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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
A previously unpublished list reveals that backers of a bank that the U.S. says helped fund al-Qaida include prominent members of the Arab world.
Mar 15, 2002 | According to an unpublished list obtained by Salon, the Al Taqwa bank, part of a network of financial companies named by the Bush administration as a major source and distributor of funds for Osama bin Laden's terrorist operations, has shareholders that include prominent Arab figures from numerous countries in the Middle East. Among the shareholders are the grand mufti of the United Arab Emirates and prominent families in the UAE and Kuwait. Two sisters of Osama bin Laden are also on the list, undermining the bin Laden family's claim that it separated itself from his terrorist pursuits after he was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1994.
Ahmed Huber, a Swiss director of the bank who is a radical Islamist and Hitler admirer, acknowledged in 1995 that wealthy Saudi Arabians were large contributors to the Al Taqwa bank. The just-revealed list of shareholders demonstrates further connections between important individuals in moderate Middle Eastern countries and a financial network allegedly vital to bin Laden.
The FBI may have known who the shareholders were for as long as four years. There is also evidence that Swiss authorities have since the mid-1990s refused to cooperate with international intelligence inquiries into the bank's activities. Swiss officials have said they were aware of reports that Al Taqwa was connected to terrorist groups, but there was never sufficient evidence to merit a search warrant.
The names appear on an unpublished shareholders register of "Bank Al Taqwa" that reflects holdings as of December 1999. Bank Al Taqwa is based in the Bahamas; the Al Taqwa group (which changed its name to Nada Management Organization a year ago, after authorities began an investigation into its dealings) is headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland. In November, the U.S. named the Al Taqwa network a funnel for Bin Laden's al-Qaida financial network. Representatives of the bank have denied any involvement in terrorist activities.
The list has been confirmed as authentic by both U.S. officials and Al Taqwa. Michele Davis, spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, was shown the documents on March 13 and acknowledged, "We have the list. We are doing the same as you -- trying to find out who these people are." There are 745 names on the 18-page register.
Al Taqwa president Youssef Moustafa Nada, one of several top bank officials who was put on the U.S. "supporters of terrorism" list in November, also confirmed the veracity of the list. "It is genuine," he said in a phone interview. "You can ask Mr. Nicati [the Swiss deputy attorney general]. He investigated all these things four months ago. The FBI knows since 1997. I talked to them."
Nada has vehemently denied funding bin Laden.
Included on the list are Yousuf Abdullah Al-Qaradawi, the grand mufti of the United Arab Emirates, and five members of his family; Mariam Al-Sheikh A. Bin Aziz Al-Mubarak of a branch of the Kuwaiti royal family; and members of the prominent Khalifeh family of the United Arab Emirates. Sisters Huta and Iman Binladen, who live in Saudi Arabia, and Hassan el-Banna, a leader of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood group, are also listed.
Al Taqwa was a so-called "hawala" operation (an informal word-of-mouth system that keeps no records and relies on trust) that facilitated transfers of cash between agents worldwide. The bank also used correspondent accounts -- accounts that banks have in other banks -- to transmit cash to its agents.
In October, Swiss Attorney General Valentine Roschacher said he'd received names from the FBI and they were being checked, but said no evidence of any wrongdoing had been found. He added, "It's difficult for us to get information." Swiss banks are protected by stringent secrecy laws, and the hawala system makes ascertaining the exact nature of Al Taqwa's transactions even more difficult.
One American law enforcement official who was shown the list recognized names of members of the militant Palestinian organization Hamas, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, among the shareholders. Additional publicly accessible records show that some of the bank's shareholders are connected to organizations Western intelligence officials link to al-Qaida.
