- Jul 27, 2015
- 5,458
Quote : " Anna Waterhouse was a high-flying lawyer at Deutsche Bank in Dubai. Now she's unemployed.
Amjad Rihan was a partner at the accountancy giant EY's Dubai office. He also lost his job and hasn't worked for more than five years. They both say their lives were destroyed after they flagged up suspicious activity at a major gold refiner in Dubai - Kaloti. A joint investigation between BBC Panorama and French media company Premieres Lignes shows they were right to be suspicious. Anna and Amjad didn't know it at the time but had stumbled upon evidence of an organised crime group using gold sales to Kaloti to launder British drug cash. EY, Deutsche Bank and Kaloti have all denied any wrongdoing.
In 2013, Amjad was leading an audit into Kaloti's supply chain for EY. His team found Kaloti had weak checks on its suppliers - and was handing out extraordinary amounts of physical cash for gold. "My team started conducting these audits and it's really shocking what they were finding," he said, "Kaloti has done more than $5.2bn (£4bn) in cash in one year. Money-laundering 101 tells you not to use cash. Cash increases the risk of money-laundering." A few miles away, Anna, Deutsche Bank's general counsel and head of compliance in Dubai, was getting suspicious about Kaloti's cash too. Panorama has seen a transcript of a Dubai court case in which she says "never before had I seen such a catalogue of suspicious circumstances". She told Panorama: "A colleague came into my office and described a call from a local bank in Dubai. Apparently they had called to ask, 'Are these guys, Kaloti, are they good guys? Are we safe doing business with them?' I was surprised. That's very unusual.
"The guys at the bank had noticed that Kaloti had been withdrawing very large amounts of money, so large that they had to remove this physical cash in wheelbarrows. "They said: 'We can see that quite a lot of this money is being funded by a Deutsche Bank account.'" BBC Panorama's joint investigation with Premieres Lignes shows that cash from Kaloti was a crucial part of a $250m money-laundering operation which used gold sales to launder cash from British and European drug deals. In all, 27 members of the money-laundering gang were jailed in France in 2017. The crime boss behind it, Nour Eddine Ech-Chaouti, remains on the run in Morocco. Documents seen by Panorama show Kaloti bought 3.6 tonnes of gold from a company owned by a member of the gang in 2012 alone. The gold refiner paid the company $146m in cash. The money-laundering could have been stopped years earlier if concerns raised by the two whistleblowers had been investigated properly. Anna Waterhouse reported her suspicions about Kaloti's cash withdrawals to the local money-laundering authorities. It was a decision that would wreck her life. First, she told the Anti-Money-Laundering Suspicious Cases Unit at the Central Bank of the UAE. She says they didn't investigate Kaloti - but turned on her and the bank instead. "When I explained these very serious concerns, I was straight away met with the accusation that you must have done this. How else would you know? And of course it's ridiculous," she said. "Why on earth would anybody run into the head of the Anti-Money-Laundering Suspicious Cases Unit to tell them that they'd laundered [money]? It's absurd."
Amjad Rihan was a partner at the accountancy giant EY's Dubai office. He also lost his job and hasn't worked for more than five years. They both say their lives were destroyed after they flagged up suspicious activity at a major gold refiner in Dubai - Kaloti. A joint investigation between BBC Panorama and French media company Premieres Lignes shows they were right to be suspicious. Anna and Amjad didn't know it at the time but had stumbled upon evidence of an organised crime group using gold sales to Kaloti to launder British drug cash. EY, Deutsche Bank and Kaloti have all denied any wrongdoing.
In 2013, Amjad was leading an audit into Kaloti's supply chain for EY. His team found Kaloti had weak checks on its suppliers - and was handing out extraordinary amounts of physical cash for gold. "My team started conducting these audits and it's really shocking what they were finding," he said, "Kaloti has done more than $5.2bn (£4bn) in cash in one year. Money-laundering 101 tells you not to use cash. Cash increases the risk of money-laundering." A few miles away, Anna, Deutsche Bank's general counsel and head of compliance in Dubai, was getting suspicious about Kaloti's cash too. Panorama has seen a transcript of a Dubai court case in which she says "never before had I seen such a catalogue of suspicious circumstances". She told Panorama: "A colleague came into my office and described a call from a local bank in Dubai. Apparently they had called to ask, 'Are these guys, Kaloti, are they good guys? Are we safe doing business with them?' I was surprised. That's very unusual.
"The guys at the bank had noticed that Kaloti had been withdrawing very large amounts of money, so large that they had to remove this physical cash in wheelbarrows. "They said: 'We can see that quite a lot of this money is being funded by a Deutsche Bank account.'" BBC Panorama's joint investigation with Premieres Lignes shows that cash from Kaloti was a crucial part of a $250m money-laundering operation which used gold sales to launder cash from British and European drug deals. In all, 27 members of the money-laundering gang were jailed in France in 2017. The crime boss behind it, Nour Eddine Ech-Chaouti, remains on the run in Morocco. Documents seen by Panorama show Kaloti bought 3.6 tonnes of gold from a company owned by a member of the gang in 2012 alone. The gold refiner paid the company $146m in cash. The money-laundering could have been stopped years earlier if concerns raised by the two whistleblowers had been investigated properly. Anna Waterhouse reported her suspicions about Kaloti's cash withdrawals to the local money-laundering authorities. It was a decision that would wreck her life. First, she told the Anti-Money-Laundering Suspicious Cases Unit at the Central Bank of the UAE. She says they didn't investigate Kaloti - but turned on her and the bank instead. "When I explained these very serious concerns, I was straight away met with the accusation that you must have done this. How else would you know? And of course it's ridiculous," she said. "Why on earth would anybody run into the head of the Anti-Money-Laundering Suspicious Cases Unit to tell them that they'd laundered [money]? It's absurd."
Blowing whistle on dirty money 'wrecked my life'
Two people flagged up suspicious activity at a major Dubai gold refiner - and lost their jobs.
www.bbc.com