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Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Direct Link Established Between Money Launderer And Mois

Focus on the Kroll Associates Report

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To understand the following article, you will need to first understand what money laundering is. Read this Kumekucha article that explains what it is.

Investigators compiling the Kroll report were able to establish a clear link between one of the biggest money launders in Europe, based in Geneva, called Gabriel Moussa Katri nd the Mois. Brilliantly using his Kenyan clients, Katri is said to have been the main person behind the channeling of vast amounts of money looted from Nigeria by the then president Sani Abacha which was channeled through Kenya's Trans National Bank onto various offshore destinations.

The main contact at Trans National Bank was Ashok Gohil (who died in 2001) and was Kulei's right hand man. One of the things Gohil did to facilitate his illegal activities was to set up companies in Kenya where ODM Kenya's Mutula Kilonzo was the main director. This included companies like Ashar Limited and Chen.

Finance and especially the dizzying financial transactions that are the hallmark of money laundering, which is an illegal activity for criminals, can get a little boring. However the main questions Kenyans need to ask themselves are where these huge sums of money coming from Kenya and being transferred abroad by the Mois was coming from. It is estimated that Moi and his associates transferred at least double what Sani Abacha laundered through Kenya. That is US$400 million through Katri alone and his Trans national bank conduit. What business were the Mois involved that would have generated this amount of cash? Already investigators have established that Joshua Kulei's wealth can not be justified by any dividends that could have accrued from the myriad of companies he is said to have had a stake in. Leaving everybody with only one conclusion, that this was corrupt money and in many cases looted funds from tax payers' money.

Further there were very significant legal reasons to use banks rather than transfer the corrupt money directly abroad. For starters most of the Western countries where the funds were pouring into have laws designed to check money laundering. However Nostro accounts belonging to genuine banks are never questioned and this is what Katri used for his two big clients in this case, namely Sani Abacha and Daniel Moi.

Katri's genius for hiding corrupt money did not end there. He further used wealthy friends to hide the money by paying it out to their accounts, only for the same funds to be paid back through another account belonging to the same business associates.

Katri has gone undeground since 2001 when he lost his Financial intermediary license when the Swiss authorities strated investigating his money laundering activities through Kenya using Kulei.

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