Top executives of Enron caused the world’s biggest bankruptcy while making off with millions of dollars by using the same financial tools as Osama Bin Laden.
The Bush administration knew right where to look when it wanted to shut down Bin Laden’s financial network ” offshore secrecy havens. The system moves money for people with something to hide. Sometimes they are terrorists. Sometimes they are financial swindlers.
U.S. investigators had to use muscle to get the Bin Laden information. When a Bahamas bank refused to open its records, the U.S. had it cut off from the world’s wire transfer systems and the bank changed its mind within hours. Offshore revelations on Enron should make the public and policymakers question the continued existence of the world’s financial services system for criminals.
Von Lucy Komisar*, Beat Kraushaar Und Henry Habegger, Mitarbeit: Laurent Duvane SonntagsBlick (Zurich) 9 Dezember 2001 BERN – 600 Kilo nukleares Material wollten Ex-SVP-Nationalrat Bernard Rohrbasser und Notar R. verkaufen – an die Saudis. Verwickelt in den dubiosen Handel ist auch das Departement für auswärtige Angelegenheiten. Jetzt ermittelt die Bundesanwaltschaft. Diesen Mittwoch erhielt die Bundesanwaltschaft […]
When tracking down the terrorist money trail, Washington will inevitably wind up in Switzerland. Swiss banks have long been used by shady characters worldwide to launder money. One of them might be a good starting point for U.S. investigators seeking terrorist funding sources and illicit bioweapons trade.
GENEVA–To protect America from terrorist attack, the United States must investigate illicit trade in biological weapons and trace the movement of terrorist money. A good starting point is a controversial Swiss bank that may have facilitated the sale of hazardous biological materials to Islamic militants.
GENEVA– As the U.S. searches for the culprits who let loose an anthrax attack on America and for the money trail of Islamic terrorists believed to have plotted the attack on the World Trade Center, key questions are: How does the illicit trade in biological weapons operate and how is terrorist money moved?
For answers to both those questions, the U.S. ought to zero in on a Swiss bank that handled a sale from a known Russian biological weapons producer, Biopreparat, to a company, Interplastica, with links to Islamic militants.
Offshore banking has helped Citibank clients hide millions.
Citibank Citibankis leading a fight by American banks to gut the anti-moneylaundering laws currently being considered in Congress”laws that could significantly change the way banks do business for their wealthiest clients.
Citibank is seeking an exception to a proposed ban on doing business with shell banks, which have no physical presence and are situated “virtually” in offshore zones to avoid taxes and regulations. The banks are used to hide and launder perhaps billions of dollars a year.
NEW YORK–A controversial European book that might help authorities track terrorist funding sources remains unpublished and relatively unknown in the United States.
”Entitled Revelation$,it exposes a secret banking system that might be used by terrorists. At the center is a clearinghouse in Luxembourg called Clearstream, which transfers money for international banks and major companies.
Written by a former high-ranking Clearstream official and a French journalist, its publication last February by Les Arenes in Paris triggered the firing of Clearstream’s top officials, a judicial inquiry in Luxembourg, and invitations to the authors to address members of the European Parliament and the French parliamentary commission on financial crime and money-laundering.
Terrorist networks all over the world depend on the international bank and corporate secrecy system to hide and move their money. This structure is allowed to exist by agreement of the world’s banks and financial powers. A lot of people make money from it, including the owners and managers of banks that hide customers’ deposits from tax authorities. But an unintended consequence is that it helps worldwide networks of terrorists.
Terrorists need a way to finance operations in dozens of countries around the globe, to pay for houses, salaries, transport, weapons and explosives.
For years the banking laws of the United States and its allies have protected money laundering, which makes money for banks and the wealthy, and has even helped Washington fund freedom fighters. But the system also provides funds and cover for terrorists; the system must be dismantled with new laws.
The global money-laundering system used by terrorists has also served the U.S. government and banks for years, creating wealth and occasionally supporting U.S. political interests abroad. Changing U.S. bank secrecy laws to pierce that laundering system is as essential to stopping terrorism as military force and diplomatic moves.
Global money laundering made easy by loose rules on secret accounts
Terrorists work the levers of global banking laws to move money that finance their efforts from phony banks to real ones, like Britain’s Barclays Bank, which Osama bin Laden allegedly used.
Terrorist networks all over the world depend on the international bank and corporate secrecy system to hide and move their money. This structure is allowed to exist by agreement of the world‘s banks and financial powers. A lot of people make money from it, including the owners and managers of banks that hide customers‘ deposits from tax authorities. But an unintended consequence is that it aids and abets worldwide networks of terrorists.
For Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov, 53, called Taivanchik (the Taiwanese) because of his Asian features, the plot to get an Olympic gold medal for Russia’s top figure-skaters was small-time.
The Russian mafia don who was arrested July 31 for fixing skating contests at the Salt Lake City summer Olympics reminds one of Al Capone, who was put away for tax evasion, because the government couldn‘t get enough evidence against him for murder, extortion and criminal racketeering.
I was having dinner at the Moscow apartment of Tatiana Kudryavtseva, the Russian translator for books by Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, John Updike and William Styron, among others. But it wasn’t a literary evening. The other guest was Rufina Philby, widow of the British spy. Tatiana knew her through Greene, who had written a preface to Philby’s memoir.
Rufina, or Rutchka, as Tatiana called her, was disarming, referring to Kim as the spy and recounting how they’d met in Moscow when a friend couldn’t use a ticket to the U.S. Ice Capades. The couple going with her invited Kim. She recalled how depressed he’d been in his Russian exile until the KGB finally gave him a job–training spies to behave as proper Brits so they’d pass easily in England.
I asked if she’d been to the KGB Museum I’d heard about.
I’ve never been there, she said. I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t know there was one.
When Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said after the February meeting of the top industrialized countries, known as the G-7, that a European initiative to clamp down on money laundering is not about dictating to any country what should be the appropriate level of tax rates, it was clear that the game was over.
For about eighteen months the United States had signaled that it was serious about joining the Europeans in modest efforts to deal with the tide of illicit money that washes around the world. Now, the Bush Administration was saying that it was backing off the US commitment to reform the offshore banking system. Instead, the tough on crime Republicans would stand shoulder to shoulder with the shady characters in Nauru, Aruba, Liechtenstein and elsewhere who offer state-of-the-art financial services for crooks.
Money: The wealthy hide a bundle of their dollars in banks that can keep a secret.
The Bush tax cut for the top 1 percent of richest Americans is worth $69 billion, nearly 38 percent of the total. People who protested that are virtually ignoring another Republican policy that saves the rich the same amount. Experts estimate that $70 billion in taxes are lost annually because many wealthy Americans hide money in tax havens, but Republicans in Congress and the White House are blocking efforts to stop this tax evasion.
In the first salvo of an international effort to disable the system of shell companies used widely by criminals, corrupt officials, and tax cheats, the OECD Council of Ministers on May 10th adopted a report on what countries should do to pierce shell company secrecy. Called “Misuse of Corporate Vehicles for Illicit Purposes,” it is part of a campaign by the world‘s financial powers against the illicit offshore bank and corporate secrecy system. It was written by OECD Steering Group on Corporate Governance made up of experts from member countries‘ finance and securities ministries.
PARIS — OECD Secretary General Donald Johnston says he is pleased about the OECD commitment to try to stop companies from its own member states from bribing public officials in other countries. But, he added, that effort needs to be extended to cover bribery of corporate officials as well.
The Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions entered into force in February 1999. It commits 34 signatory countries, including all the world’s biggest economies, to adopt common rules to punish companies and individuals who engage in bribery.
Criminals — drug dealers or dictators — with embarrassing amounts of cash on hand, or corporations trying to avoid taxation, often use false fronts in poor countries to launder the funds. Major U.S. banks are heavily involved in this unsavory business, so banker Robert Rubin Robert Rubinmay face some interesting questions from the other members of a UN panel intended to help debtor nations.
There is more than a little irony in the appointment of Robert Rubin, a chairman of Citibank, to a United Nations panel which is supposed to propose methods for helping poor countries.
The net around money launderers may be getting a bit tighter, with a new treaty signed in Palermo under the auspices of the UN. It’s a step in the right direction, but a lot remains to be done to effectively combat what has become a global plague.
For more than a decade, the international community has been wrestling with the issue of what to do about the worldwide bank secrecy system that allows drug traffickers, fraudulent business operators and tax cheats to flourish.
Washington denies any problem, as does the International Monetary Fund. But Russians who should know are sure that a $4.8 billion loan never reached its destination. They have been joined recently by Swiss prosecutors who are equally skeptical. PNS contributor Lucy Komisar is a freelance journalist who, sponsored by PNS, spent three months in Russia on a U.S. National Research Council grant to investigate the impact of offshore bank and corporate secrecy.
When news broke in August 1999 that somewhere from $7 billion to $15 billion had been spirited out of Russia through the Bank of New York, in what looked to U.S. investigators to be money laundering, American bankers professed shock. A month after those revelations, Bank of New York CEO Thomas Renyi told the U.S. House Banking Committee how dismayed I have been by the suggestions in the press that the Bank of New York has been involved in, or been used as a vehicle for, money laundering or other illicit activities.
Two far-reaching and potentially controversial anti-money laundering measures would require professionals such as lawyers and accountants to file the same sort of suspicious transaction reports that banks do and would extend know your customer rules to include the owners of companies. The Council of Europe has already proposed the first. US authorities have not acted on either.
After it was revealed in August that $7 billion to $15 billion had been siphoned out of Russia through the Bank of New York, the nation’s influentials were shocked, shocked. America’s most sophisticated financiers were vulnerable to tawdry Russian fraudsters? The press gasped at the scale, congressional committees mobilized, and the Clinton administration trumpeted an anti-money-laundering strategy.
But the scandal was no surprise to federal immigration agent Thomas D. O’Connell. Nor was it the first time a New York bank had been soiled by money believed stolen by Russian con men. Though it has not been reported until now, the Bank of New York and other New York banks”including Chemical, Chase Manhattan, and Citibank” were and most likely still are conduits for the proceeds of a still-to-be-tallied series of crimes, with at least a thousand shell company bank accounts laundering dirty cash.
The Russian banking scandal should have been no surprise to Western financial experts. The Bank of New York laundered some $7 billion in Russian money through the offshore system.
The sudden attention by U.S. government officials and the mainstream media to the $7 billion or more of Russian money laundered through the Bank of New York might make you think this is the first time that multimillions have been stolen from Russia-or elsewhere-and washed through the international offshore system. In fact, it’s not even the first time for the Bank of New York.
Planning a visit to our cousins, the Brits? In London, there are several main areas best to stay in. Most convenient is the West End — known as Theatreland. You can move further west and live near one of the big parks or squares — Green Park or Grosvenor.
Here is the majestic Millennium Britannia in Grosvenor Square.
Or you can choose to be in Knightsbridge, Chelsea or Kensington, the trendy areas that are minutes from downtown by tube and have the flavor of an upscale Greenwich Village and Upper West Side. I checked out hotels in each of those neighborhoods.
Philby, widow of the British spy. Tatiana knew her through Greene, who had written a preface to Philby’s memoir. 