Yesterday I saw an article in The New York Times that gave me a glimpse of the power that some of the major terror groups now have because they are now going international. The article is called "Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah's Financing" and it reports on a bank that has been found to be laundering money for an international cocaine ring connected to the terrorist group Hezbollah.
Working on an international level has allowed Hezbollah to become Lebanon's major military and political power. Hezbollah is using the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a hub to move large sums of money into the legitimate financial system even though there are sanctions in place to try to cut off Hezbollah's economic lifeblood.
According to the article, some senior bank managers had assisted some account holders in washing drug money by mixing it with the proceeds of used cars bought in the United States and then sold in Africa. It is scary to think that even with all of the anti-terrorist measures that the U.S has taken, terrorist operations still go on in the U.S.
The most terrifying thing however, is that the scheme was only discovered by accident when the banks untainted assets were being sold, "with American blessings", to the French banking giant Societe Generale. If auditors had not been called in to scrub the banks books, this scheme would be going on today and no one would have any idea.
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