In the mid-1990s, Esam Ghazzawi's name arose when investigators of the corrupt bank BCCI were trying to recover assets from Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, and the prince argued that his assets were being held in another account under Esam Ghazzawi's name.
The story…also states that the FBI withheld the Sarasota house information from the joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, and that it was not mentioned in the Sept.11 National Commission's final report.
Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida told Summers and Christensen that the FBI withheld information from Congress linking Saudis in Florida and California to the attacks, and that the Sept. 11 Commission's report on foreign support for the hijackers was entirely blacked out.
Ghazzawi purchased a home in a gated community outside Sarasota…His daughter, Anoud Alhijji, & her husband Abdulaziz Alhijji, lived there…on Aug. 30, 2001, the Alhijjis suddenly abandoned the house, as well as several brand new luxury vehicles, their clothes & luxury items.
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@arapaho415@TeresaCCarter2@insiderfilms1@sisu_sanity@clearing_fog@TheAtlantic To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.
May 2002
The Israeli "art student" mystery
For almost two years, hundreds of young Israelis falsely claiming to be art students haunted federal offices - in particular, the DEA. No one knows why - and no one seems to want to find out.
H/t: @HelpingJournal1 salon.com/2002/05/07/stu…
In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country.
According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year
If you were, let’s say, a college dropout in the 1970s who had a gift for structuring complex corporate arrangements and obscure financial transactions…maybe your name was something like Effrey Jepstein.
And let’s say, hypothetically, that maybe you used these skills at some point to further the operations of a commodities trader who sold sanctioned Iranian oil with the help of global organized crime.
@davetroy And it’s all connected to the Reza Zarrab/Turkey/cash-for-gold/Halkbank/Aktif Bank/Iranian sanctions evasion scheme, the gray market/black market for Iranian oil, and the transaction laundering/narcotics smuggling/human trafficking trade associated therewith.
@davetroy Note also that Viet Dinh (partner at Kirkland and Ellis, counsel to Alfa Bank) not only directed Brian Benczkowski (who worked on behalf of Alfa Bank, while at Kirkland and Ellis) to kill the data transfer investigation but also represented Reza Zarrab.
Reminder: Khawaja alleges that he taught Nader (who then taught the Emiratis & the Saudis) how to work with corrupt payment processors to issue prepaid gift cards and use these gift cards to make donations to political campaigns under the names of stolen identities.
An online payment provider which last month settled US charges that it assisted fraudsters was a longstanding client of Wirecard, underlining concern about anti-money laundering procedures at the controversial German payments group.
The Federal Trade Commission said Allied Wallet helped perpetrators to defraud more than $110m from consumers in scams, pyramid schemes and unlawful debt collection operations. The company and its officers settled without admitting or denying the allegations.