The SAR contains no explanation for the January 2003 transaction. A source close to the Saudi embassy said the money was reimbursement for expenses related to a summer 2003 visit here by officials from around the world. The travel and lodging for the visit was arranged by the embassy's Office of Islamic Affairs, the source said. Another SAR concerns a $6 million check drawn on the Saudi embassy's Riggs account and deposited into the personal account of Ahmed A. Kattan, the No. 2 official at the embassy, on Oct. 19, 2001. In transactions on Oct. 22 and Oct. 24, Kattan had $5.5 million wired out of his account to two men operating a private school in Cairo. The transfers triggered an SAR because Egypt at the time of the transfer was viewed by the U.S. government as lacking anti-money-laundering safeguards.
...
Riggs internal investigators also found a $50,000 payment in October 2001 from the embassy to the American Muslim Council, whose founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, was charged last September with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Libya, which then was designed by the United States as a sponsor of terrorism. The check was deposited in a Morgan Stanley account after being endorsed by Alamoudi without reference to the council, according to an SAR filed by Riggs. An embassy source said the payment was part of the embassy's long-standing practice of donating money to charities and nonprofit organizations.
Another SAR details more than $17 million in payments last August from the account of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense and Aviation to Ibrahim Shorbatli in Saudi Arabia. Riggs determined that the ministry had been paying Shorbatli $4 million each quarter. Saudi officials told Riggs that the money was for building palaces in Saudi Arabia and that Shorbatli coordinates construction projects for Bandar, but in the SAR Riggs said it could not determine the ultimate use of the funds. The transaction was previously reported in Newsweek.
An embassy source said the money was for a government construction project in Saudi Arabia.
Bandar and his staff were out of the country yesterday and could not be reached, nor could a spokesman for the embassy. An embassy source who asked not to be identified because he is not the official spokesman said diplomats there continue to cooperate with every aspect of the FBI investigation. The source said that as recently as two weeks ago the FBI met with embassy officials and expressed no concern that Saudi officials had done anything wrong or illegal.
But a law enforcement official said that few of the transactions have been adequately explained and that the matter remains under investigation.
Riggs began filing its suspicious-activity reports about the Saudi accounts after examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) -- the Treasury Department unit that oversees banks -- began to crack down a year ago on what it considered to be the bank's weak procedures for catching money laundering. Riggs filed about a dozen SARs in the spring of 2003, and 20 more after November when Riggs began an audit of past Saudi transactions.
Because of its questions about the rigor of the bank's supervision, the OCC recently designated Riggs a "troubled institution," which gives the unit sweeping powers to order changes that could include replacing senior executives.
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FBI scrutiny of Riggs's international business began soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and widened to include parallel probes by the OCC and Riggs itself after a Newsweek report in November 2002 suggesting that the Saudi ambassador's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal , may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists. In the course of the inquiries, bank and federal investigators found tens of millions of dollars in questionable transactions that had not previously been reported by Riggs, as the law requires. That led to the flurry of suspicious-activity reports filed by the bank last November.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20942-2004Apr17_2.htmlRiggs Bank Is Sued
Over 9/11 Attacks
By GLENN R. SIMPSON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 13, 2004; Page B3
WASHINGTON -- A lawsuit was filed on behalf of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and their families against Riggs Bank for allegedly contributing to the disaster through negligence, as both the owner and the leaseholder of the World Trade Center site took aim at Saudi Arabia's leaders, its banks and its charities in their own legal complaints.
The boldest filing was the suit, which seeks class-action status, against Riggs National Corp. and its banking unit. "Riggs' constant failure to comply with banking oversight laws resulted in funds being forwarded from high risk Saudi Embassy accounts at Riggs Bank to at least two September 11 hijackers," the suit, drafted by the torts firm Motley Rice of Mount Pleasant, S.C., alleges.
Both Riggs and the Saudis had no comment.
The bank has been under intense scrutiny since investigators discovered a possible money trail from Princess Haifa al Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador, to two Sept. 11 hijackers. Subsequently, regulators found that the bank had overlooked tens of millions of dollars in suspicious cash transactions by Saudi diplomats. The controversies crippled Riggs, which is being sold by its controlling stockholders, the billionaire Allbritton family, to PNC Financial Services Group Inc., of Pittsburgh.
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http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Haifa+riggs+bankbottom link Cached
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