U.S. embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe. One of them, an account a diamond-smuggling operation involving several top government officials, would have a decent shot at be optioned in Hollywood.

First, the background: Zimbabwe's economy has more or less vanished over the past decade, but the Mugabe regime does have one thing going for it: diamonds. In 2006, a huge diamond field called Marange was discovered in eastern Zimbabwe, prompting a mad dash for the riches. A British company called African Consolidated Resources, taking over a claim that had belonged to diamond giant DeBeers, opened large-scale mining operations, only to be forcibly evicted by Mugabe's government, which took over the diamond field in 2007. The national mining company attempted to run things there for a little while, but eventually excavation was ceded to a small army of independent hand-panning prospectors, giving rise to a lawless, Wild West environment; the Zimbabwean military was reported to have gunned down illegal miners from helicopters in its efforts to gain control over the chaos.

The Marange diamond operation has been a stone in the shoe of the international community ever since. The Kimberley Process, the international gem-trade-governing body that certifies exporters in an effort to control the trade in blood diamonds, has accused the Zimbabwean government of committing various human rights abuses at the Marange mines, and eventually stopped certifying the diamonds mined there. Mugabe, in turn, has blasted the Kimberly Process as illegitimate, and continued to export diamonds without the group's stamp of approval (he has found plenty of buyers in China and India). The whole affair has led to some soul-searching about the means the international community has chosen to regulate the diamond industry; an International Crisis Group report in November suggested it was time to "rethink" the Kimberley process, since the Zimbabwean trade had demonstrated so many gaping holes in it.

It was in this context that Andrew Cranswick, CEO of the recently ousted African Consolidated Resources, met with U.S. embassy officials in November 2008 to spill the dirt, so to speak, on who was cashing in on the diamond field -- including many officials of the government that was nominally trying to bring the situation to heel. (At the time, Zimbabwean diamonds were still Kimberley-certified -- but the Marange exports were being sold on the black market.) Cranswick is of course hardly a disinterested party here, so caveat emptor; "it is clear," the cable -- signed by U.S. Ambassador James McGee -- notes, "that Cranswick is a businessman trying to find any pressure point he can through which to leverage his own claim. At the same time, he sheds light on an industry that is enriching many of the same old corrupt Zimbabwean elite -- and causing violence and deaths that so far have received little attention."

Indeed, the account of how the Zimbabwean diamond trade worked is pretty interesting reading. First there are the principals: Eleven Zimbabweans including Mugabe's wife, prime minister, and minister of mines and mining development, plus the local governor. (The cable notes that the embassy's own inquiry yielded a similar list of names.) Then there's the pipeline: Once they were sold to "a mix of Belgians, Israelis, Lebanese (the largest contingent), Russians, and South Africans," the low-grade diamonds were smuggled into Dubai and traded in an economic free-trade zone there, while gem-quality stones found their way to Belgium, Israel, or South Africa.

Back on the diamond field, meanwhile, things were slipping ever deeper into chaos, as prospectors from half a dozen other African countries flocked to Marange for a cut of the action, and efforts to control them "led to hundreds and possibly thousands of homicides." This was known at the time, but still, the details here are engrossing:

In response to aggressive police action, diggers began arming themselves with handguns and in some cases automatic weapons. They also formed loose gangs in an attempt to protect themselves as well as "claimed" areas. Cranswick said that some members of the police and army have deserted in order to join the digging, and they typically brought their firearms with them. Some former police even still wear their uniforms as they search for diamonds.

Apart from the BP oil spill last spring, no global energy story has eclipsed the perennial Ukraine-Russia natural gas spat in terms of global attention, drama, nasty accusations, and pure impact -- the relegation of a dozen European countries into the dark and cold. But there has also been mystery, as in, Why does this keep happening?  Russia's Vladimir Putin told us it was all a very simple matter of unpaid gas bills, but experts pointed to the role of personal gain and a little-known intermediary company called Rosukrenergo. This company, putatively controlled by a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash, had somehow positioned itself smack in the middle of the natural gas deal, and appeared to be earning some $4 billion a year for the privilege. But what was Rosurkenergo, and who was Dmitry Firtash to get such a deal? Politicians linked them to an alleged organized crime boss, and suspicious experts and journalists resorted to phrases like "shady" and "secretive" to describe this apparent sweetheart deal.

So it was that William Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was surprised when, uninvited, Firtash elected to walk into the mission on Dec. 8, 2008, and explained himself, according to a cable filed two days later by Taylor and released by WikiLeaks. Provided this incredible opportunity, Taylor came right out with the main question on everyone's mind: What was his relationship with Semyon Mogilevich, an alleged Russian mob boss wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and now under arrest in Russia?  

As the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal report, the answer to the question provides fascinating firsthand insight into the way business is really done in Ukraine and the region as a whole. In a nutshell, Mogilevich had indeed given his blessing to Firtash's foray into Ukrainian business, but that did not mean they were business partners, Firtash said. Instead, he went on, he was simply observing "the law of the streets." From the cable:

Firtash answered that many Westerners do not understand what Ukraine was like after the break up of the Soviet Union, adding that when a government cannot rule effectively, the country is ruled by ‘the laws of the streets.' He noted that it was impossible to approach a government official for any reason without also meeting with an organized crime member at the same time. Firtash acknowledged that he needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich when he established various businesses, but he denied any close relationship to him.

Firtash's bottom line was that he did not deny having links to those associated with organized crime. Instead, he argued that he was forced into dealing with organized crime members including Mogilevich or he would never have been able to build a business. If he needed a permit from the government, for example, he would invariably need permission from the appropriate ‘businessman' who worked with the government official who issued that particular permit. He also claimed that although he knows several businessmen who are linked to organized crime, including members of the Solntsevo Brotherhood, he was not implicated in their alleged illegal dealings. He maintained that the era of the ‘law of the street' had passed and businesses could now be run legitimately in Ukraine.

Firtash was just warming up. He stayed in Taylor's office for two and a half hours. Much of the time, he was pouring scorn on Yulia Timoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister. But he also seemed intent on polishing up his own image.