Some Missing Parts of the Banking Debate
By Douglas Farah
My friend Dennis Lormel and others are correct in stating that programs to attack terror finance must be differentiated and viewed in their many different elements. Which is why what is striking in the current debate is not what is said but what is not discussed.
What is not being discussed is the non-formal methods of money transfer, with the accompanying use of commodities and other methods to store financial value; and the use of the Islamic banking structures and its corresponding, massive offshore structures. This includes not only the multiple holdings of DMI and others in the Bahamas, Caymen and Panama, but also the offshore holdings of designated terrorist financiers such as Yousef Nada and Idriss Nasreddin. None of these have been touched.
The Islamic banking strucutre, while having every right to exist as a system to meet particular religious constraints, does not play by the same rules. Massive amounts of money move outside the SWIFT-reported systems all over the world, in part through Islamic banks that are specifically designed to help the customer avoid the Western banking system. My full blog is here.