|
Trending Topics
|
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11j09q2llo
British Bank Accused of Helping to Fund Terrorists
(BBC News) Andy Verity - Documents filed in a New York court on May 31 claim that thousands of transactions worth more than $100 billion were carried out by Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), one of the UK's largest banks, from 2008 to 2013 in breach of sanctions against Iran. An independent expert has identified $9.6 billion of foreign exchange transactions with individuals and companies designated by the U.S. government as funding "terror groups," including Hizbullah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. David Scantling, an expert with decades of experience with counter-terrorist financing, including at the U.S. Department of Defense, stated that the spreadsheets containing records of more than half a million separate transactions were "cloaked" and were not immediately visible, but could be extracted through a simple technique well-known to analysts in his field. For example, SCB facilitated 73 transactions for a Gambian front company owned by a key Hizbullah financier, Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi.