Paradise Papers firm worked for bank linked to terrorist financing and organised crime

Appleby client FBME is banned from US financial system

by David Pegg
Tue 23 Jan 2018 17.56 GMT

The firm at the heart of the Paradise Papers leak provided offshore services to a bank accused of facilitating terrorist financing, transnational organised crime and the Syrian government’s chemical weapons programme.

Appleby represented the Cayman Islands holding company of FBME Bank for at least a year after the US Treasury published an extraordinary roster of allegations against the bank, and acted as its agent for more than a decade beforehand.

FBME, which was banned from the US financial system last year, denies all the allegations against it. It said Appleby regularly carried out full compliance checks on FBME Ltd, which it took on as a client in 2004.

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FBME was described as “a financial institution of primary money laundering concern” in a notice of finding published in July 2014 by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (Fincen).

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Appleby withdrew from acting as the FBME holding company’s registered agent 17 months later in December 2015. According to a US court judgment, Appleby decided that “FBME did not fit (its) risk profile”. FBME Ltd effectively ceased to exist in the Cayman Islands, a UK territory, as a result.

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