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U.S
Senate alleges continued money laudering by African
political elites
Foreign dictators, high-living bureaucrats and arms dealers are still able
to funnel millions of dollars in potentially corrupt money into the United
States despite post-Sept. 11 laws cracking down on money laundering, according
to a Senate investigation.
The son of the president of Equatorial Guinea moved $110 million in suspect
funds into the United States from 2004 to 2008 while an Angolan arms dealer,
now in a French jail, was able to pay $9.6 million for an Arizona home in 2000
and maintained U.S. bank accounts handling some $60 million in transactions
between 1999 and 2007, the report found.
The Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations, which wrote the
report, has summoned several of the U.S. lawyers, real estate agents and bankers
involved in the financial transactions to a hearing Thursday.
The subcommittee
chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said that while banks are doing better
in blocking
dirty money because of anti-money
laundering safeguards
in the 2001 Patriot Act, there are still "so many vehicles in our system
where corrupt money can flow." The findings of the report, which focused
on four case studies, are "infuriating," he said.
The 330-page
report concluded that powerful foreign officials and their families, known
internationally
as "politically exposed persons" or
PEPs, have used lawyers, real estate and escrow agents, lobbyists, bankers
and university
officials to circumvent anti-corruption laws.
It noted that the Treasury Department exempted some industries, such as hedge
funds and the real estate industry, from Patriot Act anti-money laundering
requirements, and that many of the professionals examined were under no legal
obligation to take anti-money laundering precautions when dealing with a foreign
official.
The four case studies:
_Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the president of Equatorial Guinea,
who used U.S. lawyers, bankers, real estate agents and escrow agents to move
$110 million into the United States. The report said Obiang, the subject of
an ongoing U.S. criminal investigation, used two lawyers who helped him with
shell company accounts, two real estate agents who helped him purchase a $30
million home in Malibu, Calif., and an escrow agent who assisted in buying
a $38.5 million Gulfstream jet.
_Omar Bongo, president of Gabon for 41 years until his death last year, employed
a U.S. lobbyist to buy six U.S.-built armored vehicles and obtain U.S. government
permission to buy six U.S.-built C-130 military cargo aircraft from Saudi Arabia.
A bank in New York closed an account of Bongo's daughter, a student, after
discovering she had $1 million in $100 shrink-wrapped bills in her safe deposit
box, which she said her father had brought into the United States using his
diplomatic status.
_Jennifer Douglas, a U.S. citizen and fourth wife of the former vice president
of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar, reputedly helped her husband bring more than $40
million in suspect funds into the United States. Some $25 million of that was
wire transferred by offshore corporations into more than 30 U.S. bank accounts
opened by Douglas. Two offshore corporations transferred about $14 million
over five years to American University in Washington, D.C., to pay for consulting
services in setting up a university in Nigeria founded by Abubakar.
Prosecutors last year said former Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., who received
a 13-year sentence for accepting bribes, demanded $100,000 from a Virginia
businesswoman to pay a bribe to Abubakar. The Nigerian denied any wrongdoing.
_Bank of
America did not flag the accounts of Pierre Falcone, the Angolan arms dealer,
despite numerous
suspicious transactions, the report
said. From
1999 to 2003, the accounts received multiple wire transfers totaling more than
$6 million from unidentified "clients" from such secrecy jurisdictions
as the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Singapore and Switzerland. The bank closed
the accounts in 2007.
The report recommended that Treasury adopt recent World Bank proposals to
strengthen bank controls related to foreign officials and repeal anti-money
laundering exemptions. Congress should require that the owners of shell corporations
be named, according to the report, and should make acts of foreign corruption
a legal basis for denying U.S. entry to the person involved in the corruption
and his family.
A Levin aide said one possibility was attaching anti-money laundering provisions
to pending legislation to increase oversight of financial institutions
Source:
AP
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