Investigators in Italy have discovered that massive amounts of capital used to support the Islamic State have been moving through banks and other financial institutions.
Many thanks to FouseSquawk for translating this article from Il Giornale:
Bank of Italy: Increase in reports for terrorist financing
According to the Bank of Italy report, there are increasing reports of transactions suspected of financing terrorism: The total amount is 88 billion
by Ginevra Spina
July 3, 2017They are increasing reports of suspicious transactions made to finance terrorism, with a total amount of €88 billion.
The warning comes from Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy, on the presentation of the report for the tenth anniversary of the Unit of Financial Information (FIU), the organ of the Bank of Italy that deals with money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
Particular attention should be paid in countering illegal activities, the use of economic currency, and money transfer. It is the governor’s warning, which noted that the total amount of reports received by the FIU has reached €88 billion.
During 2016, the FIU made reports to investigators and authorities of suspicious financial transactions “for more than €88 billion. This figure becomes more than €150 billion if you take into account transactions only attempted,” said Visco. “The number of reports has grown exponentially, not only in quantity but also in quality.”
“In 2016, the terrorist threat has emerged as one of the most important and urgent among those with which the system has been confronted. The operations of suspected terrorist financing noted were 741, more than double the number compared to 2015 and six times higher in comparison with 2014,” the report reads.
“Over 90% of them were considered to be of investigative interest by the Special Unit Currency Police, and there are several cases where investigations have confirmed the suspicions,” the report says. “More specifically, of about 84,000 reports about 60,000 have prompted investigations. More than 7,000 were transferred to criminal proceedings.”
“A specific project on the financial characteristics of foreign terrorist fighters” has been activated and has “made possible the sharing of a very considerable amount of data on international networks of relationships, which have been reconstructed on the basis of financial transactions carried out by people suspected of belonging to or supporting the Islamic State and matters related to them,” it concludes. “Shared data so far relate to transactions carried out by more than 38,000 names and were the subject of dissemination to law enforcement agencies.”
In the photo, why is paper money being dried on a clothes line? The big number on these banknotes is strange too: Is that 1500, or 500? Here is a better picture:
https://usercontent2.hubstatic.com/13024093_f520.jpg
Pictured on the note is what looks like an avant-garde building with a chimney that can easily be modified with a marker to match the digits 5 0 0 beside it, thus changing a 500-euro note into a counterfeit 1500-euro note. What were the artistic currency designers thinking?
Alas, I have no banknotes to compare: my last trip to the continent was a second visit to Barcelona in May ’16. I could happily live there if I were not too old (or lazy) to learn Catalan. I hope they gain their independence (that’ll give the Spanish government and the EU something to think about!) My beloved and I plan to visit Andalucia (from the UK) in October; I’ve already prepped her about the true cultural history.
“In the photo, why is paper money being dried on a clothes line?”
It’s called “laundering”, as in “money laundering”. Any questions?
Jesuits and Vatican involved?
Jesuits are now very Franciscan type -no money, no capitalism.
Story’s a few years back, but the Franciscans are very much interested in money, laundered or not. See link.
Doubt if the Jesuits are less so, in spite of their gnarled anti-capitalist public face. The current underhanded doings at the Vatican Bank, with the Jesuits much in the ascendancy in Vatican City [Pope Francis personally dismissing a high profile audit] say otherwise.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/19/franciscan-order-monks-uncovers-fraud
Europe needs another leader to rise… as did Jan III Sobinsky of Poland in 1683 !
I guess what the article is telling us is that ISIS is financed and supported by the functions of Western institutions. There are two implications for this. One, is that laws should be strengthened and enforced domestically. People involved in money laundering should face a high likelihood of hard jail time and deportation. Now that I think about it, a common currency probably exacerbates the problem of money laundering. This is another argument to bury the euro.
The other implication is that we underestimate the sophistication of Muslim adherents to our peril. Simply because they take the idiocies of the Koran seriously, and publish fewer books in all the Muslim countries than are published in Spain, doesn’t mean that Islamic expansionists do not have firm control over political levers. In other words, Islamists are winning. They are using the mechanisms of the West against them, with extraordinary success.
Ronald-
They are extremely effective at spreading their mental virus and its broken lifestyle. Look at how quickly they are managing it without 1% of Hollywood’s ability to blast a message over worldwide mass media channels.
Another thing the story tells us is that Islamic piggybanks are supplying Western European expansion. There’s no way all that money came from the Islamic invaders themselves. Arabia, Gutter, Emirates, Iran, and probably Iraq, are the enemy.