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Expelling Iranian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication would shut down Tehran’s main avenue to doing business with the rest of the world – an outcome the West believes is crucial to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

SWIFT, which has never cut off a country before, has been closely following efforts in the United States and the European Union to develop new sanctions targeting Iran that would directly affect EU-based financial institutions.

The United States and EU have already moved to sanction Iran’s central bank.

“SWIFT stands ready to act and discontinue its services to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions as soon as it has clarity on EU legislation currently being drafted,” the company said in an emailed statement.

The United States has been pushing the European Union to force SWIFT to evict the Iranian firms but it was unclear whether the EU would reach an agreement.

For one, SWIFT’s home country, Belgium, does not think the global banking firm should be the only company of its kind required to comply with sanctions.

The Obama administration said it welcomed SWIFT’s intention to stop transactions involving designated Iranian banks. “We will continue to be in contact with our EU partners to urge action on this issue,” a U.S. Treasury official said.

5.20 pm

Lord James of Blackheath: My Lords, I hope the minute that that has taken has not come off my time. I do not wish noble Lords to get too encouraged when I start with my conclusions but I will not sit down when I have made them. I will then give the evidence to support them and, I hope, present the reasons why I want support for an official inquiry into the mischief I shall unfold this afternoon. I have been engaged in pursuit of this issue for nearly two years and I am no further forward in getting to the truth.

There are three possible conclusions which may come from it. First, there may have been a massive piece of money-laundering committed by a major Government who should know better. Effectively, it undermined the integrity of a British bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, in doing so. The second possibility is that a major American department has an agency which has gone rogue on it because it has been wound up and has created a structure out of which it is seeking to get at least €50 billion as a pay-off. The third possibility is that this is an extraordinarily elaborate fraud, which has not been carried out, but which has been prepared to provide a threat to one Government or more if they do not make a pay-off. These three possibilities need an urgent review.

In April and May 2009, the situation started with the alleged transfer of $5 trillion to HSBC in the United Kingdom. Seven days later, another $5 trillion came to HSBC and three weeks later another $5 trillion. A total of $15 trillion is alleged to have been passed into the hands of HSBC for onward transit to the Royal Bank of Scotland. We need to look to where this came from and the history of this money. I have been trying to sort out the sequence by which this money has been created and where it has come from for a long time.

It starts off apparently as the property of Yohannes Riyadi, who has some claims to be considered the richest man in the world. He would be if all the money that was owed to him was paid but I have seen some accounts of his showing that he owns $36 trillion in a bank. It is a ridiculous sum of money. However, $36 trillion would be consistent with the dynasty from which he comes and the fact that it had been effectively the emperors of Indo-China in times gone by. A lot of that money has been taken away from him, with his consent, by the American Treasury over the years for the specific purpose of helping to support the dollar.

Mr Riyadi has sent me a remarkable document dated February 2006 in which the American Government have called him to a meeting with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is neither the Federal Reserve nor a bank. It is a bit like “Celebrity Big Brother”. It has three names to describe it and none of them is true. This astonishing document purports to have been a meeting, which was witnessed by Mr Alan Greenspan, who signed for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of which he was chairman, as well as chairman of the real Federal Reserve in Washington. It is signed by Mr Timothy Geithner as a witness on behalf of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF sent two witnesses, the other being Mr Yusuke Horiguchi. These gentlemen have signed as witnesses to the effect

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that this deal is a proper deal. There are a lot of other signatures on the document. I do not have a photocopy; I have an original version of the contract.

Under the contract, the American Treasury has apparently got the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to offer to buy out the bonds issued to Mr Riyadi to replace the cash which has been taken from him over the previous 10 years. It is giving him $500 million as a cash payment to buy out worthless bonds. That is all in the agreement and it is very remarkable. Establishing whether I have a correct piece of paper is just two phone calls away-one to Mr Geithner and one to Mr Greenspan, both of whom still prosper and live. They could easily confirm whether they signed it. Mr Riyadi, by passing these bonds over, has also put at the disposal of the US Treasury the entire asset backing which he was alleged to have for the $15 trillion. I have a letter from the Bank of Indonesia which says that the whole thing was a pack of lies. He did not have the 750,000 tonnes of gold which was supposed to be backing it; he had only 700 tonnes. This is a piece of complete fabrication.

Finally, I have a letter from Mr Riyadi himself, who tells me that he was put up to do this, that none of it is true, and that he has been robbed of all his money. I am quite prepared to recognise that one of the possibilities is that Mr Riyadi is himself putting this together as a forgery in order to try to win some recovery. But it gets more complicated than that because each of the $5 trillion payments that came in has been acknowledged and receipted by senior executives at HSBC and again receipted by senior executives at the Royal Bank of Scotland. I have a set of receipts for all of this money. Why would any bank want to file $5 trillion-worth-$15 trillion in total-of receipts if the money did not exist? The money was first said to have come from the Riyadi account to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and from there it was passed to JP MorganChase in New York for onward transit to London. The means of sending it was a SWIFT note which, if it was genuine, ought to have been registered with the Bank of England.

When this came about, I took it to my noble friend Lord Strathclyde and asked what we should do with it. He said, “Give it to Lord Sassoon. He is the Treasury”. So I did, and my noble friend Lord Sassoon looked at it and said immediately, “This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It would stick out like a sore thumb and you cannot see it in the Royal Bank of Scotland accounts”. He went on to say, “The gold backing it is ridiculous. Only 1,507 tonnes of gold has been mined in the history of the world, so you cannot have 750,000 tonnes”. That is true. The third thing he said was, “It is a scam”, and I agree with him. The problem is that at that point we stopped looking, but we should have asked what the scam was instead of just nodding it off.

We have never resolved it. Today, I have this quite frightening piece of paper, which is my justification for bringing it into this meeting. It is available on the internet and I am astonished that it has not already been unearthed by the Treasury because every alarm bell in the land should be ringing if it has. It is from the general audit office of the Federal Reserve in Washington-the real Federal Reserve-and its audit

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review to the end of July 2010 on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It has on it some 20 banks listed to which $16.115 trillion is outstanding in loans. That is the sore thumb that was being looked for by my noble friend Lord Sassoon. But more particularly there are two other interesting things. The first is that Barclays Bank has $868 billion of loan, and the Royal Bank of Scotland has $541 billion, in which case one has to ask a question, because they could have earned back in three weeks their entire indebtedness and could pay off the taxpayers of Britain. Why have they not done so and could we please ask them to put a cheque in the post tonight for the whole $46 billion?

The next thing that is wrong with it is that every bank on this list, without exception, is an MTN-registered bank, which means that they are registered to use medium-term notes to move funds between themselves with an agreed profit-share formula, in which case these banks are investing this money and, most extraordinarily, not a penny of interest does the Federal Bank of New York want paid on that vast amount, $16 trillion. Anyone who knows what the IMF rules are will immediately smell a rat. The IMF has very strict rules for validating dodgy money. There are two ways of doing it. You either pass it through a major central bank like the Bank of England, which apparently refused to touch this, or you put it through an MTN-trading bank, which is then able to use the funds on the overnight European MTN trading market where they can earn between 1 per cent and 2.5 per cent profit per night. The compound interest on that sum is huge. If it is genuine, a vast profit is being made on this money somewhere.

“Two Iranian ships crossed through the Suez Canal (on Thursday) following permission from the Egyptian armed forces,” a source in the canal authority said on Friday.

Amine el-Khalifi, 29, was picked up while carrying an inoperable MAC-10 automatic weapon and a fake suicide vest provided to him by undercover FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda associates, U.S. officials said. They said he entered the United States when he was 16 and was living as an illegal immigrant in Northern Virginia, having overstayed his visitor’s visa for years.

Khalifi was arrested in a parking garage on Constitution Avenue NW a few blocks from the Capitol following a year-long investigation, officials said.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.

“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”

He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.

“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”

In this undated photo provided by the Iron County Sheriff’s Office in January, a man is seen walking past a cabin in the remote southern Utah wildness near Zion National Park. Authorities believe the man in the photo, captured by a motion-triggered surveillance camera sometime in December, is a suspect responsible for more than two dozen cabin burglaries over the past five years.

Investigators have clawed for clues, scouring cabins for fingerprints that match no one and chasing reports of brief encounters only to come up short, always a step behind the mysterious recluse.

They’ve found abandoned camps, dozens of guns, high-end outdoor gear stolen from the homes and trash strewn around the forest floor.

But the man authorities say is armed and dangerous and responsible for more than two dozen burglaries has continued to outrun the law across a swath of mountains not far from Zion National Park. He’s roamed across 1,000 square miles of rugged wilderness where snow can pile 10 feet deep in winter.

The bonds were found hidden in makeshift compartments of three safety deposit boxes in Zurich, the prosecutors from the southern city of Potenza said in an e-mailed statement. The Italian authorities arrested eight people in connection with the probe, dubbed “Operation Vulcanica,” the prosecutors said.

The U.S. embassy in Rome has examined the securities dated 1934, which had a nominal value of $1 billion apiece, they said in the statement. “Thanks to Italian authorities for the seizure of fictitious bonds for $6 trillion,” the embassy said in a message on Twitter.

The financial fraud uncovered by the Italian prosecutors in Potenza includes two checks issued through HSBC Holdings Plc in London for 205,000 pounds ($325,000), checks that weren’t backed by available funds, the prosecutors said. As part of the probe, fake bonds for $2 billion were also seized in Rome. The individuals involved were planning to buy plutonium from Nigerian sources, according to phone conversations monitored by the police.

Speaking at a Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, the California lawmaker said she was “outraged” that the agency has hired a contractor to review a variety of social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter, and that General Dynamics is being tasked with reviewing news sources, blogs and their bylines for all types of articles, including those containing anti-American sentiment and reaction to policy proposals.