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★阿修羅♪
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マアリブのオーナーとその代理人イスラエルの駐英大使も関与の疑い。イスラエルだからと合成麻薬も関係してるかと勘繰りたくなったが、記事にはそれを窺わせるところはまだないみたい。
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4324305.stm
Last Updated: Sunday, 6 March, 2005, 22:52 GMT
Israeli bank 'in laundering scam'
Police have arrested 22 people working at one of Israel's biggest commercial banks over suspected money-laundering.
The Bank Hapoalim employees are thought to have been involved in an operation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Police chief Amichai Shai said the affair was one of the largest in Israeli history and involved funds from several other countries.
Investigators say employees helped customers move money without reporting the transfers.
"It appears they helped customers transfer funds without reporting it as required by law. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars," Mr Shai said at a press conference.
Tel Aviv branch
Police said that funds had passed through the bank from many countries but cited only France as one of them.
Police said they were examining more than 80 bank accounts linked to 170 customers.
All the employees arrested worked at a central Tel Aviv branch of Bank Hapoalim.
After introducing anti money-laundering legislation, Israel was removed from an OECD money-laundering blacklist in 2002.
In a statement the bank said it had ordered its employees to co-operate fully with the investigation and said it had taken several measures to prevent funds being laundering through the bank.
Police investigating suspicions of a mammoth money-laundering scheme are likely to question Maariv owner Vladimir Gusinski, whose Tel Aviv offices were raided Sunday, and Israeli ambassador to London Zvi Hefetz, who was Gusinski's point man in Israel.
Twenty-four employees, past and present, of Bank Hapoalim's Hayarkon Street branch in Tel Aviv were arrested Sunday in what officials called the biggest money-laundering case in the history of the state, thought to involve hundreds of millions of dollars in the past year.
Police are investigating whether Gusinski held bank accounts with a tie to the alleged laundering operation.
Israel Radio reported Monday that two senior bank officers may have recently sold shares valued at $900 million. One of the two mentioned was Shari Arison, billionaire heiress to the Carnival cruise line fortune.
The Petah Tikva Magistrate's Court Sunday remanded for five days the branch's former manager, Motti Cohen, on suspicion of involvement in massive illegal money-laundering schemes, which included leading "oligarchs" from Russia who also had business interests in Israel.
The head of customer relations in the branch, Yaakov Sverdelik, and the head of the Commonwealth of Independent States desk, Alik Leder, were also remanded for five days.
The court also remanded, for three days each, Dalia Kaiserman, head of the branch's French desk, and David Abutbul, who was responsible for French customers in the bank.
Investigators from the International Crimes Unit said that hundreds of millions of dollars were illegally laundered through the bank over the past year. Police sources said they have evidence that senior officials in the bank knew about the laundering and chose not to report it.
Police are now investigating whether senior executives at the national level of the bank were aware of the money-laundering.
Sunday, police froze 180 accounts held by 18 customers at the branch, accounts that police suspect were used as conduits for the flow of money from outside the country into those accounts and then, via "back-to-back" standing orders, sending the money out of the country.
At least 45 customers will be summoned in coming days by the police to answer questions about signs of laundering in their accounts. But all the customers of the bank - about 200 businesspeople - will be questioned, as police try to determine just how extensive the laundering was in the branch.
The case was only made possible by the promulgation of an anti-money laundering law that went into effect two years ago. Many of the bank's employees, including the manager and other senior officials, took part in the laundering on behalf of their customers, police said. The branch, which only handles foreign customers, had effectively become a money-laundering station for hundreds of businesses worldwide, said police sources.
Despite the sensitivity of the investigation and the extent of the suspected crimes, police emphasized that so far their probe is focused entirely on the branch and does not extend to elsewhere in Bank Hapoalim. Nonetheless, senior executives of the bank are expected to be asked about their knowledge of the branch's activities, especially if, as police now suspect, branch employees won bonuses for their work facilitating the laundering and not reporting it to the authorities.
Police described several of the laundering methods they say were used at the bank. In some cases, large sums of money would flow into an account and immediately flow out, in smaller amounts, to shell companies around the world, in an effort to hide the original source of the funds.
A second way was to break up large sums of money into smaller amounts deposited in separate accounts in the bank, thus enabling businessmen to avoid the rule requiring the bank to report cash transfers of more than NIS 1 million if it involves money from overseas or NIS 50,000 if it is money from inside Israel. A third method was for the businessman to deposit a large sum, take a loan of the same amount from the bank and then send the borrowed money overseas, with the loan covered by the sum that remained in the account.
The police worked closely with the Bank of Israel's Supervisor of Banks Yoav Lehman in preparing their case, but Hapoalim's senior management was left in the dark, with the arrests Sunday morning sending shock waves through the bank. The police informed the bank as it moved from a secret, undercover operation to the open one, made public through the media. Bank executives promised full cooperation with the investigation and with the central bank. Hapoalim shares were down by 2.6 percent for the day.
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