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Extremists' Financial 'Tentacles' Hard to Sever
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
By Alan Boyd
Global Economy

A crime investigator with an Asian organization said the diversification of terrorist criminal operations had created an inevitable problem of coordination at command levels. "You might have one agency dealing with drugs, one with sophisticated economic crimes, another with trans-border cash movements. They might not share computer codes. They might not even be familiar with one another," he said. "So yes, you get a situation where no one really has the grand picture of what is going on, what you might call the complete jigsaw. Of course, the picture is also changing all the time."



Changing so rapidly that there is a whole growth industry of experts tracking laundering trends, as terrorists keep one step ahead through the simple process of monitoring the monitors. As investigators tighten financial systems, still the most obvious route for disposing of illicit assets, savvy extremist groups are switching to informal business networks that are harder to detect.



SIDNEY, Australia -- AT
Afghanistan may have been the first phase in George W Bush's crusade against terrorism, but it was never intended that it would be the most important.

The real frontline was to be the labyrinth of financial cells that prop up the murky operations of extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf and Harakat ul-Mujahidin. Cut off the tentacles, declared Bush, and the body will quickly wither away.

But 12 months on from that defiant challenge, the body is still evidently well nourished and displaying a reptilian-like ability to grow new tentacles in place of disrupted supply lines.

While 142 countries worldwide, including three dozen in Asia, have frozen the assets of suspected terrorists, it is clear that investigators are struggling to identify the scale of the threat -- let alone deal with it.

"We know a lot more now than we did before [September 11, 2001]. We have an improved state of alertness in the financial community. We have governments with a better appreciation of the problem. But are we still playing catch-up? Undoubtedly," said a member of a US economic-crimes agency.

In the United States alone, the assets of 158 known terrorists, their parent organizations and bankers have been frozen since September 2001 because they were suspected to be funding extremist activities. Yet it is the countless unidentified activists, ranging from low- level operatives and religious sympathizers to otherwise respectable businessmen, who worry counter-terrorism officials.

The Financial Action Taskforce on Money Laundering (FATML), the main umbrella group lobbying for tighter controls over the movement of illicit funds, admitted several years ago that it was not possible to determine accurately the scale of laundering activities in the Asia- Pacific region.

The only authoritative country study was completed by Australia back in 1995: it calculated that criminals were disposing of US$2.8 billion worth of assets each year, equivalent to 40 percent of the entire national income of Zimbabwe.
(More: ATimes.com News Source)
2002 © Asia Times Online.

Dan