Det har adskillige private og folkelige operatører i nødhjælpsarbejdet oplevet, ifølge en ny rapport fra en britisk tænketank – de mange anti-terrorlove komplicerer forholdet mellem NGOer og pengeinstitutter i flere lande.
LONDON, 31 December 2014 (IRIN): The British government must do more to prevent charities working in high-risk countries from having their finances cut off by banks concerned their operations may fall foul of anti-terror laws, leading charities and bankers have warned.
In recent months a growing number of British NGOs working in the Middle East and other dangerous regions have faced account closures, crippling their much-needed humanitarian work.
Others have had payments delayed for many months. In most cases no specific allegations of wrongdoing were put forward by the banks.
A report published Wednesday calls for better coordination between the banks, NGOs and the British government to reduce such cases. It also urges the government to take the lead in designing a clearer framework for what banks and NGOs are allowed to do legally.
Not enough guidance
Report author Tom Keatinge, Director of the Centre for Financial Crime & Security Studies at the RUSI think tank and a former banker, said at times there had not been enough guidance from the government on how to avoid being tripped up by anti-terrorism legislation.
“Too often the government has claimed to be powerless in the face of US sanctions, or it has hidden behind the banks’ ‘commercial decisions’,” he said, adding:
“They need to provide greater clarity to both banks and NGOs to allow this important work to continue.”
Justine Walker, Director of the Financial Crime department at the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), echoed his call.
She said the banking community and large NGOs had improved coordination in the past year, but they needed greater clarity from the government on what was permitted.
“The banks and charities have come to the table and we are trying to find solutions, but in essence we are responding to the concerns raised by government and regulators so they also need to be at the table to agree this,” she stated.
Keatinge said, however, that there was a “growing understanding” from the government of the scale of the problem.
De-risking
Since the attacks on 11.th September 2001 a vast range of anti-terrorism legislation has been introduced across the globe, often having hugely different impacts in different countries.
Meanwhile, banks have faced a squeeze on their profits since the financial crash. This, combined with a huge increase in fines for those found guilty of being complicit in money-laundering, has made many risk averse.
Risk and compliance departments have grown exponentially – with the research arm of KPMG estimating that global annual expenditure on risk and compliance is likely to exceed 10 billion US dollar (ca. 60 milliarder DKR) within the next two years.
This has led to so-called “de-risking” – where banks have sought to close down high-risk accounts, especially those with low profit margins.
Following the controversial decision to close the bank account of a Somali remittance company, an internal Barclays review found that “it would not be commercially viable for Barclays to continue to provide services to any customer representing less than £100,000 in annual revenue.”
Keatinge said that in many cases banks were looking at NGOs working in the Middle East and concluding that both the costs of compliance and the risks of money being diverted were too high, while the profits are too low.
Have fallen victim
Among those who have fallen victim is the Ummah Welfare Trust (UWT).
In July the charity, which has an annual turnover (omsætning) of around £25 million (39 million dollar) and works in a variety of Middle East and Asian countries including Syria and Gaza, received a letter from their bank (HSBC) announcing their account would be closed.
HSBC itself had been fined nearly two billion dollar in late 2012 in a money-laundering case.
Muhammad Ahmed, a trustee at UWT, said no specific reason was given for HSBC’s decision. “It just said you fall out of our risk category and they didn’t want to elaborate on that.” There was no appeals process – the decision was final.
While most of those organizations that have received similar letters have sought to deal with the issue behind closed doors, UWT went on the attack, organizing a boycott campaign.
“We had a huge response from our supporters and donors who in their thousands said they would close their bank accounts if [HSBC] continued,” Ahmed said.
They are still, Ahmed said, pursuing both legal options and carrying their boycott campaign to the Middle East and Asia:
“The lesson needs to be that any financial institution which decides to take a charity’s account so lightly – affecting hundreds of thousands of suffering people – will not go unpunished.”
An HSBC spokesman said they did not comment on individual cases.
Abdulrahman Sharif, executive director at the Muslim Charities Forum, said such bank closures are still relatively rare, but cases are increasing.
He said the effect has been that many organizations have stopped working in parts of the Middle East, where some of the world’s largest humanitarian crises are.
“If you are a person with good will and you decide you want to set up a charity in Somalia or Yemen or Syria, opening a bank account for that is really near to impossible,” he said.
“Banks are more and more seeing non-profit [organizations] as non-profitable and as a risky client to maintain. So they prefer just to close the account and not maintain that client.”
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/100980/ngos-and-anti-terror-laws-how-to-keep-your-bank-manager-happy
