Iran, Trying to Skirt Sanctions, Attempts to Set Up Banks Worldwide

(Washington Post) Glenn Kessler - Iran is secretly trying to set up banks in Muslim countries around the world, including Iraq and Malaysia, using dummy names and opaque ownership structures to skirt sanctions that have increasingly curtailed the Islamic republic's global banking activities, U.S. officials say. Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official and director of a counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the banking operations, even if successfully created in other countries, are likely to be small-scale and insufficient to make up for the volume of banking activity Iran has lost.


2010-10-21 09:09:15

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