Category Archives: FBI

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Appeal Brings Details of 2011 Murders

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The man who implicated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in a 2011 triple murder in Waltham said he and Tsarnaev took thousands of dollars from the victims and spent more than an hour trying to clean up the crime scene, law enforcement officials said.

The details were contained in a search warrant affidavit partially unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Boston in connection with the pending appeal of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now 26, the younger brother of Tamerlan and his coconspirator in the bombings.

Who's Who in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial. (Photo composite Zeninjor Enwemeka/WBUR) Who are these people, click here.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is challenging his conviction and death sentence in the Marathon case. He is claiming that he acted under the sway of a violent, domineering older brother. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died days after the Marathon attack during a confrontation with police in Watertown.

While Tamerlan Tsarnaev and a friend, Ibragim Todashev, were suspected in the Waltham killings previously, this week’s filing offers new details into the actions of the elder Tsarnaev in the years leading up to the 2013 Marathon bombings.

The search warrant affidavit, filed in the bombing case, recounted statements that Todashev made to investigators in a May 2013 interview. Shortly after making the statements, officials say, Todashev was fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent when he allegedly lunged at the agent with a metal broomstick.

Officials also alleged Todashev hurled a coffee table at the agent, striking him in the head. Authorities ruled that the FBI agent who shot Todashev had acted in self-defense.

“Todashev confessed that he and Tamerlan participated in the Waltham murders” on Sept. 11, 2011, of Brendan Mess, 25, Erik H. Weissman, 31, and Raphael M. Teken, 37, the affidavit said. The victims were killed in Mess’s apartment on Harding Avenue in Waltham.

The Middlesex district attorney’s office said Friday the investigation into the Waltham triple slaying was still open.

One of the Waltham victims, Mess, had formerly been a close friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But Tsarnaev did not attend Mess’s funeral, a friend of Mess’s told the Globe in 2013, saying it raised suspicions.

The affidavit said Todashev indicated “he and Tamerlan had agreed initially just to rob the victims, whom they knew to be drug dealers who sold marijuana. Todashev said that he and Tamerlan took several thousand dollars from the residence and split the money. Todashev said that Tamerlan had a gun, which he brandished to enter the residence.”

Todashev indicated that Tamerlan Tsarnaev chose to escalate the crime from robbery to murder.

“Tamerlan decided that they should eliminate any witnesses to the crime, and then Todashev and Tamerlan bound the victims, who were ultimately murdered,” the affidavit said. “Todashev said that they spent over an hour cleaning the scene.”

According to this week’s filing, Todashev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev wanted to remove “traces of their fingerprints and other identifying details” from the scene.

The two traveled to the scene of the murders together in a gray, 1999 Honda CR-V and left the scene together in that same vehicle, according to the filing.

The victims were discovered in Mess’s apartment with their throats slit and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana.

The search warrant was for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Honda CR-V. Investigators were seeking “blood, DNA, trace evidence, and other items” in the vehicle that may have linked him and Todashev to the Waltham slaying, according to the affidavit.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether any physical evidence was recovered.

The Tsarnaev siblings carried out the April 15, 2013, bombings, which killed three people, including an 8-year-old Dorchester boy, and wounded more than 260 others. The brothers also killed an MIT police officer while they were on the run.

State and federal investigators first contacted Todashev, who was a gym buddy of Tamerlan Tsarnaev before he moved to Florida, six days after the Marathon bombings.

Todashev spoke to investigators several times in the weeks after the bombings. But, after Todashev booked a ticket home to Russia in May, an FBI agent and two state troopers traveled to Orlando to interview him.

At his apartment in May 2013, the three law enforcement officers interviewed Todashev starting around 7:30 p.m. and stretching past midnight. Another officer stood guard outside.

At first Todashev denied involvement in the Waltham murders: “Like I said, I didn’t kill nobody and I need your help.” But eventually, he confessed that he was involved in it, officials said.

Shortly after midnight, the apartment erupted in violence. A coffee table was hurled in the air, opening a gash on the FBI agent’s head that would require nine staples. Todashev then brandished a metal broomstick and charged. The bleeding agent shouted at Todashev to stop, then fired his gun three or four times. Todashev fell, but sprang up and lunged again, and the agent shot him several more times. Todashev fell again, face down, and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted and sentenced to death in 2015 for his admitted role in the Marathon bombings.

The heavily redacted warrant was unsealed Wednesday at the request of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers.

The attorneys maintain the trial judge erred when he barred the defense from telling jurors about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s suspected involvement in the Waltham case.

Federal prosecutors have responded that the Waltham evidence doesn’t “show that Tamerlan ‘influenced’ or ‘intimidated’ him into committing the crimes in this case or that [Dzhokhar] Tsarnaev played a lesser role in the bombing.”

Oral arguments in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s appeal are slated for Dec. 12 before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He’s currently incarcerated at a federal supermax facility in Colorado.

It is Bigger than Burisma and the Bidens, Trump Knows

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Speaker Pelosi held a press conference after the first day of the open impeachment inquiry hearing declaring that she is the smartest when it comes to intelligence and she will defend and protect the whistle-blower with all her might. HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff said at least twice that he does not know nor has he spoken to the whistle-blower. Sheesh really? REALLY?

Pelosi and Schiff are for sure covering for something much larger and it is in Ukraine and likely at least a few other countries. There was a historic theft from PrivatBank a few years ago that was in excess of $5 BILLION. Then Ukraine was forced to nationalize the bank until such time the monies were tracked, found or recovered, which still has not happened. The country was financially suffering and the reputation of corruption in Ukraine continued to fester.

Seems our own U.S. State Department was enlisted to step up operations in Ukraine using several government agencies and non-government agencies known as NGO’s.

The matter of the whistle-blower is but one piece of all things Ukraine even while 2 State Department officials, George Kent and William Taylor provide testimony in the first round of the public hearing. (BTW, Kent’s wife is of Crimean-Tatar ancestry) Kent and Taylor are in the thick of all things Ukraine and beyond even while responding in open testimony they were unaware of key political events stateside.

Our not so favorite nefarious operator George Soros is very much at the center of much of the chaos in Ukraine, the Hillary Clinton/John Kerry State Department and some of those NGO’s.

List below are some bullet items for reference. It is difficult to piece together the whole mess but the facts below may help the reader with the long game plot against President Trump because his handful of phone calls with Ukraine President Zelensky regarding investigations into corruption(s) has struck a nerve that the power-brokers in DC are driven to stop and protect.

  • To boost legitimacy of Ukraine and Burisma, the Obama administration partnered Burisma with USAID.
  • USAID was enlisted to prepare for a new generation of Ukrainian politicians.
  • From the U.S. Ukraine Business Council: Briefing by Vadym Pozharskyi, Advisor to the Board of Directors, Burisma Holdings Ukraine’s largest independent gas producer, 30% market share by gas output volume in 2015

    Vadym Pozharskyi currently serves as an Advisor to the Board of Directors at the Burisma Holdings. He is also in charge of the Holding’s overseas expansion, GR & PR block. Prior to that, he worked for 4 years in the public sector, inter alia, on positions of the Head of the International Relations Department at the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine and the Deputy Head of the State Environmental Investment Agency of Ukraine.

    During these engagements he extensively cooperated with international organizations, led the negotiations group to UNFCCC on the restoration of Ukraine’s status in Kyoto protocol. From 2010 until 2014, Mr. Pozharskyi was the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Focal point in Ukraine.

    Burisma Holdings, www.BURISMA.com, since its launch in 2002, has rapidly become the largest gas producer in Ukraine.  Burisma Holdings consists of 4 operating companies, engaged in exploration and production of hydrocarbons (dealing with hydrocarbon production).  Burisma Holdings has expanded its operations beyond Ukraine and now operates in Germany, Mexico, Italy, and Kazakhstan.

    Burisma Geothermal is a new branch of Burisma Holdings.  It is a 100% owned subsidiary which specializes in geothermal energy development and electricity production from renewable and environmentally friendly energy sources in Europe.  Burisma Holdings has purchased equipment and technologies from such USA companies as Halliburton and Caterpillar.

  • Several U.S. government agencies were tapped to provide financial assistance to Ukraine and President Trump is right to ask harder questions as there is no Inspector General assigned to Ukraine to track that spending for legitimacy. Remember the legacy of corruption in Ukraine and Trump has a duty to see if he can trust a brand new leader in Zelensky who was never a politician.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • William B. Taylor is the executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Earlier, he was the special coordinator for Middle East Transitions in the U.S. State Department. He oversaw assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. Ambassador Taylor became chargé d’affaires ad interim for Ukraine in June 2019. In picking through some of the other names in the membership of The American Academy of Diplomacy  (NGO) which includes Taylor, they are: Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Jon Huntsman Jr., John Kerry, Victoria Nuland, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, Strobe Talbott and Kent Volker.
  • Willam Taylor as part of the U.S. Institute of Peace, not only was USAID a deeper partner in Ukraine but Google is also. USAID was/is a sponsor of RADA. RADA and the USAID program that launched in November of 2013 collectively took to the streets in Ukraine for what is known as the Revolution of Dignity coordinating with Members of Parliament and civil society organizations and other international experts.
  • President Trump mentioned Crowdstrike in the phone call. Crowdstrike was hired by Perkins Coie to investigate the hacking of he DNC server. Perkins Coie was the law firm of record for the DNC and hired Fusion GPS. Trump has the notion that Crowdstrike also may have operated out of Ukraine that clues point to Crowdstrike was part of foreign interference into our 2016 elections. It should be noted that a independent group of journalists based in Britain are seeking a UK report of Russian/Ukraine interference their Britain’s election. As a matter of fact, Crowdstrike has an office in London.

 

  • With all this political power and international resumes, how was it that Russia was allowed to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine in the first place? Where was Taylor, Nuland, Kerry, Rice or Obama? Too busy with the Iran nuclear deal it seems. The United States needed Russia’s cooperation with the Iran JCPOA so Obama did not grant the request of Ukraine for military aide other than to ship MRE’s and blankets. Congress (read Democrats) never complained until President Trump was in a phone call and approved the eventual shipment of real military aide.

So, back to the beginning, where does this whistle-blower fit in? Seems he was/is the Ukraine expert assigned to VP Biden who was assigned by Obama to be the leader of the envoy for all things Ukraine. At least 6 emails obtained from a FOIA list the Ciaramella in the email chain. Others include Victoria Nuland, George Kent and Kathleen Kavalec. There are other names in the email discussion(s) dated June 2016.

This is a larger operation that has a genesis in Ukraine. There are known quantities of moving parts but it is clear that Pelosi, Schiff and perhaps many others at NGO’s, the State Department, the previous members of the Obama White House are in fact just a little nervous that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani are treading in waters made dark by operatives they are working to hide, defend and protect.

 

Trump’s Reelection Operation Targeted by Cyber Attacks

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Hey Hillary it is not Russia, but they are out there for sure. This time most notable attributions are pointing to Iran.

When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?

“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.

Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.

El acuerdo del Pentágono con Microsoft conlleva un centro ...

What are the superpowers of Microsoft?

“Microsoft sees stuff that just nobody else does,” says Williams, who founded the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “We routinely find stuff, for instance, like flags for malicious IPs in Office 365 that Microsoft flags, but we don’t see it anywhere else for months.”

Connect the dots

Cyber threat intelligence is the discipline of tracking adversaries, following bread crumbs, and producing intelligence you can use to help your team and make the other side’s life harder. To achieve that, the five-year-old MSTIC team includes former spies and government intelligence operators whose experience at places like Fort Meade, home to the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, translates immediately to their roles at Microsoft. 

MSTIC names dozens of threats, but the geopolitics are complicated: China and the United States, two of the most significant players in cyberspace and the two biggest economies on earth, are virtually never called out the way countries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea frequently are. 

“Our team uses the data, connects the dots, tells the story, tracks the actor and their behaviors,” says Jeremy Dallman, a director of strategic programs and partnerships at MSTIC. “They’re hunting the actors—where they’re moving, what they’re planning next, who they are targeting—and getting ahead of that.”

Microsoft, like other tech giants including Google and Facebook, regularly notifies people targeted by government hackers, which gives the targets the chance to defend themselves. In the last year, MSTIC has notified around 10,000 Microsoft customers that they’re being targeted by government hackers. 

New targets

Beginning in August, MSTIC spotted what’s known as a password spraying campaign. Hackers took around 2,700 educated guesses at passwords for accounts associated with an American presidential campaign, government officials, journalists, and high-profile Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised in this attack.

“Once we understand their infrastructure—we have an IP address we know is theirs that they use for malicious purposes—we can start looking at DNS records, domains created, platform traffic,” Dallman says. “When they turn around and start using that infrastructure in this kind of attack, we see it because we’re already tracking that as a known indicator of that actor’s behavior.” 

After doing considerable reconnaissance work, Phosphorus tried to exploit the account recovery process by using targets’ real phone numbers. MSTIC has spotted Phosphorus and other government-sponsored hackers, including Russia’s Fancy Bear, repeatedly using that tactic to try to phish two-factor authentication codes for high-value targets.

What raised Microsoft’s alarm above normal on this occasion was that Phosphorus varied its standard operating procedure of going after NGOs and sanctions organizations. The cross-hairs shifted, the tactics changed, and the scope grew.

Microsoft’s sleuthing ultimately pointed the finger at Iranian hackers for targeting presidential campaigns including, Reuters reported, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection operation.

One consequence of the 2016 US election is a rise in the sheer number of players fighting to hack political parties, campaigns, and think tanks, not to mention government itself. Election-related hacking has typically been the province of the “big four”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. But it’s spreading to other countries, although the Microsoft researchers declined to specify what they’ve seen.

“What is different is that you’re getting additional countries joining the fray that weren’t necessarily there before,” says Jason Norton, a principal project manager on MSTIC. “The big two [Russia and China]—now, we can say they’ve been historically going after this since well before the 2016 election. But now you’re getting to see additional countries do that—poking and prodding the soft underbelly in order to know the right pieces to have an influence or impact in the future.” 

“The field is getting crowded,” Dallman agrees. “Actors are learning from each other. As they learn tactics from the more prominent names, they turn that around and use them.” 

The upcoming election is different, too, in that no one is surprised to see this malicious activity. Leading into 2016, Russian cyber activity was greeted with a collective dumbfounded naïveté, contributing to paralysis and an unsure response. Not this time.

You saw them in 2016, you saw what they did in Germany, you saw them in the French elections—all following the same MO. The 2018 midterms, too—to a lesser degree, but we still saw some of the same MO, the same actors, the same timing, the same techniques. Now we know, going into 2020, that this is the MO we’re looking for. And now we’ve started to see other countries come out and start doing other tactics.”

In 2016, it was CrowdStrike that first investigated and pointed the finger at Russian activity aiming to interfere with the American election. The US law enforcement and intelligence community later confirmed the company’s findings and eventually, after Robert Mueller’s investigation, indicted Russian hackers and detailed Moscow’s campaign.

MIT Technology Review visited Microsoft, the full summary is here.

Self Described Socialist Now the DA in San Francisco

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Senator Dianne Feinstein lives in Pacific Heights, a suburb of San Francisco. Speaker Nancy Pelosi lives there too. In fact 56 billionaires live in the Bay Area of which at least 20 live in Pacific Heights. Did they all vote for the Marxist Boudin or know his history much less objectives as a District Attorney?

Primer, a leading voice from CNN for Black Lives Matter:

Was going to write a piece on Boudin but I found this perfect summary below.

Nation's Most Toxic DA Candidate - Patriot Gun News

On Saturday, public defender Chesa Boudin won the race to become district attorney of San Francisco. His victory, although celebrated as part of the larger national movement to elect more criminal justice reformers to offices of power, may not be such a gift to San Francisco, whose crime woes seem to be at least partly the result of too little criminal enforcement.

Boudin’s political leanings are fairly unsurprising. San Francisco’s newest DA and self-proclaimed socialist is the son of former members of the violent revolutionary far-left group Weather Underground, an organization that rose to infamy in the 1970s and carried out as many as two dozen bombings of government properties. Both of Boudin’s parents were imprisoned for murders related to a robbery they conducted as Weathermen, and Boudin’s father David Gilbert is still serving time.

In his parents’ stead, two other militant Weathermen, known as leaders within the organization, raised Boudin. Indeed, in an interview with Jacobin (yes, that Jacobin), Boudin spoke positively of how his four parents’ “activism” has inspired his own work, despite the “mistakes” they all made—a supposedly “charming” detail that is fundamentally grotesque.

As a Yale-trained lawyer, Boudin eventually left the United States to work as a translator for Venzuela’s now-deceased socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, an outrageous resume data point that ought to get someone laughed out of political office (for those unfamiliar, Chavez’s socialism eventually transformed Venezuela into a failed state). But predictably not so in San Francisco, where behemoth, yet ineffective government is fetishized to the point of allowing piles of human feces in the streets.

Starting January 1, 2020, Boudin will hold the office of the city’s top law enforcement official, but his staggeringly leftist vision—regarded by some as exceptionally to the left, even by San Francisco standards—may be at sharp odds for what the city needs.

True, Boudin isn’t entering the easiest of roles. Among the United States’ 20 largest cities, San Francisco currently ranks number one in property crime, a status that has been driven by a cottage industry of organized gangs reselling stolen goods, often in broad daylight. Boudin’s stated approach to crimes like this is to stop punishing them.

Boudin’s platform is nominally predicated upon reducing mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Among Boudin’s declared initiatives is to no longer charge for gang enhancement, which significantly increases the penalties if an offender is found to have participated in a street gang.

Boudin has called this penalty “racially motivated” since recent studies have found that only 8 percent of documented gang members are white. However, San Francisco, whether its latest DA is willing to admit it or not, has a serious problem with gang activity. For instance, 70 to 80 percent of the city’s car break-ins are carried out by organized gangs, and a car is broken into in San Francisco 80 times per day. If these numbers suggest anything, there isn’t enough deterrence for joining a street gang.

Decriminalizing gang membership should not be used as a political cudgel to advance the left’s identity politics drivel, and doing so may have disastrous consequences. San Francisco has previously relaxed certain policies, reducing penalties for some facially non-violent charges, to reduce incarceration levels and allow police supposedly to focus on violent crime. While this method can be applied with some measured success, it requires a highly tailored approach that San Francisco has shown itself ill-equipped to carry out.

For instance, when San Francisco passed Proposition 47 five years ago, it met loud applause from criminal justice reform groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But it was an abysmal failure. As I wrote last week when reflecting on Prop 47, “Prop 47 was allegedly designed to keep non-violent offenders out of the state’s already packed prisons by reducing certain non-violent felonies to mere misdemeanors. For instance, a thief can now steal twice as much as he or she formerly could before facing a felony charge. But thieves have begun to capitalize on this loophole. In cities like Vacaville, CA, just outside of the state’s capital, theft has more than doubled, and police believe Prop 47 is to blame.”

Boudin’s platform, in all its emphasis on reducing incarceration (as opposed to reducing crime), likely promises more failed policies similar to Prop 47. Some have voiced their discontent with Boudin’s election, which they fear will only exacerbate San Francisco’s current crime woes, ones that remained largely unaddressed by San Francisco’s former DA George Gascon. On Saturday, police union president Tony Montoya declared in an official statement, “Unfortunately, the election results mean that San Francisco residents will have to suffer through another four years of George Gascón style policies that have plagued our city and decimated public safety.”

Two Marches ago, I reflected in the tone of a sad desperado how San Francisco had begun to resemble a failed state. As a former San Franciscan, I have little hope that Boudin’s policies will do anything but exacerbate what is, by all metrics, an urban crisis fomented and sustained by excessive liberalism. Hat tip Federalist

Syrian Henchmen Financial Sanctuary in Moscow

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2011: Hillary Clinton declared that Bashir al Assad was a reformer.

Primer:

Rami Makhlouf: Wealthy, powerful cousin of Syria’s president

Makhlouf, 45, is Syria’s richest man and a member of what was described during U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearings as a powerful “mafia” that also includes Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, Makhklouf’s cousin. Before his country plunged into civil war, Makhlouf was allegedly worth $5 billion thanks to his control of monopolies and semi-monopolies in the air travel, telecommunications, real estate, oil and construction sectors. Makhlouf is on U.S. sanctions lists and is a known beneficiary of corruption.

***

Several Makhlouf family members, close cousins and accomplices of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, have purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of properties in Moscow’s prestigious skyscraper district.

Headed by al-Assad’s uncle, Mohammed Makhlouf, the Makhloufs are considered to be Syria’s richest and second most important family. Before 2011, they controlled 60 percent of the Syrian economy, ostensibly acquired through years of corruption and intimidation.

GlobalWitness:

Our exposé of the Makhloufs’ properties is rare supporting evidence that lends substance to rumours of regime money being funnelled out of Syria throughout the war. Information about the regime’s assets and finances is notoriously scarce due to the terror fostered by al-Assad’s apparatus at home and abroad.

Our investigation further shows that the loans secured against some of the properties could be for the purposes of laundering money from Syria into Moscow. This opens the possibility that the money could then be moved into other jurisdictions, such as the EU, where members of the family are sanctioned.

Of the newly-revealed Moscow property purchases, the largest amount was bought by Hafez Makhlouf, one of Bashar al-Assad’s first cousins.

Hafez is accused of overseeing the killings and torture of detainees and protestors. Most of Hafez’s purchases were arranged using an opaque Lebanese loan structure that bears several hallmarks of money laundering, possibly with the purpose of moving the money beyond Russia.

Russia has been a key ally of the al-Assad family over their almost 50-year rule. It intervened on their side of the war in Syria in 2015, turning it in their favour through airstrikes and land offensives on opposition-controlled territory.

Reports of Russian banks aiding the Syrian regime surfaced in 2012 and 2013, after Western sanctions hit and the more powerful family members were stripped of European visas and their EU and Swiss bank accounts were frozen. Now it seems that the Syrian regime has been using Moscow as an alternative safe haven, and possibly a potential gateway for its ill-gotten gains to enter the wider financial system.

Hafez Makhlouf, who purchased US$22.3 million worth of property in Moscow’s ‘City of Capitals’ towers, was head of the Damascus ‘Section 40’ of Syria’s infamous General Intelligence Directorate until late 2014. This is the Syrian agency charged with quelling internal dissent, formerly and popularly known as the State Security service. As Damascus is the capital, this was already an important role, but Hafez appears to have had a great deal more authority than this official title reflects.

Testimony collected by Syrian human rights groups about Hafez’s Section 40 and its command branch, the Al-Khatib Branch, as well as wider testimony collected by journalists about the systemic use of torture by Syria’s intelligence services, points to how Hafez would have potentially overseen the detention of  thousands of Syrians and their subsequent abuse, and, in some cases, even murder.

Moreover, multiple regime defectors have since testified, in a 2019 book by journalist Sam Dagher, that Hafez was a hard-line member of Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle and one of his most influential advisers. According to the testimony, Hafez was one of two main advocates for crushing the demonstrations in 2011. Dagher’s book includes testimony from witnesses who saw Hafez shooting civilians in Douma and giving shoot-to-kill orders on hundreds of peaceful protestors in Daraa and Homs.

Makhlouf Family Tree Diagram english  When buying the Moscow office space in 2016, Hafez Makhlouf’s Russian-registered property companies took out loans using 11 of the properties as collateral. The complex structure of these loans disguises Hafez’s connection to the funds. This is characteristic of money laundering and could have been designed to establish money flows between Russia and Syria which would appear unconnected to Hafez, raising the possibility that the ultimate aim is to move the money out of Russia.

The loans were provided to Hafez’s Russian companies by a Lebanese company called Nylam SAL Offshore. The company is classified as ‘offshore’ in Lebanon; while Lebanese ‘offshore’ companies do not hide their owners like offshore companies in so-called secrecy jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, these companies do benefit from enhanced banking secrecy. The exact amount loaned by Nylam is unknown.

In 2018, two years after the property purchases, Hafez, the sole shareholder of his three Russian companies, passed his shares to Briana SAL Offshore, a Lebanese company with identical shareholders, directors and address as Nylam. Russian corporate records for the Russian property companies contain details about Briana because it is a shareholder. These records show that Briana states its country of business as Syria.

Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, provided banking services for at least one of the Russian property companies formerly owned by Hafez and now owned by Briana, a Russian corporate database shows.

As the loans from Nylam to Hafez’s Russian companies were international (coming into Russia from Lebanon), it is feasible that they were transacted in US dollars, which is the commonly used international currency. If that were the case, the money could have transited through Sberbank’s SWIFT payment system, which, according to anti-money laundering expert Graham Barrow, could risk breaching the terms of the US sanctions against Hafez Makhlouf.

The convoluted nature of the loans taken against the properties should have raised red flags with Sberbank, but it is unclear what due diligence was carried out on the loans.

Sberbank’s dealings with the Makhloufs are part of a broader pattern of major Russian banks helping the Syrian regime. In 2012 and 2013, both Reuters and Wall Street Journal reported that the al-Assad regime held accounts at Gazprombank and VTB, two of Russia’s largest banks, which, like Sberbank, have extensive international correspondent banking relationships. More here.