The Iranian Games and Pipeline Mastery
By Douglas Farah
As the saga of Lloyds TBS' involvement in illicit banking to help the Iranian regime continues to broaden and ensnare other banks,it is useful to look back over the circumstances that this unveils.
It must be one heck of a case to generate a $350 million settlement and deferred prosecution agreement, as significant admissions of criminal misconduct in stripping the Iran identifiers from bank transactions.
One thing that stands out is that Dubai, again, is the hub, as it was for A.Q. Khan, Dawood Ibrhaim, Viktor Bout and countless other facilitators of both criminal and terrorist networks. Now, Dubai is a nice city, but these folks are unlikely to be there for the glittering skyscrapers and or camel races.
Rather, they go there because the regulatory regime is so lax that they know the chances of being detected (or, more importantly, anyone wanting to detect their activities) are essentially nil. It is also an ideal physical location, at the crossroads of several key trading routes.
Now, with other banks under investigation, including one for trying to acquire 30,000 metric tons of tungsten, most likely to build missiles, under the guise of building refrigerators. That amount would take care of every refrigerator in the Middle East and then some,” Mr Morgenthau (Manhattan DA) told the Financial Times on Sunday.
“It was not being purchased, we think, for domestic consumption . . . Tungsten was not used for making refrigerators but for long-range missiles. That is our supposition.”
In none of the above cases did Dubai play a significant role in investigating anything. Dubai turns up in other investigations, which lead there. An interesting circumstance that is not coincidental. My full blog is here.
