A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a court case against Kuveyt Türk Participation Bank and Kuwait Finance House, which has claimed that the two banks have deliberately allowed funds to pass through accounts allegedly belonging to aid groups with ties to extremists.
The lawsuit was filed last summer by St. Francis Assisi (SFA), an association established by the plaintiff's lawyer Mogeeb Weiss one week prior to the submission of the complaint, allegedly representing the relatives of Assyrian Christians who suffered at the hands of Daesh in Syria and Iraq.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White on Tuesday decided the case had lack of standing because SFA failed to provide an individual member who would otherwise have standing to sue for the claims asserted. The judge also ruled that the court had no jurisdiction over the two foreign banks. The court granted SFA leave to amend its complaint by no later than February 28.
The charges casted in SFA's complaint seem contradictory in its nature due to claims surrounding the wars in Syria and Iraq. Weiss claimed in his complaint that designated Nusra Front financier Hajjaj Fahd al-Ajmi has been collecting money for Daesh on social media by sharing bank account numbers belonging to the aid groups that work with these two banks.
"The claims are incoherent: At bottom, they are based on ISIS's conduct, but the allegations confuse support for the Nusra Front - a different entity - with support for ISIS. Moreover, even assuming that the defendant Hajjaj assisted ISIS, no facts are alleged that either bank had any knowledge or involvement in any activities of Hajjaj or ISIS," the lawyers for the defendants said in their motion against the complaint on Nov. 2, using a different acronym for Daesh. Several sources pointed out that fact that the Nusra Front and Daesh have been in armed clashes since 2013, and a Nusra Front supporter financing an enemy combatant group was not logical.
The complaint said Hajjaj Fahd al-Ajmi instructed followers to make their donations to a Kuveyt Türk account registered under the name of the Sham Islamic Committee Association (SIC) – 'Şam İslami Heyeti Derneği' in Turkish.
The bank records show that the claim is factually wrong because the complaint says the customer number for the account was 8695311 and formal documents prove that this account does not belong to the SIC. It is registered under the name of another association, the Sham Humanitarian Foundation (SHF), or İnsani Şam Derneği.
Kuveyt Türk lawyers shared a number of official documents with Daily Sabah that show that the United Nations and UNICEF donated money to the SHF many times over the last few years and conducted joint humanitarian operations. Needless to say, the SHF is not a designated organization.
Several reports tied the Weiss lawsuit to Thomas Creal, an expert in the field of international asset tracing. Creal told several Turkish journalists that he believes "reckless" banks "tolerated the support for terrorism" by negligence. He also wowed that his team would pursue the case to the very end, wherever the funds take them.
The lack of evidence in the complaint opened ways for speculations on the motives. A Daily Sabah research found that Weiss and Creal have recently been in financial trouble. Weiss is named as debtor for several tax liens and lawsuit judgments reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plaintiffs also alleged in 6 separate lawsuits that he falsified loan documents.
Creal also filed bankruptcy in August 2014 due to his liabilities that are over 1 million dollars.
