Where Angels Prey

Where Angels Prey is a novel by Ramesh S Arunachalam. Please refer to www.whereangelsprey.com for more information

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Tracing the Global ‘Microfinance’ Money Trail: Bob, Chandresh, Maarten, Tomas and Al Qaeda’s Hawala Transactions

“While Bob calls Maarten, Chandresh tries to tidy up.


Maarten greets Bob with great cheer.


“Bob, I was beginning to wonder if you had forgotten. Tomas here is a busy man!”

Bob apologizes and introduces Chandresh.

“Maarten, Chandresh and I go a long way back, just like you and me. And obviously, given that we’re on his home turf, you could say he is the boss on this one!”

Chandresh laughs.

“Maarten, Bob is just being polite. But let me tell you that I have followed some of your stories and it’s a pleasure connecting with you.”

“Likewise, Chandresh. Now, let me tell you more about Tomas, the star of the hour. Tomas Lindquivist, gentlemen, is something of an expert on the subject of money laundering and the international trafficking of money.”

Bob and Chandresh exchange glances. Where is this conversation going?

“We are in Tomas’s home in Brussels. I flew in this morning, and we have had a rather enlightening conversation.”

Bob is intrigued. If Maarten took time off his busy schedule at the BBC studios in London to fly to Brussels, there must be a very good reason.

Maarten continues, “Tomas used to be part of the European Union core group that framed the anti-money laundering legislations. He’s been retired for some time now, but he’s still the go-to guy for several agencies because of his well-known expertise in unearthing hawala transactions. What really made him famous, though, was when he managed to crack the Al Qaeda’s methods of transferring monies across continents and discovered how they shared information on such transfers. He was the first to reveal how they operated several email accounts but never sent a message about the money transfer. You see, the same account was accessed by various operatives across the globe and they would communicate with one another by typing messages and saving them in the Drafts folder. So no e-mail had to be sent. This simple but effective trick had kept the international investigators at bay for a long time before Tomas Lindvquist miraculously cracked it.”

Bob and Chandresh are, of course, suitably impressed by Lindvquist’s exploits but are also impatient to know how all that could be relevant to the Tejasvi Enterprises trail. Maarten, meanwhile, rambles on about another case that he has worked on closely alongside Tomas.” (pages 156 – 157, Where Angels Prey)

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