History
The Al Taqwa (Arabic for "Fear of God") network of financial companies was set up in 1988 by prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably Al Taqwa's chairman and co-founder, Youssef Nada. Later, Swiss Islamic convert Ahmed Huber, a vocal admirer of Adolf Hitler, was hired because the company needed at least one Swiss citizen on its board. Another co-founder was François Genoud, one of the key managers of Nazi assets after the second world war who later attained notoriety as the publisher of Joseph Goebbels' diaries.
Al Taqwa Bank was targeted early on by the United States because of its alleged links to terrorism. The U.S. also targeted it because its allegedly terror-related funds indirectly filter through the banking system of the United States, through its use of correspondent accounts. Al Taqwa Bank holds such accounts with the Swiss Banca del Gottardo, which in turn holds correspondent accounts with Citibank and the Bank of New York.
Read more about this topic: Al Taqwa Bank
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)