Trump White House affords chance to confront Lebanese terror bank

The reason MEAB has evaded sanctions is that it has friends in high places.

By David Isaac, JNS

President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory offers a golden opportunity to shut down a Lebanese bank, one critical to Iran and Hezbollah, that has so far escaped sanctions even as it serves as one of the main conduits of terror financing, observers tell JNS.

While numerous Lebanese banks and individuals have been slapped with sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Middle East & Africa Bank (MEAB), the 15th largest by deposits in Lebanon, has fallen through the cracks.

In 2019, MEAB bank was named as a defendant in a case, still ongoing, in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York, brought by American citizens and the families of American citizens who were killed or injured in Iraq between 2004 and 2011 in attacks orchestrated by Hezbollah in coordination with other terrorist groups.

In 2006, MEAB Bank’s offices were targeted by Israeli fighter jets after a fundraising appeal aired on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station asking that donations for the terrorist group be sent to a specific account at the bank.

Haig Melkessetian, a former intelligence operative for the U.S. Defense and State departments, has investigated MEAB extensively. He told JNS that the reason MEAB has evaded sanctions is that it has friends in high places.

In January 2015, during the Iran nuclear talks, Mohammad Zarif, the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister at the time, asked then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “to go easy on MEAB,” in other words, that it be kept off the OFAC sanctions list, Melkessetian said.

David Wurmser, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, who has researched the bank and the Shi’ite clan behind it, told JNS, “It’s very clear that the Iranians were out to preserve their core structures, and this bank really lies at the center of the global reach of Hezbollah, and through Hezbollah, the global reach of Iran.”

The Obama administration, which had already signaled it intended to sanction MEAB bank, couldn’t simply drop its plan entirely, Melkessetian said, so instead of sanctioning MEAB, the U.S. sanctioned its chairman, Kassem Hejeij.

The African connection

Kassem Hejeij bears responsibility for the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, according to the Global Fight Against Terror Funding (GFATF), a website dedicated to exposing individuals, institutions and states contributing to the spread of global terrorism.

The ammonium nitrate that exploded, causing 218 deaths and more than 7,000 injuries was supposed to go to a company in Mozambique, Fabrica de Explosivos de Moçambique, after it left the Republic of Georgia, where it had been produced.

Kassem used an African connection to offer the company $700,000 to pretend to be the official destination of the ammonium nitrate, and after that to shut down, GFATF reported. The company, in financial straits, agreed.

In June 2015, the U.S. labeled Kassem a Specially Designated Global Terrorist with direct links to Hezbollah.

“[Kassem] Hejeij has helped open bank accounts for Hezbollah in Lebanon and provided credit to Hezbollah procurement companies. Hejeij has also invested in infrastructure that Hezbollah uses in both Lebanon and Iraq,” the U.S. Treasury Department said, announcing its sanctions against him.

Hejeij had himself sanctioned, rather than his bank, making the best of a bad situation. He hired lobbyists in Washington to plead his case, leading to the agreement to shift the target of sanctions from the bank to himself. As part of the deal, he would step down as bank chairman in favor of his son Ali.

“The former chairman has no relationship whatsoever or ownership interest in MEAB,” claimed the bank in its June 15, 2015, announcement that Kassem was removing himself from his position as head of the bank.

“Kassem isn’t supposed to be involved with banking, but his office is in the bank. Across the hall from him is his son,” Melkessetian said. “Do you think the son is going to be more loyal to U.S. Treasury sanctions or to his father?”

According to a 2017 article in The Daily Caller, Hejeij told a Lebanese government source that “turning the bank over to Ali changes nothing because me and my son are one and he is following my orders.”

He also said that “he never has to worry about business, because of go-betweens connecting him with U.S. lawyers and lobbyists willing to represent Treasury sanctioned individuals.”

(This is likely a reference to his brother, Mohsen Hejeij, who can operate freely in the U.S. and hired law firm Squire Patton Boggs and consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to help keep MEAB bank off OFAC’s list.)

“I have the Americans in my pocket and I can buy Washington,” Kassem boasted, according to The Daily Caller report.

It’s impossible to talk about MEAB Bank without understanding the Hejeij clan that runs it. The GFATF website describes the clan as “one of the pillars of Hezbollah’s financial structure and operative mechanism.”

The clan is led by Kassem and his brother Mohsen. They operate business ventures in various countries with a network of “governors, bank managers, lawyers, accountants, police officers and organized crime members,” the website reported.

The opportunity to deal with that network may be at hand. The incoming U.S. administration brings a clear understanding of the danger of these “mafioso underworld” type networks, which enjoy illicit and political ties throughout Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, Wurmser said.

The incoming administration also understands that the 2021 China–Iran Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement has opened these strategic terrorist networks to the Chinese.

“It becomes a very dangerous struggle to shut these networks down because they also serve Chinese interests in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in Latin America,” Wurmser said.

The Hejeij clan

In a September 2020 paper for the Center for Security Policy, Wurmser took a deep dive into the workings of the Hejeij clan, concluding it owes its success to its connection to Hezbollah and Amal, a secularist Shi’ite Lebanese movement and ally of Hezbollah.

“Without lineage nor pedigree,” this undistinguished family tied its coattails to the rise of those new powers in Lebanese politics, he wrote, describing it as a creation “bootstrapped up from insignificant origins” by Hezbollah, Amal and Iran, “to become the new—and entirely beholden—elite of the Shi’ite community in Lebanon.”

The Hejeij clan would be nothing without Hezbollah and Iran and so it is “all-in” with the terrorist group as the clan’s survival depends on it, he wrote.

Hejeij family members often post on social media in support of Hezbollah and broadcast their attendance at Hezbollah meetings and events.

“While we in the West might wonder why they tip their hand so, we must remember that their stature is entirely dependent within Lebanon at this point on being understood as an extension of the reigning Hezbollah power. So, they must flaunt their connection as loudly and widely as possible for validation,” Wurmser explained.

The clan members’ work on behalf of Hezbollah is what led it to establish the bank in the first place. Starting their own bank was their answer to the problem of maintaining an international business presence when reputable banks were reluctant to lend money or issue credit to a group on which hung a “thick cloud of suspicion,” Wurmser noted.

The problem of the Hejeij clan, and others like it, goes beyond terrorism financing. History shows that unless uprooted, such criminal networks become strategic assets that survive their patrons, in this case, Iran, he said.

To think that Shi’ite criminal networks such as the Hejeij clan wouldn’t survive the Islamic Republic’s demise is “pollyannish,” Wurmser wrote. “They will seek new masters, and China and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan are eagerly awaiting them.”

Sectarian divides are no barrier. “The history of the Middle East shows that there’s a fluidity of identity that allows for transfer of bad behavior. They basically transfer networks from one global threat to another,” Wurmser told JNS.

“The Nazis developed extensive networks across the Middle East, which were absorbed wholesale into the KGB structure of networks in the whole region, which then were easily transferred and absorbed into the Islamist network that the Iranians employed,” he added.

“These terror networks, thus, are no longer just criminal problems. They are strategic assets and commodities with flexible talents used by adversarial powers for strategic objectives. And they are playing an increasingly important role in great power rivalries worldwide, not only in the Middle East,” Wurmser said.

HezbollahKassem HejeijMEAB