Global finance completely compromised. “Report Shows How HSBC Maintained Its Ties With One Of Osama Bin Laden’s Key Benefactors,” by Linette Lopez for Business Insider, July 17 (thanks to Twostellas):
Yesterday, the Senate released a report on HSBC’s ties to the darkest actors in global finance. Today, the details of the 335 page investigation are trickling out and shocking everyone.
The laundry list of offenses includes everything money laundering for Mexican drug cartels to ignoring U.S. regulations meant to prevent dollars from reaching our country’s known enemies.
Enemies like Al Qaeda.
One of the most damning parts of the report details HSBC’s relationship with Saudi based Al Rajhi Bank, a member of Osama bin Ladin’s ‘Golden Chain’ of important Al Qaeda financiers. The relationship has spanned decades, perhaps that is why even when HSBC’s own internal compliance offices asked that it be terminated in 2005, even when the US government discovered hard evidence of Al Rajhi’s relationship with terrorism, HSBC continued to business with the bank until 2010.
Al Rajhi bank is owned by the billionaire Al Rajhi family and holds $59 billion in assets. It is Saudi Arabia’s largest private bank.
Al Rajhi’s links to terrorism were confirmed in 2002 when U.S. agents searched the offices of a Saudi non-profit and U.S. designated terrorist organization, Benevolence International Foundation (page 193). In that raid, agents uncovered a CD-ROM listing the names of financiers in Osama bin Ladin’s elite ‘Golden Chain.’ One of those names was Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, a founder of Al Rajhi bank….