Did UBS help the Mullahs’ nuclear ambitions?

The Swiss bank UBS has become the latest casualty of raging "Iran fever" (¿? Sounds a little bit ironic and despective, doesn't it?) on Capitol Hill after key congressmen stepped up allegations that it had helped finance the Mullahs' nuclear ambitions in breach of US sanctions, and that it had once banked for Osama Bin Laden. Dana Rohrabacher, the chairman of a congressional inquiry into off-shore banking and terrorism, is mulling further hearings to determine whether UBS endangered world security by helping Iran through the illegal transfer of $440m (£253m) in US bank-notes in the 1990s.

"Iran at that time was facing a credit crunch. If the US was trying to restrict Iran's flow of income, but UBS was working to supplement it through loans and credits, then it seems to me the bank was working directly against the interests of the country that acted as one of the most important sources of business," he said in congressional hearings.

"Worse, UBS transferred US banknotes to Iran in violation of the very programme they were entrusted to run," he said.

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Michael Moore, The Yale Taliban and the Afghan Pipeline

Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban ambassador-at-large who is now studying at Yale, also played a cameo role in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11″ cleverly constructed propaganda attack against President Bush. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal has noticed this coincidence in recollecting the interview he had with Mr. Hashemi during the ambassador’s visit to the United States in 2001.

Michael Moore asserts that George Bush allowed Mr. Rahmatullah to enter the United States in 2001 because Unocal wanted to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan and that the pipeline deal was set to benefit Enron, a company Mr. Moore alleged was a large contributor to then-Gov. Bush’s presidential run, with Halliburton receiving a contract to build the pipeline. Mr. Moore’s argument is a stretch. The CentGas proposal to build the Afghanistan pipeline was dropped in 1998 and Enron played the field, contributing strongly to Bill Clinton, even though Clinton was from Arkansas. Halliburton was never part of the CentGas consortium. (READ MORE)

HT: Noisy Room.Net.

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Tha lack of control in foreign commercial relations and the funding of terrorists

(From Spanish digital Newspaper NUEVO DIGITAL):

The operations of foreign and internal commercial relations are the more widespread methods for the ilegal bands from the named Triple Frontier between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to wash illegal money whose origin are the illicit manoeuvres that is used to finance the Islamic terrorism, mainly Al-Qaeda and Hizbollah. George Bush Administration is very worried about this situation and has asked the Governments of the region to adopt the necessary measures to fight the illegal business by which Latin America is finanacing terrorism.
A report published by the Wall Street Journal points out that the drug lords, smugglers and forgers based in that area systematically recur to foreing commercial operations to wash illegal money that is used afterwards by the terrorists organizations that act globally.
The modus operandi runs like this:

If an imported product is overvalued, the exporter receives an inflated price for the product, and wealth is shifted from the importer to the foreign exporter. Normally, this wouldn’t be a profitable deal for the importer, but if the parties are in cahoots they can share the proceeds. Likewise, when a money launderer converts illicit cash into goods and then sends them abroad at below market prices, the importer can resell them at real market prices and thus transfer value out of a country under the noses of authorities.

Looks like the Administrations of these countries as well as India, The Philippines and Panama have expressed their intention to acquire the software needed to combat these practices:

“For us, this is a very important concept because these trade transparency units should help us in not only combating transnational crime such as money laundering but also trade fraud,” says Marcos Vinicius Pinta Gama, head of Brazil’s Transnational Crime unit at the Foreign Ministry.