Monday’s Cabinet meeting, chaired by King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, resulted in approval for measures to address issues concerning money laundering and terrorism funding as well as housing.
The King briefed the session, held at Al-Yamama Palace in the capital, on the most significant communications of the past week, including the visits to the Kingdom of the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir.
King Abdullah also briefed the Cabinet on communications he received from the President of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and his reception of Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Dawoud Awghlou and the Second Vice President of Afghanistan, Abdul Karim Khalili.
Minister of Culture and Information Abdul Aziz Khoja released a statement to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) saying that the meeting looked at reports on developments in the Arab and Islamic world as well as wider international affairs and discussed the Kingdom’s economy following the recent announcement of the national budget.
Cabinet approval was given to authorize Prince Naif, Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, to sign with foreign authorities a memorandum of understanding on collaboration in investigation into money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
Measures were also approved following a study on providing land grants to Saudi nationals to facilitate the acquisition of homes. The measures included joining the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs program to the Iskan housing program to guarantee citizens housing, the provision of land to the Housing Commission to build homes for nationals in conformity with regulations and government-planned zones, provide all services stipulated for by the budget, and help beneficiaries of housing projects integrate with the rest of society by ensuring that projects are evenly distributed across cities. Cabinet approval was further given for the proposed Board of Directors at the Balad Al-Ameen Construction Development Company for the period of three years and its members from government, private and other sectors.
Similar approval was given for the restructuring of the Board of Directors of the Jeddah Development and Construction Company.
Source: The Saudi Gazette
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Rabu, 06 Juni 2012
Senin, 28 Mei 2012
Abbas signs AML decree, making it harder for Hamas to bring in funds
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has signed an anti-money laundering decree that could make it harder for Hamas to obtain funds and is also meant to reassure foreign banks that they can do business with their Palestinian counterparts, officials said Saturday.
Hamas officials acknowledged that the new regulations could hamper its cash flow. "This law may have some effect on the movement, but eventually it won't succeed in fulfilling its goal of drying up the financial sources of the Hamas movement," said a spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri.
No bank will deal directly with Hamas. However, Palestinian officials from Abbas' Fatah movement have alleged that Hamas has made deals with moneychangers and merchants to receive funds from Iran, Arab countries and Islamic charities abroad. Cash is also believed to be smuggled through tunnels into Gaza.
Abbas signed the decree Friday, and it was published in the Palestinian media on Saturday.
Under the new regulations, violators face three to 15 years in prisons and fines of up to 600,000 shekels ($125,000).
Jihad Alwazir, the deputy governor of the Palestine Monetary Fund, said the regulations were put together with the help of the International Monetary Fund and were in line with international standards.
"The prosecutors now have more means at their disposal," Alwazir said of the new regulations. The Palestine Monetary Fund serves as the Palestinians' central bank.
Alwazir said the new rules should reassure foreign banks that they can do business with their Palestinian counterparts without running afoul of U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism regulations.
Two Israeli banks, Bank Hapoalim and Israel Discount Bank, announced several weeks ago that they were severing their ties with Gaza's banks. The Israeli banks are wary of inadvertently funneling money to Hamas.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/27/africa/ME-GEN-Palestinians-Money-Laundering.php
Hamas officials acknowledged that the new regulations could hamper its cash flow. "This law may have some effect on the movement, but eventually it won't succeed in fulfilling its goal of drying up the financial sources of the Hamas movement," said a spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri.
No bank will deal directly with Hamas. However, Palestinian officials from Abbas' Fatah movement have alleged that Hamas has made deals with moneychangers and merchants to receive funds from Iran, Arab countries and Islamic charities abroad. Cash is also believed to be smuggled through tunnels into Gaza.
Abbas signed the decree Friday, and it was published in the Palestinian media on Saturday.
Under the new regulations, violators face three to 15 years in prisons and fines of up to 600,000 shekels ($125,000).
Jihad Alwazir, the deputy governor of the Palestine Monetary Fund, said the regulations were put together with the help of the International Monetary Fund and were in line with international standards.
"The prosecutors now have more means at their disposal," Alwazir said of the new regulations. The Palestine Monetary Fund serves as the Palestinians' central bank.
Alwazir said the new rules should reassure foreign banks that they can do business with their Palestinian counterparts without running afoul of U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism regulations.
Two Israeli banks, Bank Hapoalim and Israel Discount Bank, announced several weeks ago that they were severing their ties with Gaza's banks. The Israeli banks are wary of inadvertently funneling money to Hamas.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/27/africa/ME-GEN-Palestinians-Money-Laundering.php
Jumat, 25 Mei 2012
Muslim Charity's Ex-Leaders Convicted
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2008; Page A06
A federal jury in Dallas convicted five men with ties to a prominent Muslim charity of scores of criminal charges yesterday, handing the U.S. government a significant victory in its largest terrorism financing trial.
The verdicts against former leaders of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once ranked as the country's largest Muslim charitable organization, came only hours after a federal appeals court panel in New York upheld criminal convictions of three men accused of helping plot deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Together, the developments strengthened the Justice Department's power to choke the sources of funding that help fuel terrorist schemes -- and to use warrantless electronic surveillance to monitor the activities of U.S. citizens suspected of engaging in international conspiracies.
Yet the victories in cases first filed as long as a decade ago underscore the lengthy path through the criminal justice system, which has afforded the government a mixed record in terrorism prosecutions.
Dennis M. Lormel, a former chief of the FBI's terrorist financing operation section, said the guilty verdicts on the 108 charges in the Holy Land trial amounted to a "validation" of the government's approach and encouraged his former colleagues to aggressively pursue similar investigations.
But Lormel said the most critical, practical development may have come in December 2001, when authorities raided the charity's headquarters in Richardson, Tex., and seized its assets.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials accused Holy Land of funneling more than $12 million to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. The original case against Holy Land and its leaders included more than 100 unindicted co-conspirators, a status that several charities challenged as overreaching by the government.
"For many years, the Holy Land Foundation used the guise of charity to raise and funnel millions of dollars to the infrastructure of the Hamas terror organization," said J. Patrick Rowan, assistant attorney general for national security. "This prosecution demonstrates our resolve to ensure that humanitarian relief efforts are not used as a mechanism to disguise and enable support for terrorist groups."
In the course of the trial, defense attorneys argued that prosecutors had wrongfully targeted philanthropically minded people who wanted to support schools and hospitals in Palestinian territories devastated by conflict with Israel. They drew in part on arguments by civil liberties advocates, who maintain that prosecutors sometimes exploit laws designed to crack down on material support to terrorists to criminalize activities protected by the First Amendment.
The Holy Land verdicts come a year after the first case dissolved in a mistrial. The government's record in prosecutions involving the material support of terrorist networks has been checkered, as questions have arisen about the proper use of informants and whether authorities arrested suspects without enough evidence.
This time around, after enduring months of second-guessing after the Holy Land mistrial, government lawyers pared their evidence and limited the number of witnesses they presented to the jury, which deliberated for eight days.
Earlier yesterday, the convictions of three men with ties to al-Qaeda were upheld in New York. They were convicted for their roles in the 1998 bombings of embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania. The plots killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and injured thousands.
The panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, led by Judge José A. Cabranes, unanimously rejected defense claims of insufficient evidence and violations of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Cabranes was joined by Judges Jon O. Newman and Wilfred Feinberg.
The defendants, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali and Wadih el-Hage, are serving lengthy prison sentences in a supermax prison facility in Colorado. They were convicted in 2001.
Attorneys for Hage, who had been a close associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, asserted that government investigators improperly collected evidence through wiretaps of his land-based and cellular phones from August 1996 to August 1997. They also argued that federal agents did not secure appropriate warrants to search his apartment in Nairobi. Because Hage is a naturalized U.S. citizen, the defense said, the government should have sought court permission before taking such intrusive steps.
The appeals court panel disagreed, ruling that "we see no merit in this challenge" and finding that the search was "reasonable under the circumstances presented here."
In a conclusion that legal experts say could have implications for other challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the panel ruled that U.S. courts could admit evidence obtained through warrantless overseas searches of American citizens, but that the searches must be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
"The decision of the Court of Appeals . . . is one further measure of justice for the victims of those attacks," U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Source: Washington Post
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 25, 2008; Page A06
A federal jury in Dallas convicted five men with ties to a prominent Muslim charity of scores of criminal charges yesterday, handing the U.S. government a significant victory in its largest terrorism financing trial.
The verdicts against former leaders of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once ranked as the country's largest Muslim charitable organization, came only hours after a federal appeals court panel in New York upheld criminal convictions of three men accused of helping plot deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Together, the developments strengthened the Justice Department's power to choke the sources of funding that help fuel terrorist schemes -- and to use warrantless electronic surveillance to monitor the activities of U.S. citizens suspected of engaging in international conspiracies.
Yet the victories in cases first filed as long as a decade ago underscore the lengthy path through the criminal justice system, which has afforded the government a mixed record in terrorism prosecutions.
Dennis M. Lormel, a former chief of the FBI's terrorist financing operation section, said the guilty verdicts on the 108 charges in the Holy Land trial amounted to a "validation" of the government's approach and encouraged his former colleagues to aggressively pursue similar investigations.
But Lormel said the most critical, practical development may have come in December 2001, when authorities raided the charity's headquarters in Richardson, Tex., and seized its assets.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials accused Holy Land of funneling more than $12 million to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. The original case against Holy Land and its leaders included more than 100 unindicted co-conspirators, a status that several charities challenged as overreaching by the government.
"For many years, the Holy Land Foundation used the guise of charity to raise and funnel millions of dollars to the infrastructure of the Hamas terror organization," said J. Patrick Rowan, assistant attorney general for national security. "This prosecution demonstrates our resolve to ensure that humanitarian relief efforts are not used as a mechanism to disguise and enable support for terrorist groups."
In the course of the trial, defense attorneys argued that prosecutors had wrongfully targeted philanthropically minded people who wanted to support schools and hospitals in Palestinian territories devastated by conflict with Israel. They drew in part on arguments by civil liberties advocates, who maintain that prosecutors sometimes exploit laws designed to crack down on material support to terrorists to criminalize activities protected by the First Amendment.
The Holy Land verdicts come a year after the first case dissolved in a mistrial. The government's record in prosecutions involving the material support of terrorist networks has been checkered, as questions have arisen about the proper use of informants and whether authorities arrested suspects without enough evidence.
This time around, after enduring months of second-guessing after the Holy Land mistrial, government lawyers pared their evidence and limited the number of witnesses they presented to the jury, which deliberated for eight days.
Earlier yesterday, the convictions of three men with ties to al-Qaeda were upheld in New York. They were convicted for their roles in the 1998 bombings of embassy buildings in Kenya and Tanzania. The plots killed 224 people, including a dozen Americans, and injured thousands.
The panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, led by Judge José A. Cabranes, unanimously rejected defense claims of insufficient evidence and violations of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Cabranes was joined by Judges Jon O. Newman and Wilfred Feinberg.
The defendants, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali and Wadih el-Hage, are serving lengthy prison sentences in a supermax prison facility in Colorado. They were convicted in 2001.
Attorneys for Hage, who had been a close associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, asserted that government investigators improperly collected evidence through wiretaps of his land-based and cellular phones from August 1996 to August 1997. They also argued that federal agents did not secure appropriate warrants to search his apartment in Nairobi. Because Hage is a naturalized U.S. citizen, the defense said, the government should have sought court permission before taking such intrusive steps.
The appeals court panel disagreed, ruling that "we see no merit in this challenge" and finding that the search was "reasonable under the circumstances presented here."
In a conclusion that legal experts say could have implications for other challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the panel ruled that U.S. courts could admit evidence obtained through warrantless overseas searches of American citizens, but that the searches must be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
"The decision of the Court of Appeals . . . is one further measure of justice for the victims of those attacks," U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Source: Washington Post
Kamis, 17 Mei 2012
PA crackdown has Hamas reducing cash transfers to West Bank
By Avi Issacharoff
Hamas has dramatically reduced its money transfers to various charitable organizations in the West Bank formerly linked to the group, as the Palestinian Authority continues to assert its control over those organizations.
Hamas had used the charities to transfer money to its operatives in the West Bank and to strengthen its standing among the Palestinian public. Since the beginning of this year, the PA has systematically installed new managements at the charities, which then transferred the organizations' assets to the PA itself.
In addition, the PA has appointed religious leaders affiliated with the Ramallah government to the Waqf Islamic religious trust, which was previously run by clerics identified with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas' parent movement. This leadership change has forced Hamas to stem the flow of money to the charities it once funded.
The global economic downturn has also slowed the money flow, as major donors in the Persian Gulf have transferred smaller amounts into Hamas' coffers. Tighter Israeli supervision of the charities and more familiarity with Hamas' money-laundering techniques also played a role in the reduction.
In addition, Palestinian security services recently seized several million shekels destined for Hamas-affiliated social services organizations.
Source: Haaretz
Hamas has dramatically reduced its money transfers to various charitable organizations in the West Bank formerly linked to the group, as the Palestinian Authority continues to assert its control over those organizations.
Hamas had used the charities to transfer money to its operatives in the West Bank and to strengthen its standing among the Palestinian public. Since the beginning of this year, the PA has systematically installed new managements at the charities, which then transferred the organizations' assets to the PA itself.
In addition, the PA has appointed religious leaders affiliated with the Ramallah government to the Waqf Islamic religious trust, which was previously run by clerics identified with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas' parent movement. This leadership change has forced Hamas to stem the flow of money to the charities it once funded.
The global economic downturn has also slowed the money flow, as major donors in the Persian Gulf have transferred smaller amounts into Hamas' coffers. Tighter Israeli supervision of the charities and more familiarity with Hamas' money-laundering techniques also played a role in the reduction.
In addition, Palestinian security services recently seized several million shekels destined for Hamas-affiliated social services organizations.
Source: Haaretz
Selasa, 15 Mei 2012
US workshop in Jordan builds support to battle money laundering
The U.S. government organized a workshop in Jordan to teach officials from the Arab countries how to detect and investigate the smuggling of money.
The U.S. has been working with Jordan and other Arab countries to ensure that banking institutions are subject to appropriate oversight and that they have effective programs in place to prevent money-laundering and terrorist financing.
Participants, including representatives from Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Tunisia and Yemen, examined anti-money laundering standards used by the Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based inter-government body set up in 1989 by the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
This week, U.S. federal prosecutors said two NY residents were indicted on charges of trying to smuggle $500,000 (euro323,000) from the U.S. to Jordan.
Authorities said a grand jury in Hartford, Connecticut returned an indictment charging 35-year-old Hassan Abuzaitoun and 33-year-old Mohammad Alazzam with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to smuggle bulk cash from the United States. Both are naturalized U.S. citizens from Jordan residing in Yonkers, New York.
Jordanian authorities have often asserted that Jordan was free of money laundering because of its strict monetary regulations and practices.
In 2004, three different groups of families of suicide bombing victims in Israel filed suits in a Brooklyn, N.Y. federal court against Jordan's largest financial institution _ Arab Bank _ alleging that it moved donations from Saudi Arabia to militant Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The bank denied the allegation. It later decided to close down its New York branch saying it was pursuing its strategy to focus on operations in the Arab world and Europe.
http://www.amlosphere.com/america/legislation/us-workshop-in-jordan-builds-support-to-battle-money-laundering.html
The U.S. has been working with Jordan and other Arab countries to ensure that banking institutions are subject to appropriate oversight and that they have effective programs in place to prevent money-laundering and terrorist financing.
Participants, including representatives from Jordan, Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Tunisia and Yemen, examined anti-money laundering standards used by the Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based inter-government body set up in 1989 by the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
This week, U.S. federal prosecutors said two NY residents were indicted on charges of trying to smuggle $500,000 (euro323,000) from the U.S. to Jordan.
Authorities said a grand jury in Hartford, Connecticut returned an indictment charging 35-year-old Hassan Abuzaitoun and 33-year-old Mohammad Alazzam with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to smuggle bulk cash from the United States. Both are naturalized U.S. citizens from Jordan residing in Yonkers, New York.
Jordanian authorities have often asserted that Jordan was free of money laundering because of its strict monetary regulations and practices.
In 2004, three different groups of families of suicide bombing victims in Israel filed suits in a Brooklyn, N.Y. federal court against Jordan's largest financial institution _ Arab Bank _ alleging that it moved donations from Saudi Arabia to militant Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The bank denied the allegation. It later decided to close down its New York branch saying it was pursuing its strategy to focus on operations in the Arab world and Europe.
http://www.amlosphere.com/america/legislation/us-workshop-in-jordan-builds-support-to-battle-money-laundering.html
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