Banks accused over Pinochet cash

[DoYouEverWonder]

16 March, 2005

The US Senate has accused major banks of allowing former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to set up a network of accounts to conceal his wealth.

The allegations are contained in a report by a senate sub-committee, which names Citigroup, Bank of America and seven other institutions.

Bank officials say the accounts were opened under false names, and have vowed to co-operate with investigators.

<snip>

Some of the banks, including Riggs and Citigroup, had a relationship with Gen Pinochet going back 25 years, the report says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4352905.stm


Aren't most of these banks connected to BushCo? Sounds like business has usual for this crew.

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. More Pinochet-US bank links revealed

16 March 2005

Former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet had 125 secret bank accounts holding cash, stocks and bonds in the United States - allowing him to move at least $13 million to the US.

According to the US Senate's Carl Levin, "new information shows that the web of Pinochet accounts in the US was far more extensive, went on far longer and involved more banks than was previously disclosed".

In June, the Senate revealed that Pinochet had accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington, which may have held as much as $8 million.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2D4028C6-D265-4B07-84AB-651FFB242026.htm


This story has some more of the gory details.

[seemslikeadream]

2. Simon Kareri - Aldrich H. Ames - Riggs account

Oil Boom Enriches African Ruler
By Ken Silverstein
Angeles Times
January 20, 2003

Riggs' reputation for discretion has attracted controversial clients in the past. They have included CIA agent turned Russian spy Aldrich H. Ames, who moved some of his payments from Moscow through a Riggs account in the early 1990s. Equatorial Guinea's account is managed by Simon Kareri, a senior vice president and senior international banking manager at Riggs' Dupont Circle branch in Washington. Kareri handles embassy banking for Africa and the Caribbean region and also offers private banking services for wealthy individuals with a minimum of $1 million to invest.

Kareri did not return phone calls. One of Kareri's past private banking clients was Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko, a Mali businessman who was subsequently accused of embezzling nearly $250 million from the Dubai Islamic Bank and funneling it through U.S. and European financial institutions. Dubai Islamic filed suit to recover the money and in 1999 recovered a small part of the missing funds through a default judgment.

Kareri opened a Riggs account for Sissoko in 1997, when Sissoko was under house arrest in Miami after having pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe a U.S. customs agent. Sissoko wanted to conceal his control over the account, ran millions of dollars through it and regularly had a representative stuff large withdrawals into a suitcase or his pockets. Kareri told Dubai Islamic lawyers in a deposition that he was suspicious of Sissoko but did not report his concerns to his superiors or the Treasury Department.

Property records show that Kareri and Riggs helped with Obiang's local real estate purchases. In late 1999, the Guinean president paid $2.6 million in cash for a mansion in the Maryland suburbs that has 10 bathrooms, seven fireplaces and an indoor pool, according to the real estate listing. Early the following year Obiang bought a second Maryland property for $1.15 million. He took out a $747,500 mortgage from Riggs on the property, and paid it off nine months later, real estate records show.
more

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/2003/0122gui.htm

[seemslikeadream]

3. A Washington Bank, a Global Mess

By TIMOTHY O'BRIEN
New York Times
April 11, 2004

snip
Attendees have included luminaries like Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States; Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America; and others with surnames like Greenspan, Kissinger and Rehnquist. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made their first joint public appearance after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Alfalfa gathering in 2002. And each and every year, after dinner winds down, a dynamic Alfalfan from Mississippi, standing just over 5 feet tall, is host for a late-night cocktail party or a brunch the following day. These events are more than mere codas to an evening of networking. They are reminders that in a town long on political heavyweights and short on full-blown business tycoons, the 79-year-old host, Joe L. Allbritton, is a corporate titan. Upon arriving in Washington in the mid-1970's, Mr. Allbritton cemented his ties to the city's high and mighty by assembling a gaggle of businesses: a newspaper, television stations and the faded banking jewel of Washington's financial establishment, the Riggs National Corporation. Along the way, he has given generously to charitable causes, helped to endow institutions as diverse as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and relished the international cachet that Riggs conveyed despite its middling fortunes. Today, however, Mr. Allbritton and Riggs National Bank, which provides banking services to most of Washington's foreign embassies and to American consulates worldwide, are swept up in controversy. Federal law enforcement officials, Congressional investigators and banking regulators are scouring Riggs accounts in a wide-ranging investigation revolving around the netherworlds of terrorist financing, money laundering and the seamier geopolitics of Big Oil. Neither Mr. Allbritton nor Riggs have been charged with any crime, although regulators say they are considering levying large fines against the bank for possible violations of statutes meant to thwart money laundering. One former Riggs executive, Simon P. Kareri, is the target of a grand jury investigation related to the inquiry. The bank has been cooperating with an F.B.I. investigation of Saudi Arabian accounts at the bank, some controlled by Prince Bandar. The investigation began as federal officials tried to track funds used by the Sept. 11 hijackers; as the investigation wore on, banking regulators became increasingly alarmed by Riggs's practices. Last July, they publicly rebuked the bank for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering standards. Although Riggs said it has made great progress in overhauling its practices, it has suffered yet another setback. In recent months, according to people with knowledge of the investigation, the bank's own examiners revealed to regulators that Mr. Kareri failed to adequately supervise accounts held by officials and the government of the oil-rich West African nation of Equatorial Guinea. Until late February, Riggs managed $360 million worth of Equatorial Guinean accounts that federal investigators say were controlled by that country's dictator. The accounts were largely funded by proceeds from deals with Exxon Mobil, the oil company. Federal investigators say they are scrutinizing those accounts to see if they involve the proceeds of political graft or were used to bribe executives of any American companies, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the investigation. The problems with the Equatorial Guinean accounts also prompted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last month to warn Riggs that it plans to label it a "troubled" institution, meaning that the bank would have to cede significant managerial authority to the government. RIGGS, meanwhile, decided to close all of its Saudi accounts in early March after huge cash transfers by Prince Bandar in and out of his personal accounts aroused fresh concerns at the bank about the nature of the transactions. A spokesman for the Saudi Arabian Embassy said that the F.B.I. recently assured the embassy that there were no concerns that any Saudi accounts at Riggs involved terrorist funds or money laundering. The Equatorial Guinean Embassy did not respond to repeated interview requests. Amid this turmoil sits Mr. Allbritton, Riggs's controlling shareholder and until 2002 its chief executive. For more than two decades, he has held the reins of a bank that is a highly personal, extraordinarily quirky institution. Riggs is deeply rooted in the history of Washington: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis held accounts there. Today, despite anemic profits and an elfin footprint that would make it a backwater bank in other locales, Riggs has maintained its stature by catering to the glamorous, chauffeur-and-Champagne set that is Washington's elite political and diplomatic corps. Although Mr. Allbritton and Prince Bandar share a fascination with expensive racehorses, frequent the same spots on the cocktail circuit, and have each courted the Bush family, they do not have a close personal relationship, according to Mr. Allbritton's friends. Even so, friends and banking analysts say that it would have been unusual for Mr. Allbritton and Prince Bandar not to have had regular business contacts, because the Saudis are among Riggs's biggest clients. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudi officials often rolled into a Riggs branch on a Friday and withdrew millions of dollars for, say, a weekend splurge in London, according to individuals familiar with the transactions.
more

http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?show+-ui13zl+-h+-mCurrents.227.783.804741+Currents+1072+330

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. How many Senators and Congressmen

do their banking at Riggs? Seems they give one stop service for a variety of clients. I a bet a lot of political campaigns laundered their money through there?

[seemslikeadream]

7. Remember this - Bob Dole withdraws $8000 week in cash?

Bob Dole withdraws $8000 week in cash?
Riggs Affair Sparks 'Suspicious Activity' Alert on Dole


WASHINGTON -- The Riggs National Bank scandal has led to unexpected fallout, including "suspicious activity reports" on former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, Friday's Wall Street Journal reported.

As often as once a week, Mr. Dole's assistant walks around the corner from his Pennsylvania Avenue office in Washington to a branch of Riggs Bank, where she withdraws as much as $8,000 in cash. For walking-around money, Mr. Dole keeps a wad of $100 bills in the breast pocket of his shirt. "I probably use a credit card four or five times a year," Mr. Dole confesses. "I don't even have a wallet."

Mr. Dole's affinity for cash was of no concern to anyone until recently, when federal regulators pawing through the books of scandal-tarred Riggs spotted the large withdrawals and called them to the attention of management. In short order, the bank filed "suspicious activity reports" on Mr. Dole and another prominent Washington figure, Mr. Carlucci, questioning whether the two men might have violated federal laws against money laundering.

The two aren't actually suspected by Riggs of wrongdoing, people familiar with the filings say. But the bank, a unit of Riggs National Corp. (RIGS), felt it had no choice but to file these reports because of the strict wording of the Bank Secrecy Act.


http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000375.html

[0007]

5. If the factuality was indeed checked one could probably find

Henry A. Kissinger's name somewhere in the archives.

[diamond14]

6. bush* grandpa's bank funded HITLER...this has been going on for YEARS

http://www.john-loftus.com/Thyssen.asp#fortune

written by attorney John Loftus, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum...many years of research here, heavily documented.

-snip-

The Dutch Connection

How a famous American family made its fortune from the Nazis. For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen's simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed utterly. Why? Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.

[emad]

8. Pinochet 'stowed $13m in banks'

BBC

The former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet stowed away more than $13m (£6.8m) in 125 bank accounts, according to a US Senate investigation.
It found a range of top banks helped Gen Pinochet hide his funds or broke regulations over his accounts.

Bank officials say the accounts were opened under false names and have vowed to co-operate with investigators.

Gen Pinochet's military regime killed and tortured thousands of political prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s.

He is also being investigated in Chile over allegations of human rights abuses and embezzlement of state funds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4353801.stm

[Inland]

9. Big deal. That wouldn't pay for one day of Chimp's inaugural debauch.

Nine Billion is missing from Iraq. Homeland security spending is a black box. Heck, Chalabi took more than that as payment for selling the US secrets to Iran.

What a piker.

[emad]

10. Coutts Bank named....

Intersting that Coutts (now part of NatWest) is named as among the General's moneylaundering banks.

In the mid 1980s the Cavendish Square branch of Coutts - in the Harley Street medical distric of London - was involved in a murky IRA moneylaundering scam involving payments to Colombian coke dealers linked to relatives of the late Robert Maxwell, who were involved in a huge property/fraud scam in the UK.

The Coutts manager at the time, Graham Harper, had to retire "on health grounds" when it was revealed that a senior Cuban-born KGB officer called Henry Gelli was the front man in the £30 million attempted heist.

[bemildred]

11. Dictator's 100+ secret accounts (pinochet)

Washington - Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had 125 secret bank accounts holding cash, stocks and bonds in the United States, allowing him to move at least $13m, the United States Senate reported on Tuesday.

"New information shows that the web of Pinochet accounts in the US was far more extensive, went on far longer, and involved more banks than was previously disclosed," Senator Carl Levin said.

In June, the Senate revealed that Pinochet had accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington, which may have held as much as eight million dollars.

The Senate investigations subcommittee announced on Tuesday that Pinochet had 28 accounts at Riggs and 97 elsewhere: Citigroup, Banco de Chile, Espiritu Santo in Florida, Banco Atlantico, Bank of America and at Coutts and Co, owned by Banco Santander since 2003.

News24