New York, NY – U.S. authorities have seized $150 million linked to an alleged scheme by Hezbollah to launder drug money.
Prosecutors in New York City announced on Monday they used a seizure warrant to take the money from an escrow account in Lebanon.
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The prosecutors had filed a lawsuit last year demanding hundreds of millions in money-laundering penalties from Lebanese financial institutions and other entities.
Authorities had said that since 2007, more than $300 million was wired from Lebanon to the United States to buy used cars for resale in West Africa. Prosecutors said they had evidence that Hezbollah used back channels to wire cash from the cars as well as drug-dealing proceeds back to Lebanon.
As far as I can tell from the US DOJ press release, “we” seized the money from “correspondence accounts” that were here in the US, and had no “reach” into, so to speak, Lebanon’s banking system.
“The seized funds are substitutes for the money in the LCB escrow account at BLF, and came from an account at a U.S. bank that is used by BLF to conduct U.S. currency transactions (the “correspondent account”).”
http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/August12/lcbseizure.html