Good to see the Coke Monkey keeping his eye on the bottom line. No sense
letting terrorist links interfere with profits.
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Fines for terrorism links drop
Business penalties after 9/11 analyzed
By Matt Kelley, Associated Press | November 8, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle
terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies
doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell
sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of
federal records shows.
The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq, North
Korea, Sudan, or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000
in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward,
according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.
After the attacks, Bush grouped North Korea, Iran, and Saddam Hussein's
Iraq together as an ''Axis of Evil": countries with both weapons of mass
destruction and links to terrorists.
A Treasury Department spokeswoman said that despite the smaller average
fines, the administration was doing a good job of enforcing economic
penalties against nations considered sponsors of terrorism. Molly
Millerwise said the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or
OFAC, ''is committed to ensuring that US entities abide by US sanction
laws. We are not in the business of making money."
The smaller average fines could indicate that companies are making fewer
large deals with terrorist countries, said Adam Pener, who advises
businesses on how to avoid dealing with such nations.
''I would argue this is a good sign OFAC is doing its job," said Pener,
chief operating officer of the Conflict Securities Advisory Group.
Vice President ***** Cheney was a vocal critic of trade embargoes while
he headed Halliburton, a Houston-based oil services conglomerate, from
1995 to 2000. Under Cheney, Halliburton expanded its trade with Iran
through an offshore subsidiary. That arrangement is now being
investigated by a federal grand jury.
Nineteen executives or directors of companies fined by OFAC were top
campaign fund-raisers for Bush.
One example is Joseph J. Grano Jr., chairman of the federal Homeland
Security Advisory Council, which the president created by executive
order and whose members he selected. Grano formerly headed the US
subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS AG. It paid more than $100 million in
fines for trading US currency to Iran and other nations and for
transferring funds to Iraq during Hussein's rule.
Bush renewed the ban on trade with Iran in March 2001. Since 9/11, the
Treasury Department has added hundreds of names to the list of people
and businesses whose US assets are frozen because of suspected links to
terrorism and seized more than $200 million in terrorist assets.
OFAC is the agency that enforces US restrictions on trade with drug
traffickers, terrorists, and countries on the State Department's list of
terrorism sponsors.
US laws such as the Trading With the Enemy Act prohibit most trade with
those designated countries: Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Cuba. Libya
was on the list until this year, after its government agreed to disclose
and dismantle its clandestine nuclear and chemical weapons programs.
The Bush administration also removed Iraq from the banned list this year
after the US-led invasion that ousted Hussein.
The AP used publicly available OFAC records to compile a database of
penalties paid by companies for doing business with terrorists or their
state sponsors.
Analysis of the database showed:
The average corporate penalty for doing business with Cuba was four
times higher before the attacks. Before Sept. 11, the average penalty
was nearly $98,000; afterward, it was about $23,500. The State
Department accuses Cuba of bankrolling some terrorist groups and
sheltering members of Basque and Colombian terrorist organizations.
Penalties for prohibited business involving Iran were nearly twice as
high before the attacks. Before Sept. 11, the average penalty for an
Iran transaction was more than $33,500; afterward, the average fine was
about $17,300.
Fines for trading with Iraq while Saddam was in power averaged more than
$101,000 before the Sept. 11 attacks, then fell by more than a third to
about $74,800 afterward.
Companies accused of dealing with Libya paid fines averaging more than
$41,000 before the attacks, a figure more than three times higher than
the average after the attacks of about $12,800.
There was only one fine since 2001 involving a deal with North Korea,
for prohibited transactions from the 1990s.
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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