Doha Bank Funds FSA

"Ad-Diyar" Lebanese daily revealed Monday that "it had received an email from the Director of one of the Doha Bank branches owned by one of the royal family members."
"Through the nature of his work, Fahd bin Jabor bin Mohammed al-Thani unveiled details of how Qatar financed the terrorism in Syria, particularly the so-called "Islamic wing of the Free Syrian Army"."In details, the director doubted the transactions of the two Syrian bank customers Moataz al-Khayyat and Mohammed Moataz al-Khayyat.The two men possess a small contracting company in Doha, named UCC."After they had usual small accounts of deposit, transactions, remittances, and credits, they recently started entering a large amount of weekly money remittances from various sources," al-Thani informed "ad-Diyar.He further mentioned that that the Emiri Diwan is the main source of funding as well as other Omani, Syrian and Qatari sources."After checking and inspecting, I discovered that the bank information are free of any justification for the purpose of such transactions," the bank official said and pointed out that " this contradicts the rules of our Bank, as well as the international conventions related to money laundering."Al-Thani highlighted that "once I asked for clarifications , I was stunned by the Head of Retail Banking Nabil Tabbar [Lebanese from Beirut] and the Director of the branch leadership Reem Yahya al-Hija's [Lebanese from Tripoli] reaction.""They strongly opposed freezing the accounts without giving any further details," he stated.After a while, the director discovered that large amounts of the money transferred to the accounts of al-Khayyat, are weekly converted to Mahasen al-Khayyat in Istanbul, through Garanti Bank.Moreover, amounts are taken via checks deposited in the account of a Lebanese person named Ronnie Jean al-Ramadi in Koura, North Lebanon (according to his passport, which begins with 0777). Later, the money is transferred to a Turkish security officer in Ataturk Airport. The man, with the help of other Turkish and Syrian men, hands the money to a man named Abu Mamoun, who buys the arms and ammunition for the so-called "Free Syrian Army". It was also uncovered that he had in August handed a large sum of money to a Lebanese Sheikh in Tripoli.The director also mentioned that "based on the credit cards payments of al-Khayyat, the two men travel weekly to Turkey after taking great amounts of money the day before their trip."