Word: nigerians
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...recent cases the laws brought striking results. Banking regulators publicly reprimanded several Swiss banks?by name?for keeping accounts belonging to relatives of the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. And it was the Swiss in the autumn of 2000 who tipped off Peru that Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres, the former head of Peruvian intelligence, had stashed away about $114 million in five Swiss accounts. Judicial authorities in Zurich blocked the accounts after the banks themselves reported their suspicions. The Swiss ambassador in Lima then informed the Peruvian government and urged it to open an international criminal investigation, with which Switzerland...
Switzerland's banking regulator has an effective weapon to enforce the many new regulations it has put in place over the past decade: public embarrassment. Take the case of former Nigerian President Sani Abacha. At the end of 1999, the Swiss government froze all assets identified as being linked to Abacha, about $660 million, and the Swiss Federal Banking Commission began a full-scale inquiry into how and why the money had come to Switzerland. The regulator?s report, issued in August 2000, was damning?to banks. While five institutions had behaved according to Swiss money-laundering laws and procedures...
Though the Nigerian dictator had also funneled some funds through Britain, the Financial Services Authority there published its Abacha findings without identifying the banks. But the Swiss named every institution it investigated and gave specific details in each case. It was all part of the policy of banking commission director Daniel Zuberbuehler that Swiss bankers dub naming and shaming. The commission's reasoning: "The fact in itself that significant funds from the entourage of the former Abacha regime were deposited in Swiss bank accounts is extremely regrettable and damaging to the reputation of Switzerland's financial sector...
...predominantly Muslim northern states to adopt shari'a in criminal cases two years ago. The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian, has promised to back Lawal in another appeal. The case may end up in the country's supreme court. In March, Safiya Husseini, the first Nigerian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery, had her sentence dismissed by an Islamic appeals court in another state, in part because she was accused of an act of adultery--she had said it was rape--that preceded the institution of extreme shari'a there. In Lawal's case...
...ruling last week jolted Obasanjo's government to react. "We are totally opposed to [stoning]," Justice Minister Kanu Agabi told reporters. He has an ally in Muslim human-rights lawyer Aliyu Musa Yauri, who argues that harsh sentences are giving Nigerian Muslims a bad name: "Unless the Muslims of the world stand up and reinterpret these laws, we will find that the other religions will be laughing at us." And crying foul...