Yassin Kadi
Yassin Abdullah Kadi is a Saudi Arabian businessman. A multi-millionaire from Jeddah, Kadi trained as an architect in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son-in-law of Sheikh Ahmed Salah Jamjoom, a former Saudi Arabian government minister with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
The UN placed sanctions against Kadi in 1999 and 2000, when he was named by United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1333 as a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden's terror network, al-Qaeda. On 12 October 2001, the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control ordered his assets in the United States to be frozen. The European Union also applied sanctions to Kadi. In response, Kadi's lawyers brought two lawsuits now considered landmarks in EU law and public international law, known as Kadi I and Kadi II. The case for which he is best known, a 2008 decision by the European Court of Justice, Kadi I, is thought to have challenged "the core framework of UN terrorist sanctions and forces UN member states to tackle difficult legal questions or else face possible collapse of the UN’s terrorist sanctions regime."
Kadi's listing as a terrorist was overturned by several European courts, and his name was removed from blacklists by Switzerland, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. In September 2010, Kadi "succeeded in having dismissed in their entirety the civil claims brought against him in the United States on behalf of the families of the 9/11 victims", when a U.S. District Judge ruled that the District Court for the Southern District of New York had no jurisdiction over Kadi, a Saudi Arabian citizen. In October 2012, the UN Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaeda granted Kadi's petition to be removed from its blacklist. The Kadi II decision by the European Court of Justice in July 2013 declined appeals by the European Commission and the UK against the earlier annulment of European sanctions against Kadi, saying that there was no evidence to substantiate the allegations of his being linked to terrorism. On 26 November 2014, the United States Department of the Treasury removed Kadi's name from its Specially Designated Nationals list.
Early life
Kadi was born 23 February 1955 in Cairo, Egypt. His father became a successful businessman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has six sisters and no brothers.Around 1977, Kadi earned a bachelor's degree in architectural engineering from Alexandria University in Cairo, Egypt, and subsequently became an intern at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago from July 1979 to February 1981. He helped the firm develop a master plan and contract documentation for the Mecca Campus of the King Abdulaziz University.
Yassin Kadi married a daughter of Sheikh Ahmed Salah Jamjoom sometime before 1981. He and his wife have seven children, One of his sons is a U.S. citizen.
Business and nonprofit ventures
In the 1980s, Kadi became a vice president of the Jamjoom Group, a multi-national conglomerate headquartered in Jeddah. Around 1986, Yassin Kadi became one of the principal investors in BMI Inc., a Shariah-compliant investment bank based in New Jersey.Kadi inherited "several million dollars" in 1988. In 1990, he began to establish close business associations with Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, whose family owned a majority interest in Saudi Arabia's largest bank, the National Commercial Bank. Kadi said that he was brought in to maintain good financial relations with pious Muslims throughout the Islamic world, by building a more shariah-compliant banking network for the bank. "We devised systems of leasing and ways to borrow money" that could be used by pious Muslims, who are not allowed to charge interest, Kadi told the Chicago Tribune.
In May 1992, Kadi created the Muwafaq Foundation, an Islamic charity incorporated for the stated purpose of providing famine relief and education in the Islamic world, particularly Pakistan. The charity was incorporated as a trust on the island of Jersey, an off-shore tax haven located near the coast of Normandy, France. Officials on the island told the Guardian that Jersey "does not appear to maintain any public record of the Muwafaq Foundation. "They said "if it was structured as a financial trust, it would not require to be registered at all." Kadi personally donated about $15 to $20 million from his fortune, and solicited donations from bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudi families. Bin Mahfouz became a principal donor but later said that he was not involved in the operation of the charity after its establishment.
A similarly named organization, the "Muwaffaq Society" or "Muwaffaq Ltd.," was registered in the Isle of Man in June 1991, but Kadi denied any relationship to this entity. Plaintiffs who have filed suit against Kadi and his associates claim that Muwafaq was a charitable front used to funnel money to al-Qaeda, an allegation Mr Kadi has repeatedly denied.
In 1996, Kadi became one of the original founders and financial supporters of the Dar Al-Hekma Private College for Girls, a "path-breaking Saudi women's college" based in Jeddah. At the time of the 11 September attacks, he was serving as the Secretary-General of the college.
Business activity after 2001
According to Victor D. Comras, "Al Kadi is believed to have acted swiftly after 9/11 to restructure many of his business interests and, while retaining actual control, placed many of his own assets into the hands of nominal managers and directors." In 2005, the New York Times estimated that Kadi's net worth "exceeds $65 million." In 2010, Comras described him as a billionaire, citing his extensive international business holdings.Terrorism blacklist
Meetings with Osama bin Laden
In an October 2001 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Kadi said that he met with Osama bin Laden at religious gatherings in the 1980s, but "he said the encounters were unremarkable at a time when bin Laden's battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan attracted US government support and donations from Mosques around the United States."In a December 2008 interview with the New York Times, Kadi added that he once met Osama bin Laden in Chicago. He gives the date as 1981. Steven Coll, a biographer of the Bin Laden family discovered that the date of the visit was 1979. Osama "was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Los Angeles and Indiana, among other places."
The date coincides with Kadi's arrival in Chicago in July 1979. Coll gives as his source a 2009 biography written by Osama's first wife, Najwa Bin Laden.
1991: Loan Linked to Hamas
In 1991, Kadi loaned $820,000 to the Quranic Literacy Institute of Oak Lawn, IL, a group formed to disseminate the Koran and Muslim texts but later allegedly linked to Hamas. Kadi told the Chicago Tribune he made the loan because of his friendship with the literacy institute's president, whom he met at a Sunday lecture in the Chicago area.Kadi said the money was intended to allow the institute to make a land investment, which would yield profits that would support its charitable work.
1998: Funds Al-Iman University
In 1998, Kadi donated money toward the construction of housing for students at Al-Iman University in Sanaa, Yemen. The university's name is also translated as Iman University or Al-Eman.A 2010 New York Times profile of the university indicates it is run by Muslims who follow Salafist practice, that is, a strict and puritanical form of Islam practiced by the Salafi. Al-Iman is "not a typical college," says Glenn R. Simpson of the Wall Street Journal. "Its curriculum primarily concerns the study and propagation of radical Islam."
January - August 1998: Linked to Maram
According to Glenn R. Simpson of the Wall Street Journal, Kadi's bank records show that, between January and August 1998, he transferred $1.25 million from his Geneva bank account through an associate to an alleged al-Qaeda front company in Turkey known as Maram. Founded as a travel agency and import-export business, the company Maram was reportedly established by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, said to be one of al-Qaeda's founding members and to have a history of moving money and shopping for weapons for the organization.A few months later, in December 1998, Kadi reportedly transferred shares in the company to two other men. One was Wael Hamza Julaidan, a Saudi businessman said to be a founder of al-Qaeda. The other was reported to be Mohammed Bayazid, another alleged founder of al-Qaeda.
On 20 December 1998 Salim was extradited to the United States, where he was charged with participating in the 1998 United States embassy bombings. In 2010, USA Today reported that he is an inmate of the ADX Florence facility in Florence, Colorado, sentenced to life without parole for stabbing a federal prison guard in the eye.
Blocked by Executive Order 13224
On 12 October 2001 Kadi was listed as one of several dozen individuals that the United States "determined to have committed or to pose a significant risk of committing or providing material support for acts of terrorism" under Executive Order 13224. His U.S. assets were frozen. On 15 October, OFAC sent a letter to Kadi notifying him of his rights to request reconsideration. Kadi was added to the UN list shortly afterward, which also resulted in his assets being frozen in European Union countries. Saudi Arabia "supported the addition of the Jeddah-based terrorist financier, Yasin al-Qadi, to the UN's consolidated list in October 2001," according to an official press release of the U.S. Treasury."Not found guilty of anything"
Yassin Kadi was never formally charged with a crime by the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. "As is customary in such cases, Washington has presented no direct evidence linking Mr. Kadi to terrorism," the New York Times reported in 2008. "But it has made public a dense labyrinth of associations and business and personal ties that it says establishes Mr. Kadi’s relationship with Mr. bin Laden and his allies.""We have not found Mr. Kadi guilty of anything," Adam J. Szubin, director of OFAC, told the Times. "But we have found that he is a supporter of terror."
"The post-911 credo became one of pre-emption and acting on suspicion," says Marieke DeGoede in her 2012 book Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. OFAC uses its new powers to freeze assets "during the pendancy of an investigation," which means, effectively, that the government is able to stop the operations of charities suspected of being terrorist fronts "without any formal determination of wrongdoing."
Kadi, who has repeatedly claimed that he has given no support to terrorism, told the Times that the result was a legal paradox. When no criminal charge has been brought and the evidence on which the charges are based has been classified, "there is no way to defend yourself."
Kadi denied all the allegations as totally untrue. "I don’t have any connection, be it close or distant, with Al-Qaeda or its leader Bin Laden, either directly or indirectly," he told Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, in an interview.