Investigations
Belgium’s biggest banks propose system to share suspected money laundering information


Published
3 months agoon
By
NewsTeam

Under fire for anti-money laundering failures, a group of Belgium’s biggest banks proposed the creation of a platform to exchange information about suspect transactions with Belgian authorities and one other, as efforts to stem the flow of dirty money gather force globally.
In testimony before the Belgian parliament’s finance committee last week, the Belgian banks — ING Belgium, KBC Bank, Belfius Bank and Insurance and BNP Paribas Fortis — jointly asked for laws allowing them to set up a secure system to share information about suspected money laundering and the shadowy entities behind the transactions.
“We are urgently asking to engage as a real partner in the fight against money laundering, and not just as a reporter of suspicious transactions to the anti-money laundering unit, as is the case now,” Marc Raisière, chief executive of Brussels-based Belfius, testified, according to the Belgian news organization De Tijd.
The Belgian banks’ proposal follows a recent agreement by European finance ministers to create a new European Union-level body with direct supervisory powers over some “high-risk” institutions, as well as the authority to take over supervision from national regulators in “clearly defined and exceptional situations.” The ministers also gave their backing to a proposal to harmonize anti-money laundering rules across the EU and provide coordination and support for national financial intelligence units of member states.
The Belgian proposal, and the hearings themselves, are the latest fallout from the FinCEN Files, a global investigation by more than 400 journalists that revealed how banks continue to move dirty money for drug cartels, corrupt regimes, arms traffickers and other international criminals, and how a broken U.S.-led enforcement system allows it to happen. The probe was based in part on 2,100 top-secret suspicious activity reports, or SARs, obtained by BuzzFeed News and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its global media partners. The SARs are filed by global banks to the United States Treasury Department’s intelligence unit, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN.
Soon after the project was published in September, Belgian parliamentarians held an initial hearing that included testimony from reporters of ICIJ’s three Belgian media partners, Lars Bové of De Tijd, Kristof Clerix of Knack, and Xavier Counasse of Le Soir. The news organizations collaborated in probing Belgium-based banks’ role in money laundering for the FinCEN Files.
The second round of hearings last week, featured top bank officials, along with representatives of the financial sector trade group Febelfin, and the National Bank of Belgium, the country’s central bank and chief banking regulator.
Bank officials said the idea for interbank cooperation on money laundering echoes that of the United Kingdom’s Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce, created in 2015 and made up of more than 40 financial institutions, regulators and law enforcement agencies.
Karel Baert, chief executive of the trade group Febelfin, said banks’ anti-money laundering efforts have been hampered by the lack of an “umbrella platform” to communicate information in a secure environment between the banks and the government in the fight against money laundering,”
At the hearing, Marianne Collin, Belfius’s chief risk officer, also proposed that the government provide banks a list of so-called “politically exposed persons” — politicians and others deemed to present a higher risk of being exposed to bribery or corruption — to help banks monitor their financial activity.
The banks also asked for greater access to Belgian authorities’ register of so-called ultimate beneficial owners, the real people behind anonymous shell companies that are typically used as money laundering vehicles.
Also at the hearing, an official at the National Bank of Belgium disclosed that nearly one in five financial institutions in the country had been assigned a “high risk profile” for anti-money laundering by the central bank.
ICIJ’s FinCEN Files investigation found that global banks with U.S. operations used their access to the U.S. Federal Reserve System to move more than $2 trillion between 1999 and 2017 in payments they believed were suspicious, flagging bank clients in more than 170 countries and territories whom they identified as being involved in potentially illicit transactions.
In exploring Belgian banks’ role, ICIJ’s three Belgian media partners found, among other things, that of 2,100 total reports in the FinCEN Files, 365 had links to Belgium, of which 179 regarded ING Belgium.
The three Belgian news organizations also reported that the NBB’s Sanctions Committee had imposed only four administrative fines on Belgian banks since 2013,each between 50,000 and 350,000 euros.
At the hearing, bank officials and regulators defended their anti-money laundering efforts and said they had invested heavily in improving compliance systems and adding personnel.
“The fact that a Belgian bank is mentioned in a report to the American anti-money laundering unit does not mean that there is a problem,” Febelfin’s Baert said. “They are a link in a chain in which the court determines whether there is a money laundering problem.”
The post Belgium’s biggest banks propose system to share suspected money laundering information appeared first on ICIJ.
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Election Integrity
Analyzing the Case for Election Fraud
Despite the overwhelming pressure, if you can’t help but feel that tingling sense of knowing that is telling you there’s more to the story, you are not alone. In fact, according to a new Rassmussen poll, nearly 50% of voters believe the election had issues. A quick look at the data blatantly shows that indeed, shenanigans abound (how can a state have 1+ million more mail-in ballots tallied than they sent out?). But was it fraud or masterful gamesmanship?


Published
2 months agoon
December 21, 2020

The world, or at least the global media, has spoken: Biden won the 2020 Election.
UPDATED FREQUENTLY WITH NEW INFORMATION – Last update 12/21/2020
A quick Google search reveals pages upon pages of reports of why the Trump team’s assertions of vote fraud and election fraud and vote flipping are flat out fallacies. YouTube has announced a ban on any videos questioning the election results. And now on Monday all 538 electors have voted, formalizing Biden’s 306-232 win. And while there is still Congress to get through, and the inauguration, based on social media and television news and practically every other point of information bombarding society today, Biden is now the President-elect.
But why now, after Government officials confirmed during Senate testimony that a foreign adversary, Russia, attempted to interfere in the 2016 United States Presidential Election via “a multi-faceted approach intended to undermine confidence in our democratic process.” According to U.S. intelligence official reports, Russia targeted voter registration databases in at least 21 states and sought to infiltrate the networks of voting equipment vendors, political parties, and at least one local election board. And if their purpose was not so much to “hack” the election but create chaos and sow seeds of uncertainty around our election process, I would say they have won. But what if this cycle, it was Russia who somehow manipulated extra ballots and placed the blame on the Democrats? What if…?
Russian Experience With Voter Fraud
The 2004 presidential election in Ukraine saw suspiciously high turnout rates that “even Stalinist North Korea would envy,” the State Department declared!
Back then, the U.S. government decried as corrupt an earlier election where special voting boxes were created to help citizens vote from home, election observers were expelled from vote counts, pre-election polls were wildly off, and voter turnout in certain communities exceeded 90%.
But the story of that Ukrainian election as recounted by then-Ambassador John Tefft to a Senate committee in December 2004 raises a tantalizing question for voters distrustful of the Nov. 3 elections results in our own 2020 Presidential Election: If tactics and outcomes in the Ukrainian election back then were enough to cry foul, why can’t Americans debate similar concerns here?
Tefft’s testimony raises an important question: Should America, the greatest democracy in the world, share any of the fraudulent attributes of a Ukrainian election? The answer for most Americans is hopefully resounding “No.”
And despite continued and repeated headlines that there was no fraud, according to the Harvard Kenney School report on Election Integrity this cycle, expert assessments indicate that compared with 2016, the performance of this contest displays several warning flags, namely worsening confidence in the integrity of American elections and falling public trust, challenges to legitimacy arising from threats of campaign violence,legal disputes about the process and results, and public protests about the outcome, as well as growing attempts at voter suppression.
Investigations
Advocates celebrate major US anti-money laundering victory
Landmark laws to thwart the use of U.S. shell companies by terrorists, human traffickers, arms dealers and kleptocrats are set to be enacted after more than a decade of lobbying and politicking with rare bipartisan support.


Published
2 months agoon
December 11, 2020By
NewsTeam

The sweeping anti-money laundering reforms hitched a lift in the annual defense spending bill that passed the Senate 84-13 today, and was approved by the House 355-78 earlier this week.
The Corporate Transparency Act requires U.S. companies to report their true owners to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN — largely ending anonymous shell companies in the country.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has repeatedly documented how the rich, the powerful and the criminal have used anonymous entities to hide their wealth, including in the 2016 Panama Papers and the 2020 FinCEN Files investigations.
Welcoming the clampdown, Transparency International’s U.S. director Gary Kalman said, “It is rare for such a simple measure to promise such an enormous impact.” Kalman added that the long sought anti-corruption reforms would “move us into a new era of enforcement.”
The new legislation will allow law enforcement agencies and financial institutions to request company ownership information from FinCEN. The data will not be publicly available.
FinCEN Files was based on a trove of suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial institutions to FinCEN. BuzzFeed News obtained the secret documents and shared them with ICIJ and more than 100 other media organizations.
The global investigation exposed how a broken U.S.-led enforcement system allows banks to continue to profit from moving dirty money tied to drug cartels, trafficking rings fueling the opioid crisis, fraud, organized crime, sanctions evasion, ruinous real estate schemes, and terrorism.
“Too many times, people … think money laundering is a federal, victimless crime. It is certainly not that,” Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, told reporters on a call organized by the advocacy group the FACT Coalition. “Sinaloa cartel actors, fentanyl traffickers have been destroying thousands of families in my state and across the country.”
Earlier this year, Brown credited FinCEN Files for revealing the lack of forceful enforcement against banks that repeatedly violate the law. Advocates said a number of proposed bipartisan bills, including one co-sponsored by Brown, were instrumental in generating the support needed to attach the reforms to the spending bill.
“This is a really big deal to get this passed,” Brown said Thursday. “No more hiding these abuses in anonymous shell companies. It also cracks down on bank officials who look the other way or actively aid money laundering.”
A long time coming
ICIJ has shown how offshore shell companies have been used for dubious financial dealings and tax avoidance through a series of global exposés, including the Secrecy for Sale investigation, Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly cited the investigations in proposing reforms over the years.
Countries like the United Kingdom, Indonesia and members of the European Union also took steps toward ending anonymous shell companies in response to ICIJ reporting.
“When the Panama Papers leaked, there was a huge flurry of interest because there’s all of a sudden this recognition that it was kleptocrats, money launderers, corrupt officials the world over, as well as criminals, were all using a very common structure to help evade law enforcement, which was setting up an anonymous company,” Lakshmi Kumar, policy director of Global Financial Integrity, said.
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The phenomenon is not limited to the exotic offshore tax havens of popular imagination. U.S. jurisdictions like Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada are among the world’s top locations to set up anonymous companies. Legislation to require corporations to disclose their true owners was first proposed in the U.S. over a decade ago, co-sponsored by then-senator Barack Obama, and similar bills have been introduced over the years.
Advocates credit years of lobbying a broad coalition of stakeholders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which had previously been a leading opponent, in getting the reforms across the finish line this year.
“What’s changed now is a growing understanding among various constituencies about the harms that anonymous companies pose, and the threats that they pose for our financial system, to our businesses,” Clark Gascoigne, senior policy advisor at FACT Coalition, said.
But it’s not a done deal quite yet.
Although the anti-money laundering proposals have had the support of the administration, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act over provisions unrelated to financial secrecy.
I hope House Republicans will vote against the very weak National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which I will VETO. Must include a termination of Section 230 (for National Security purposes), preserve our National Monuments, & allow for 5G & troop reductions in foreign lands!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2020
Both the House and the Senate votes surpassed the two-thirds margin that would be needed to override a veto, although some Republicans have indicated that they would not support what would be the first veto override of the Trump presidency.
But the NDAA has been reliably passed by Congress every year for six decades and advocates are confident that the time has come for the landmark financial transparency measure that’s included in the omnibus bill.
“It’s one of the few areas where the outgoing Trump administration agrees with the incoming Biden administration,” Gascoigne said. “It may be the first bill in the history of Congress that has the support of both Dow Chemical and Friends of the Earth. Heck, the state of Delaware even supports reform.”
The post Advocates celebrate major US anti-money laundering victory appeared first on ICIJ.
Investigations
Muslim Brotherhood suspect and Saudi billionaire linked to same offshore companies, Austrian report says


Published
3 months agoon
December 8, 2020By
NewsTeam

One of 30 people in Austria suspected to be members of the Islamic fundamentalist group Muslim Brotherhood was the director of offshore companies linked to a Saudi billionaire, according to an investigation by Austrian media outlets profil and Ö1.
The man, described as a 37-year-old Viennese entrepreneur with Iraqi roots, is suspected of “participating in a terrorist, subversive and criminal organization” and was a target of the police investigation into the group and the Palestinian extremist organization Hamas, the report said
The inquiry, which led 930 officers to raid 60 apartments, shops and clubs in four federal states last month, had no connection to the Vienna terror attack that killed four and injured 23 on November 2, according to officials cited by Deutsche Welle.
The Austrian report ー based on police records ー does not name the suspect, nor the Saudi businessman, for fear of hampering the ongoing probe into possible terror financing.
The pair’s link to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore financial centers was revealed for the first time after the reporters’ examination of Paradise Papers, a trove of leaked documents obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2017.
The 13.4 million files include incorporation documents, emails, contracts and other records from two offshore service providers and the company registries of some of the world’s most secretive countries.
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The Austrian man was listed as the director of several companies in the BVI, Malta and the Bahamas, the media report said. His address on the documents referred to an apartment in Vienna that belongs to the wife of one of the main suspects in the police investigation, according to a review of Austria’s land registry records.
By cross-checking the confidential files with property records, the reporters also found that the shell companies owned properties in the U.K., including two office buildings, a commercial property and a retail park, worth about $73 million in total.
The documents show that a Liechtenstein trust owned by the Saudi businessman was behind those companies. The man is also known as a philanthropist who has financed Islamic studies at various European universities in recent years, including in Austria, the report added.
The complex offshore structure identified by the journalists is legal, the report said, but “can be used to disguise the flow of money and the identity of the true economic beneficiaries.”
Profil and Ö1, two ICIJ media partners in Austria, asked the Viennese suspect about the purpose of the offshore company network and his link with the Saudi billionaire. A lawyer representing him declined to comment.
The post Muslim Brotherhood suspect and Saudi billionaire linked to same offshore companies, Austrian report says appeared first on ICIJ.


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