by Lucy Komisar
(Side­bar from In These Times arti­cle “Explo­sive Rev­e­la­tion$”)

Fol­low­ing the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon, the United States started focus­ing its inves­ti­ga­tion on the finan­cial trail of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network.

Like any other large, global oper­a­tion, inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists need to move large sums of money across bor­ders clan­des­tinely. In Novem­ber, U.S. author­i­ties named some banks that had bin Laden accounts, and it put them on a blacklist.

One was Al Taqwa—“Fear of God”—registered in the Bahamas with offices in Lugano, Switzer­land. Al Taqwa had access to the Clearstream sys­tem through its cor­re­spon­dent account with the Banca del Got­tardo in Lugano, which has a pub­lished Clearstream account (No. 74381).

But bin Laden may have other access to the unpub­lished sys­tem. In what he calls a “spec­tac­u­lar dis­cov­ery,” Ernest Backes reports that in the weeks before CEO André Lussi was forced to leave Clearstream last May, a series of 16 unpub­lished accounts were opened under the name of the Saudi Invest­ment Com­pany, or SICO, the Geneva hold­ing of the Saudi Bin­laden Group—which is run by Osama’s brother, Yeslam Bin­laden (some fam­ily mem­bers spell the name differently).

Yeslam Bin­laden insists that he has noth­ing to do with his brother, but evi­dence sug­gests SICO is tied into Osama”s finan­cial net­work. SICO is asso­ci­ated with Dar Al-Maal-Al-Islami (DMI), an Islamic finan­cial insti­tu­tion also based in Geneva and presided over by Prince Muhammed Al Faisal Al Saoud, a cousin of Saudi King Fahd, that directs mil­lions a year to fun­da­men­tal­ist move­ments. DMI holds a share of the Al Shamal Islamic Bank of Sudan, which was set up in 1991 and partly financed by $50 mil­lion from Osama bin Laden.

Fur­ther­more, one of SICO’s admin­is­tra­tors, Geneva attor­ney Bau­doin Dunand, is a part­ner in a law firm, Magnin Dunand & Part­ners, that set up the Swiss finan­cial ser­vices com­pany SBA—a sub­sidiary of the SBA Bank in Paris, which is con­trolled by Khaled bin Mah­fouz. Mahfouz’s younger sis­ter is mar­ried to Osama bin Laden.