Re: Aamir Liaquat Hussain Selling Islam
every body must contact ARY and ask them to fire him and every body must boycott ARY untill this piece of **** is fired.
As much as I respect your demand but you have to understand that ARY itself is run by gangsters and money launderers. They feed their own employees with the money they receive from their fake charity foundation. Their group has been found involved with international money laundering scams and until recently the chairman haji saab was a wanted criminal.
You live in Denmark. Be a good danish and never come back to this cursed nation.
An underworld paved with gold http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HD19Ak03.html By Bertil Lintner
It seemed like a routine announcement. Last August 30, the London BullionMarket Association issued a statement revoking the status of an associatemember, ARY of Dubai, one of the wealthiest of the United Arab Emirates. But in fact, it was the first overt outcome of a long investigation intomoney-laundering, drug-trafficking and possible terrorism-financing. Sincethe August announcement, ARY has had several of its British bank accountsclosed and the revenue authorities are investigating its finances. Thiscould be the end of the road for one of the hitherto best-respected - andmost well-connected - jewelers and gold dealers in the Persian Gulf region,Abdul Razzak Yacoub Ghandi, whose initials form the name of the group ofcompanies he owns. Apart from controlling a large share of Dubai's lucrative gold wholesalebusiness, he runs a satellite TV company, ARY Digital, which he claimstransmits into 107 countries, manages a gold refinery called ARY Aurum Plus,and has interests in local real-estate development.
He also used to managethe ill-gotten gains of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of Pakistan'snuclear-weapons program. When Khan fell from grace in February 2004, he and his relatives tried torecover the funds they had deposited with ARY. But it was all in vain. Themillions of dollars that Khan had made from selling nuclear-bomb designs tocountries such as North Korea and Libya had already been transferred tosecret bank accounts, to which only ARY has access, investigators assert. So far, however, the only conviction in the region against him or any of hisassociates occurred when, in July 2002, a court in Rawalpindi, Pakistan,sentenced former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to three years' hard laborfor failing to answer corruption charges. She was tried in absentia for having received kickbacks for awarding amonopolistic contract to ARY Gold to import gold to Pakistan. In 1998,Pakistani investigators found two checks, each for US$5 million, allegedlypaid by ARY Gold in 1994 to Asid Ali Zardari, Bhutto's husband, to secure atwo-year monopoly on gold imports to Pakistan.
At the time, Ghandi acknowledged that he held the monopoly and that he hadshipped $500 million worth of gold from 1996-98, but stated that he had notpaid any bribes and that his "enemies" had falsified the bank documents.Bhutto never went to jail as she spends most of her time in self-imposedexile in the UAE, and Ghandi himself never had to testify in a Pakistanicourt. He is well connected in the UAE as well as in Pakistan, where hecounts President General Pervez Musharraf among his friends. According to one intelligence source, Ghandi also has some rather rarecontacts in the tribal region on the Afghan-Pakistani border, which haveproved useful to the Pakistani authorities.
In August 2004, he reportedlywent to Pakistan on a secret mission at the request of Pakistan'sInter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The purpose was to broker a ceasefire between the Pakistani army and theleaders of the Wana tribes of Waziristan, who had refused to recognize theauthority of the government in Islamabad and were running their own affairsand cross-border businesses. Ghandi's connections with these tribal leadersgo back to the days of the Taliban regime, when they provided him withlogistical support in transferring gold and other commodities fromAfghanistan to Dubai. The UAE was one of very few countries that haddiplomatic relations with the Taliban regime. On February 17, 2002, the Washington Post reported that even more cash andgold had been flown out of Afghanistan just before the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001 and sent to Dubai. The paper quoted US customs officials as saying they were "scrutinizing movements of gold by several companies,including ARY". Ghandi strongly denied this and threatened to sue the Postbut, in the end, settled for a letter to the editor. A court case could havebrought to light more revealing details about his gold business that hewould prefer to keep to himself. Dubai's gold market is one of the liveliest - and least regulated - in theworld. The air-conditioned Gold & Diamond Park off Sheikh Sayed Road standsout as one of the most impressive of all the new buildings in the emirate,but the old gold market, or Gold Souq as it is called, in the old town of Deira remains the center for the region's gold trade. Dubai became an entrepot for the re-export of gold after the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.
The governments of those two new countries barred gold imports as a currency-stabilizing measure. British merchants then startedbringing gold from South Africa to Dubai, from where local traders smuggledit into India and Pakistan. The trade in gold took off in the early 1960s, when the ruler of the emiratedredged the Dubai Creek and made it possible for thousands of wooden tradingboats, or dhows, to anchor there. In 1967 the price of gold in Dubai was $35an ounce, while in India the same quantity of the precious metal sold for$68. The gold trade peaked in 1997 when 600 tons was re-exported from Dubai.Gold was brought in not only from South Africa but also from Italy andRussia. In recent years, India has liberalized its restrictions on theimportation of gold, so the trade is no longer what it used to be. But it is still substantial, and its significance amounts to more than themere trade in a valuable commodity. According to the Paris-based FinancialAction Task Force: "Precious metals, and in particular gold, offer theadvantage of having a high intrinsic value in a relatively compact form.Gold can be bought and sold for currency with little difficulty in mostareas of the world. Furthermore, it holds its value regardless of the formit takes - whether, for example, in bullion or as a finished piece of jewelry ...
The advantages that gold provides are also attractive for themoney launderer, that is, the high intrinsic value, convertibility, andpotential for anonymity in transfers." ARY capitalized on those advantages when, between October 2002 and December2003, it exported gold bars worth 6.4 million euros ($7.8 million at thecurrent exchange rate) to Britain. ARY Traders in Dubai first shipped thegold to its UK subsidiary, ARY Jewelers, which sold it to a local companycalled Diamond Jewelers. Various UK-based Pakistani dealers, masquerading asjewelers, then bought the gold and were thus able to exchange their stacksof cash for a commodity that could be deposited in a bank. According toWestern investigators, Pakistani "jewelers" were, in fact, drug traffickerswho needed to launder their money. It was not always smooth sailing, however. In October 2002, Mohinder SinghBasra, a Wolverhampton resident of subcontinental origin, admittedlaundering 25 million British pounds of "dirty money" from business premisesin the city. At the time, Detective Inspector Chris Solway said that "whatwe have uncovered was a major network involved in transferring huge sums ofmoney via America to Dubai where it then effectively disappeared". Basra wassentenced to eight years' imprisonment for money-laundering while, accordingto the British Broadcasting Corp, the "Dubai-based partner is still wantedfor questioning". That partner was, hardly surprisingly, the ARY group ofcompanies.
The year before, the accounts of ARY Digital UK were the subject of three notices of suspected money-laundering. The satellite broadcasting companyhad recorded an unsupported increase in turnover from 570,000 euros in 1999to more than 4.7 million euros in 2001. Police investigators suspected thatARY Digital UK was acting as a hawala - underground banking service - inBritain.
Hawala is closely connected with the Dubai gold trade. It means "transfer"in Arabic, while Interpol describes it as "money transfers without moneymovement". The system has been used for hundreds of years to move moneyaround legal and financial barriers in the Middle East and South Asia. It isalso faster, cheaper - usually there is no commission - and more reliablethan ordinary bank transfers, which are burdened by bureaucracy and legalrestrictions. For instance, if a gang smuggles a quantity of gold to Indiaand sells it there, the seller in Dubai wants to get paid, but not ininconvertible Indian rupees. At the same time, Indian workers in the emiratewant to send money home so they pay the hawaladhar in Dubai in UAE dirhams,which are freely convertible. The hawaladhar keeps that cash, and instructs his partner in India to paythe workers' relatives with Indian rupees in recompense for the smuggledgold. In this way, everyone gets paid but it is only the gold that moves.Gold dealers across the world provide a facility whereby all can belaundered and transferred - and not only for guest workers in the Gulfregion. Criminal networks and terrorist gangs are the main patrons of thehawala system. And the biggest gold dealer in Dubai is ARY, with anestimated 45% share of the local gold wholesale business, which in 2003 wasbelieved to be in the order of $5.87 billion. More worrying than its role as an informal transfer service for expatworkers is the role hawala is believed to have played interrorism-financing. As there is no paper trail, the secrecy is perfect -and because most terrorism networks today have deep roots in the MiddleEast, it is perhaps not surprising that Dubai functions as their financialbase. Since the September 2001 attacks in the United States, Dubai has comeunder pressure from Western governments to regulate its hawala operators aswell as the emirate's established banking sector. According to Singapore-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, most of thecash spent by the September 11 militants was transferred from Dubai. The USinvestigations into the attacks exposed trails leading back to Dubai.
Much of the $250,000 used to fund the attacks was channeled through bank accounts in the emirate to suicide pilot Mohamed Atta and other suspected hijackers -and further cash was, most probably, moved through the hawala system. The role that Ghandi and his companies have played in facilitating thetransfer of money for various militant groups is debatable, but his linkswith the erstwhile Taliban regime in Afghanistan, his close, personalconnections with tribal leaders in the Afghan-Pakistani border area, and hisdealings with the ISI and A Q Khan's network are enough for Westerninvestigators to strongly suspect that there is a connection. Ghandi did not respond to questions sent to him by fax regarding his allegedinvolvement in moving the Taliban's gold out of Afghanistan, why the LondonBullion Market Association had revoked his associate membership, or if heindeed had bribed Zardari to secure a monopoly on gold imports to Pakistan. Ghandi was actually born in 1944 in Sindh in the then-undivided British India.
Sindh became a province of Pakistan after independence, and Ghandigrew up in Karachi. He moved to Dubai in 1969, where he soon establishedhimself as a major player in the gold business. Apart from being a goldtrader, he is also the chairman of the World Memon Organization, a charitythat was set up in Dubai in March 2002, at the same time that,coincidentally or otherwise, the US and Pakistani authorities were startingto go after other Islamic charities suspected of being fronts for terrorismfinancing. The Memons are descendants of low-caste Hindus who converted to Islam duringthe Mughal period in India. Their original base was in Gujarat, but beingenterprising traders and seafarers they can now be found in Pakistan, India,the UAE, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Britain, Canada and the US. They are atightly knit community and many orthodox believers do not consider them"real" Muslims, which sets them apart from most of the region's radicalIslamic networks. The vast majority of Memons are straightforward businessmen, but among them- and closely connected with Ghandi in Dubai - is Iqbal Memon, also known asIqbal Mirchi, a wanted international drug trafficker and the right-hand manof Dawood Ibrahim, the leader of a notorious Mumbai-based criminal syndicatethat was behind a string of bombings in that city in March 1993.
The attacks are widely believed to be the retaliation by the Mumbai underworld - andsome Islamic militants - for the demolition of the Babri Mosque by Hindunationalists in December 1992. Dawood has been on Interpol's notice afterthe 1993 blasts and, in 2003 the US Treasury Department put his name on itsglobal terrorist list linking him to al-Qaeda. He is also a Memon andclosely connected with Pakistan's ISI, and he is believed to split his timebetween Pakistan and Dubai. As chairman of the World Memon Organization, Ghandi presides over millionsof dollars' worth of contributions to the organization's "charitable" workin India and Pakistan. To investigate the organization's finances and linkthem to terrorism financing is impossible, but as one Western intelligenceofficial put it: "ARY nevertheless has ideal conditions for this. On the onehand, he controls the finances of an Islamic charitable organization and, onthe other, there are indications of concealed hawala banking." Whatever the case, Ghandi's star is on the wane in Britain after hisexclusion from the London Bullion Market and, as one investigator concluded:"It's now up to the Dubai authorities to take further action." That may notbe easy, given his clout - and money - in the emirate and beyond. Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern EconomicReview. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services. (Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. FAIR USE NOTICE:All original content and/or articles and graphics in this message arecopyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to thesecopyrighted items are reserved. Articles and graphics have been placedwithin for educational and discussion purposes only, in compliance with"Fair Use" criteria established in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976.The principle of "Fair Use" was established as law by Section 107 of TheCopyright Act of 1976. "Fair Use" legally eliminates the need to obtainpermission or pay royalties for the use of previously copyrighted materialsif the purposes of display include "criticism, comment, news reporting,teaching, scholarship, and research." Section 107 establishes four criteriafor determining whether the use of a work in any particular case qualifiesas a "fair use". A work used does not necessarily have to satisfy all fourcriteria to qualify as an instance of "fair use". Rather, "fair use" isdetermined by the overall extent to which the cited work does or does notsubstantially satisfy the criteria in their totality.
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