September 11 Commission Report - Gnostic Liberation Front

holding on to financial assets that belonged to holocaust victims and their families.
The search erupted into a scandal in 1997, when a janitor at UBS discovered and
retrieved documents being shredded that supported the claims of the holocaust
victims and their families. U.S. lawmakers initiated hearings and an investigation on
behalf of the U.S. families involved, which then reviewed the claims of the
Philippines, as the lawmakers made a case against the Swiss banks. The product of
these hearings and investigations was the Eizenstat Report and Related Issues
Concerning United States and Allied Efforts to Restore Gold and their Assets Looted
by Nazis During World War II, June 25, 1997, House of Representatives, Committee
on Banking and Financial Services.
4. The final front was new anti-money laundering regulations which took hold in
Switzerland in late 1998. This new legislation put criminal penalties on bankers who
knowingly supported money-laundering activities.
As state local and national lawmakers from the U.S. began to lobby in favor of sanctions
against the Swiss banks as a penalty for withholding the gold, Edgar Bronfman, as the
new president of the World Jewish Congress, negotiated a settlement with the banks. The
contention of this report, based on the circumstances and no actual proof, is that
Bronfman, as a significant owner of Barrick, which was the primary beneficiary of the
Khashoggi - conceived gold laundering operation and connections to the German bank
cartel, went to Switzerland to establish a settlement that would stop the investigation, and
prevent further disclosure of the true assets being held in accounts at UBS. This report
alleges that the threat posed by the three sets of claimants was that allowing investigators
into the accounts of Marcos and the transfers from the Deutschebank, the true magnitude
of the holdings would be disclosed, additional transfers out of those accounts would be
traced, and the whole gold laundering operation would be unraveled. Further
investigation would have resulted in having the Department of Justice pursuing assets
into accounts that moved gold into or through Barrick for laundering. With the exposure
of more that one laundering operation, the entire operation would come undone.
The inevitable question should be: If Bronfman convinced the Swiss bankers to hand
over roughly $8 billion ($1.25 billion to the holocaust victims, $ 4.6 to the Philippine
government, and another $2 billion to the 8 U.S. victims of the torture suit) compared to
less than the $1 billion they were originally planning on paying ($185 million to the
holocaust victims and $800 million to the Philippine government)- what did the UBS get
in return? Was the question: could Bronfman satisfactorily bring to end investigative
pressure on the Swiss banks? Did Bronfman turn to his long-time partner of twenty years
-Adnan Khashoggi (whose name was attached to most of these investigations) – and ask
if he could “fix” a solution?
There was another complicating factor in bringing closure to the “bullion” issues. The
Swiss and Deutschebank knew that resolving the Holocaust and Marcos gold disputes
was not the end of the pressure on the banks. There were three more open investigations:
THE SEPTEMBER 11 COMMISSION REPORT Page 247