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The Funding of Terrorism (Part II) – Terrorist Financing Hidden among Commercial Ties: Venezuela, Iran and Hezbollah

August 5, 2019

by Vanessa Neumann

6 August 2019

Comrades in arms? (Image credit: The Commentator)

 

Venezuela, my country, is dying. Money has become worthless and we now face the biggest humanitarian disaster ever seen in the Western Hemisphere as the exodus will surpass Syria’s in 2020. The country is projected to lose a third of its population. One in three, and that number is without a hot, shooting war. The main cause of the catastrophe is illicit finance of every stripe: kleptocracy, corruption, money laundering, and terrorist finance. Together, these illicit financial activities have enslaved the country to foreign interests and turned the government against the people, who want freedom and democracy. However, the regime leaders serve only their own enrichment and the interests of foreigners who help prop them up. Amongst these is the Lebanese Hezbollah.

Financial support for terrorism is a policy of the Maduro regime. In short, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro is in a strategic partnership with the Iranian Ayatollah to provide Hezbollah terrorists with financiers and an assortment of facilitators for the covert movement of people, money, and material. The network reaches right to the top: it is managed by the former Vice President and current Minister of Industries and National Production, Tareck el-Aissami, and members of his immediate family. Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation is active throughout Latin America: its Business Affairs Component oversees enormous money laundering schemes using a minimum of 11 US-sanctioned operatives. However, Venezuela has become their heartland.

Maduro’s network of illicit financial interests was established when he was Hugo Chávez’s Foreign Minister, though it grew out of shared interests and diaspora flows. Today, this global network of illicit finance is what helps keep him in power: too many people are making too much dirty money to see him go, including Iran, which has long used Venezuela to bust sanctions and used by Hezbollah to make drug money. In 1960, Venezuela co-founded OPEC with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. After its 1979 Revolution, Iran turned towards Latin America to increase trade in the region, and Venezuela was among the first approached because of this relationship through OPEC. The deeper relationship connection with Iran, that opened up the financial channels, was a policy pursued by Hugo Chávez. During 2001 and 2003 visits to Tehran, the former President signed joint venture accords with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the manufacturing of tractor parts and cars, as well as banking through Banco Toseyeh Saderat and others.

The relationship with Hezbollah developed separately. Latin America received many Lebanese immigrants in the 1980s, amid the country’s civil war of 1975-1990. In the following decade, Lebanese Hezbollah sought to deepen its financial associations with its Latin American diaspora, as its funding had been slashed by nearly seventy percent by the administrations of both presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) and Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), further adding to the significant impact of sanctions on the Iranian economy.

The two-track relationship with Iran and Hezbollah merged in 2007, when Nicolás Maduro (then Foreign Minister) and Rafael Issa (then Vice Minister for Finance), joined by one translator, met with Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, in Damascus. Afterwards, Nicolás Maduro flew to Tehran to join Chávez in his meeting with President Ahmadinejad. Here, a multitude of commercial ties were established, but dirty money was hidden among these broader commercial interests. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) opened subsidiaries in Venezuela that moved money through PDVSA (the Venezuelan state-run oil company), using it to enter the international financial system and evade sanctions. Chávez and Ahmadinejad became so close as to call each other ‘brothers’ and Chávez presented him with a replica of the Sword of Bolívar, a national symbol.

Some Chavistas are tied to Hezbollah by family. A prime example is Tareck el-Aissami Maddah who is Venezuelan of Syrian descent. His father was the head of the Ba’ath party in Venezuela and called Osama bin Laden “the great Mujahideen leader” after 9/11 and himself “a Taliban.” His great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was Assistant to the Secretary General of the Ba’ath party in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. el-Aissami was a radical student leader at the University of the Andes in the city of Mérida, on the border with Colombia. There have been many Hezbollah sympathisers at the top of the Chávez regime: Fadi Kabboul was the Executive Director of planning for PDVSA; Aref Richany Jimenez was the President of Venezuela’s military-industrial complex, CAVIM; and Radwan Sabbagh was the president of the state-owned mining concern, Ferrominera.

Yet it is el-Aissami that continues to be the lynchpin, and the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) designated him under the Kingpin Act in February 2017, for playing a significant role in international narcotics trafficking, while he was the Executive Vice President of Venezuela. el-Aissami is also linked to the coordination of drug shipments to Los Zetas, a violent Mexican drug cartel, as well as providing protection to Colombian drug lord Daniel Barrera and Venezuelan drug trafficker Hermagoras Gonzalez Polanco. Los Zetas, Barrera and Polanco were previously named as Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers under the Kingpin Act in April 2009, March 2010, and May 2008, respectively. El-Aissami’s primary frontman, Venezuelan national Samark Jose Lopez Bello, was also designated for providing material assistance to el-Aissami’s drug trafficking activities through an international network spanning the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela. El-Aissami and Lopez Bello had an international network of businesses and asset holding companies to launder the drug proceeds. Many had government contracts with PDVSA.

Maduro’s diplomatic corps has shown to be the circulatory system of the transnational crime syndicate. Tareck el-Aissami’s sister is posted to the Netherlands, where she oversees the traffic in narcotics and diamonds, shielded by her diplomatic immunity. Chávez’s daughter, Maria Gabriela, is Venezuela’s wealthiest woman (with a net worth of over US$ 4 billion) and was (until recently) the Deputy Chief of Mission to the United Nations. Rocío Maneiro, Maduro’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James, still occupies all three of our buildings in London, and uses them freely to house staff and rent rooms, despite the fact that she is indicted for grand larceny from a money laundering account in Andorra (two separate crimes). She retains her immunity and the properties, despite the fact that the UK recognises Juan Guaidó, and not Nicolás Maduro, as the legitimate head of state and government. Hence the frequently used hashtag #MaduroCrimeFamily. I am personally pressuring for the US and UK to appropriately apply counter-organised crime statutes against the Maduro regime.

The vast and multi-layered money laundering network set up by el-Aissami works through a structure designed by the former Deputy Chief of Mission in Syria, Ghazi Nasr al Din, who was sanctioned in 2008 by OFAC and designated a ‘person of interest’ by the FBI in 2015 for his support of Hezbollah. While el-Aissami was Interior Minister (2008-2012), 173 Middle Easterners with suspected ties to Hezbollah were provided with authentic, fully-legal Venezuelan passports, birth certificates, and national identification cards. In short, they were provided with completely new Venezuelan identities, to conceal these Hezbollah operatives from detection by international intelligence agencies. This case was covered in a CNN documentary, Passports to Terror. The main source of information on this is Misael López Soto, a legal attaché at the Venezuelan embassy in Baghdad, who turned whistleblower in 24 November 2015 and revealed the identities of several of these suspected Hezbollah militants. These are highly skilled and effective well beyond their numbers.

Amongst them is Hakim Diab Fattah, a Palestinian-Venezuelan dual national with suspected ties to the 9/11 hijackers. In 2015 he resurfaced in Amman, where he was arrested for potentially plotting a terrorist attack on the Allenby Bridge, connecting Jordan to the West Bank. The Venezuelan consulate in Jordan funded his legal defence. On 28 October 2014, Lebanese national and accused Hezbollah operative Muhammad Ghaleb Hamdar, was arrested in Lima, Peru for allegedly planning a terrorist attack. During questioning, he admitted he travelled to Venezuela to obtain new identification, which was eventually secured in Liberia. As recently as February 2018, OFAC sanctioned Jihad Muhammad Qansu (who has a Venezuelan passport) and five other individuals tied to an important Hezbollah financier, Adam Tabaja. The sanctions announcement describes him as “a Hezbollah member that maintains direct ties to the senior leadership.”

In October 2018 the US Department of Justice named Hezbollah one of the top five transnational criminal organisations in Latin America. The Drug Enforcement Administration led an effort to undercut Hezbollah financing from illicit drug sources, known as Operation Cassandra. Within Cassandra was Operation Perseus, targeting the Venezuelan syndicate. The effort uncovered links between two important Hezbollah financiers, directly related to Nasrallah, and cutouts connected to Maduro. Venezuela under Maduro is a hub for the convergence of criminal and terrorist networks that fund Hezbollah, loot Venezuela, and destabilize both the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East. Getting Maduro and his cartel out of power and restoring Venezuela to democracy, will not only end the horrible suffering of 32 million people, a newly free Venezuela will deal a significant blow to Hezbollah operational capabilities. That is a diplomatic win-win if ever there was one.


Dr. Vanessa Neumann is President Juan Guaidó’s appointed Ambassador and Chief of Diplomatic Mission to the United Kingdom. She is also the President of the British-Venezuelan Society and Chamber of Commerce, which is partnered with UK Trade & Investment’s Oil & Gas Team for the Americas, as well as the Caracas-based British-Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce. Prior to her diplomatic appointment, Dr. Neumann was a long-standing expert on crime-terror pipelines, the founder & CEO of Asymmetrica, and the author of “Blood Profits: How American Consumers Unwittingly Fund Terrorists.”

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Commerce, Deals, Drug, Hezbollah, Illicit, Iran, maduro, smuggling, trade, Venezuela

Can digital currencies challenge the status quo?

April 16, 2014

By Michael Jefferson:

Bitcoin_'challenge_coin'

Increasing international trade, multi-currency holding, public distrust in the banking system and a regulatory barriers that are seen to hinder the free-flow of capital. All of these suggest that a global digital currency, one that is not linked to a particular sovereign state or the fortunes of a company, is a natural development as we move towards a more inter-connected and easier to access global economy. Currencies such as the dollar, euro, pound or yen are internationally traded floating currencies that are a token of the underlying assets and economic power of it’s a sovereign nation (or in the case of the euro group of sovereign nations). This allows people to have an understanding of what that token means. Given this what place is there in the financial system for digital currency?

If you look at the most successful digital currency so far, Bitcoin, we have seen vast swings in valuation which has seen it go from under $20 in February 2013 to over $1,100 in November 2013 to around $620 at the time of writing in March 2014. There have also major infrastructure issues around security with the bankruptcy following breaches at one of the main exchanges MtGox. This is on top of high profile coverage of Bitcoin’s possible use for illegal activities on websites such as the Silk Road. These trust and infrastructure issues do not help deliver the confidence in the system that could enable it to build overtime and become a real competitor to the current financial system.

In the case of Bitcoin these issues are perhaps understandable given its origins as an open source currency developed by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto which anyone can mine. We are still in the ‘Wild West’ years of digital currencies. Bitcoin only came on the scene in 2009. Everyone is rushing to be involved and the potential gains for speculators seemingly engulf those that see the potential for building something useful and stable. These problems are fixable and as experience grows in the use and security for digital currencies I have no doubt that these concerns will fade away for the users.

Perhaps the bigger question for digital currencies to address is the underlying problems which causes the volatility – what it represents. We know what a dollar is and although we may not think about it in this way it is a token that is backed up by the US government and by extension the biggest economy in the world. Nowhere is the representation of the backstop for a currency more evident than during the 2008/9 financial crisis in the UK. The government stepped into to bail a number of banks including one of the world’s biggest banks at the time, RBS, because of the impact it would have on the pound and UK economy its possible default would have. In the year (March 2008 to March 2009) around the bank bail outs of October 2008 the pound lost almost 30% of its value against the dollar.

Here is your problem in digital currencies – what does is represent and where is the backstop? Digital currencies are an agreement between parties which then is only crystallised in value when exchanged into a currency, there are no economic indicators we can look to for an understating of where this floating currency will head. With digital currencies it is not yet the case and so its success will be valued on its efficiency and integrity in carrying out transactions. The lack of an underlying assets leaves it open to huge swings in value, which make most players nervous. It would be an understandable for a digital currency to grow into the international currency of choice allowing easy transactions and hassle free conversion not dependent on locality, but nations and regulators have vested interests in the status quo which will be a big obstacle in the next stage of development.

 

________________

Michael Jefferson works in public affairs for an international bank. He has extensive experience in public policy and international relations from his current role as well as from his time working for the UK Government on international trade. He has an MA in Japanese from St Catherine’s College, Oxford specialising in Japanese politics and international relations.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Bitcoin, digital currency, public trust, security, trade, volatility

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