by David Isaac
The Middle East & Africa Bank (MEAB) has evaded sanctions despite evidence it's a major financing arm of Hezbollah.
President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral
victory offers a golden opportunity to shut down a Lebanese bank, one
critical to Iran and Hezbollah, that has so far escaped sanctions even
as it serves as one of the main conduits of terror financing, observers
tell JNS.
While numerous Lebanese banks and
individuals have been slapped with sanctions by the U.S. Treasury
Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Middle East
& Africa Bank (MEAB), the 15th largest by deposits in Lebanon, has
fallen through the cracks.
In 2019, MEAB bank was named as a
defendant in a case, still ongoing, in the U.S. District Court of the
Eastern District of New York, brought by American citizens and the
families of American citizens who were killed or injured in Iraq between
2004 and 2011 in attacks orchestrated by Hezbollah in coordination with
other terrorist groups.
In 2006, MEAB Bank’s offices were targeted by Israeli fighter jets after a fundraising appeal aired on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station asking that donations for the terrorist group be sent to a specific account at the bank.
Haig Melkessetian, a former intelligence
operative for the U.S. Defense and State departments, has investigated
MEAB extensively. He told JNS that the reason MEAB has evaded sanctions
is that it has friends in high places.
In January 2015, during the Iran nuclear
talks, Mohammad Zarif, the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister at the
time, asked then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “to go easy on
MEAB,” in other words, that it be kept off the OFAC sanctions list,
Melkessetian said.
David Wurmser, a senior analyst at the
Washington-based Center for Security Policy, who has researched the bank
and the Shi’ite clan behind it, told JNS, “It’s very clear that the
Iranians were out to preserve their core structures, and this bank
really lies at the center of the global reach of Hezbollah, and through
Hezbollah, the global reach of Iran.”
The Obama administration, which had
already signaled it intended to sanction MEAB bank, couldn’t simply drop
its plan entirely, Melkessetian said, so instead of sanctioning MEAB,
the U.S. sanctioned its chairman, Kassem Hejeij.
The African connection
Kassem Hejeij bears responsibility for the
August 2020 Beirut port explosion, according to the Global Fight
Against Terror Funding (GFATF), a website dedicated to exposing
individuals, institutions and states contributing to the spread of
global terrorism.
The ammonium nitrate that exploded,
causing 218 deaths and more than 7,000 injuries was supposed to go to a
company in Mozambique, Fabrica de Explosivos de Moçambique, after it
left the Republic of Georgia, where it had been produced.
Kassem used an African connection to offer
the company $700,000 to pretend to be the official destination of the
ammonium nitrate, and after that to shut down, GFATF reported. The
company, in financial straits, agreed.
In June 2015, the U.S. labeled Kassem a Specially Designated Global Terrorist with direct links to Hezbollah.
“[Kassem] Hejeij has helped open bank
accounts for Hezbollah in Lebanon and provided credit to Hezbollah
procurement companies. Hejeij has also invested in infrastructure that
Hezbollah uses in both Lebanon and Iraq,” the U.S. Treasury Department
said, announcing its sanctions against him.
Hejeij had himself sanctioned, rather than
his bank, making the best of a bad situation. He hired lobbyists in
Washington to plead his case, leading to the agreement to shift the
target of sanctions from the bank to himself. As part of the deal, he
would step down as bank chairman in favor of his son Ali.
“The former chairman has no relationship
whatsoever or ownership interest in MEAB,” claimed the bank in its June
15, 2015, announcement that Kassem was removing himself from his
position as head of the bank.
“Kassem isn’t supposed to be involved with
banking, but his office is in the bank. Across the hall from him is his
son,” Melkessetian said. “Do you think the son is going to be more
loyal to U.S. Treasury sanctions or to his father?”
According to a 2017 article in The Daily Caller,
Hejeij told a Lebanese government source that “turning the bank over to
Ali changes nothing because me and my son are one and he is following
my orders.”
He also said that “he never has to worry
about business, because of go-betweens connecting him with U.S. lawyers
and lobbyists willing to represent Treasury sanctioned individuals.”
(This is likely a reference to his brother, Mohsen Hejeij, who can
operate freely in the U.S. and hired law firm Squire Patton Boggs and
consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to help keep MEAB bank off OFAC’s
list.)
“I have the Americans in my pocket and I can buy Washington,” Kassem boasted, according to The Daily Caller report.
It’s impossible to talk about MEAB Bank
without understanding the Hejeij clan that runs it. The GFATF website
describes the clan as “one of the pillars of Hezbollah’s financial
structure and operative mechanism.”
The clan is led by Kassem and his brother
Mohsen. They operate business ventures in various countries with a
network of “governors, bank managers, lawyers, accountants, police
officers and organized crime members,” the website reported.
The opportunity to deal with that network
may be at hand. The incoming U.S. administration brings a clear
understanding of the danger of these “mafioso underworld” type networks,
which enjoy illicit and political ties throughout Latin America and
sub-Saharan Africa, Wurmser said.
The incoming administration also
understands that the 2021 China–Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership
agreement has opened these strategic terrorist networks to the Chinese.
“It becomes a very dangerous struggle to shut these networks down
because they also serve Chinese interests in sub-Saharan Africa, and
particularly in Latin America,” Wurmser said.
The Hejeij clan
In a September 2020 paper for the Center
for Security Policy, Wurmser took a deep dive into the workings of the
Hejeij clan, concluding it owes its success to its connection to
Hezbollah and Amal, a secularist Shi’ite Lebanese movement and ally of
Hezbollah.
“Without lineage nor pedigree,” this
undistinguished family tied its coattails to the rise of those new
powers in Lebanese politics, he wrote, describing it as a creation
“bootstrapped up from insignificant origins” by Hezbollah, Amal and
Iran, “to become the new—and entirely beholden—elite of the Shi’ite
community in Lebanon.”
The Hejeij clan would be nothing without
Hezbollah and Iran and so it is “all-in” with the terrorist group as the
clan’s survival depends on it, he wrote.
Hejeij family members often post on social
media in support of Hezbollah and broadcast their attendance at
Hezbollah meetings and events. “While we in the West might wonder why
they tip their hand so, we must remember that their stature is entirely
dependent within Lebanon at this point on being understood as an
extension of the reigning Hezbollah power. So, they must flaunt their
connection as loudly and widely as possible for validation,” Wurmser
explained.
The clan members’ work on behalf of
Hezbollah is what led it to establish the bank in the first place.
Starting their own bank was their answer to the problem of maintaining
an international business presence when reputable banks were reluctant
to lend money or issue credit to a group on which hung a “thick cloud of
suspicion,” Wurmser noted.
The problem of the Hejeij clan, and others
like it, goes beyond terrorism financing. History shows that unless
uprooted, such criminal networks become strategic assets that survive
their patrons, in this case, Iran, he said.
To think that Shi’ite criminal networks
such as the Hejeij clan wouldn’t survive the Islamic Republic’s demise
is “pollyannish,” Wurmser wrote. “They will seek new masters, and China
and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan are eagerly awaiting them.”
Sectarian divides are no barrier. “The
history of the Middle East shows that there’s a fluidity of identity
that allows for transfer of bad behavior. They basically transfer
networks from one global threat to another,” Wurmser told JNS.
“The Nazis developed extensive networks
across the Middle East, which were absorbed wholesale into the KGB
structure of networks in the whole region, which then were easily
transferred and absorbed into the Islamist network that the Iranians
employed,” he added.
“These terror networks, thus, are no
longer just criminal problems. They are strategic assets and commodities
with flexible talents used by adversarial powers for strategic
objectives. And they are playing an increasingly important role in great
power rivalries worldwide, not only in the Middle East,” Wurmser said.
David Isaac
Source: https://www.jns.org/trump-white-house-affords-chance-to-confront-lebanese-terror-bank/
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