Until the morning of last Thursday, there was no indication that the brother of the Governor of the Banque du Liban, Raja Salameh, would appear before Judge Ghada Aoun, at a time when Raja knew that such a step would end in his arrest. Like his brother, Raja might have hidden temporarily, waiting for an appropriate political solution to the file that Judge Aoun investigated, taking advantage of the security services’ failure to assist the judge in forcibly bringing the defendants in the case. Raja might also have avoided returning to Lebanon in the first place, to enjoy his quiet stay in the French city of Cannes.
A holocaust ram or a hurry?
Here, there are many, unexpected assumptions that explain Raja Salama’s subjection to Aoun’s investigations. There are those who are likely to be Raja just a “scapegoat” made by Riad Salameh himself, to force Aoun to reveal her papers in the investigations first, especially since Aoun and the team that provided the news were keen throughout the last period to keep all the file’s data in strict secrecy, which confused the ruling defense team. . With reference to the step of arresting Raja, Judge Ghada Aoun will be caught between his release within a period of four days, or the referral of the entire file to the investigative judge following the two brothers are accused of safety, which will remove the file from her scope of work. This deadline expires next Monday, on the date that Aoun set to interrogate Riad Salameh, who is likely to miss the investigation once more.
The other hypothesis is that Raja Salameh may not have expected that Ghada Aoun possessed all the data that were presented in the investigation session, specifically those related to the details of money laundering operations in France, in addition to the Paris real estate purchase contracts that were used to recycle the wealth generated by Lebanon deals. This possibility presumes that Raja Salameh hastened to attend the investigation session, because he considered that Aoun’s expansion in tracing the trail of his brother’s crimes locally may not lead to reaching his own crimes, if Aoun did not have enough data regarding the Salameh brothers’ operations in Europe.
Knowing that Raja also expected that the investigations would not include the issue of an “immediate contract”, and how he was complicit in smuggling the money resulting from the contract to France and other European countries, since the issue of the contract was the subject of the file originally in the possession of Judge Jean Tannous. Precisely for this reason, Raja Salameh refused to answer all questions related to this contract, arguing that there was another investigation underway in this matter, despite the fact that the issue of an “immediate contract” was related to money that was later being laundered in Europe, which Judge Aoun investigated.
In both cases, whether Raja Salameh was a “scapegoat” for his brother Riad, to reveal the contents of the mysterious investigation, or he was just a hasty who did not know the depth of the file in Ghada Aoun’s possession, it is certain that the policy of ambiguity that Aoun pursued with the Salameh brothers finally paid off by pushing Raja Salama to fall into her fist.
Investigation details
The investigation session with Raja Salameh revealed that Judge Aoun possessed French contracts and documents, documenting that Raja Salameh used the money resulting from the Fawry company’s contract to buy Parisian real estate, under the guise of a network of aliases and front companies, and then transferred the ownership of these properties to companies owned by his brother, Riad Salameh. . In other words, what Ghada Aoun owned, and contrary to what Raja Salameh expected, was the direct evidence of Raja’s involvement in an organized money laundering operation, for his brother’s account, with the aim of recycling illegal funds resulting from an immediate contract in Lebanon.
Among these companies, for example, was the Zile Company, through which Raja Salameh received the money resulting from an immediate contract, and then registered several properties in the name of the company, before the company gave up the properties for the benefit of another intermediary company, and then registered The properties were later in the name of the “Beta” company owned by Banque du Liban Governor Riad Salameh (registered in the name of his niece but Raja Salameh admitted that Riad Salameh actually owned it). This process in itself proves that Riad Salameh was the actual and final beneficiary of Fawry’s commissions first, and then proves Raja Salameh’s involvement in laundering these commissions for the benefit of a sister and returning them to him in the form of real estate property.
In this way, Raja Salameh used several other intermediary real estate companies in the same way, which enabled him to launder money worth more than $300 million, for the account of the Governor of the Banque du Liban. Judge Aoun also delved into the “Paris Office” file, related to an apartment owned by the Ukrainian ruler’s friend, Anna Kozakova, which was rented – with the facilitation of Raja Salameh – at the expense of the Central Bank in exchange for fictitious commissions, on the basis that it was a “reserve center” for the Banque du Liban. Noting that the French investigations proved that the amount paid was not proportional to the size of the apartment and the value of rents in the same area, which opened the Salameh brothers to charges of abuse of influence and graft.
As a result, Raja Salameh admitted to Ghada Aoun his brother’s ultimate ownership of all funds related to money laundering operations, following sufficient documents and documents were submitted to confirm that the final objective of these operations was nothing but the ownership of Riad Salameh real estate and the wealth resulting from it, following real estate recycling. in several companies. Thus, this confession in and of itself represented a step forward in the investigations.
Mastermind
In short, Raja Salama was the mastermind of money laundering operations in the European arena, which were linked to the fortunes resulting from his brother’s abuse of his powers as governor of the Banque du Liban. All documents in Aoun’s possession prove that Raja Salameh personally supervised the work of intermediary companies, and real estate assignments that were used to transfer wealth from one company to another. The last problem lies in Judge Aoun’s need to prove the Lebanese side of the file definitively, which is related to the method of collecting illegal commissions for the benefit of the Fawry Company, in order to be able to prove the illegality of these funds and then prove the accusation of money laundering in Europe later. This aspect is related to the investigations of Judge Jean Tannous, which are pending in turn, in light of the Lebanese banks’ failure to hand over the data of Raja Salameh’s bank accounts to the Lebanese judiciary.