Financial sleuths around the world launched their hunt yesterday for money laundering and stock frauds that bankroll terrorist cells here and abroad.
European Union finance ministers dispatched a new task force of investigators from 31 industrial countries to work with Washington to pierce a shroud of secrecy surrounding the ill-gotten blood money.
“Terrorist organizations can be financed not just from drug trafficking but financed by other means that are not necessarily criminal,” said British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown after talks with his EU counterparts in Liege, Belgium.
Meanwhile, German authorities said they’re closing in on some suspicious trading that was executed just prior to the World Trade Center attack to make ghoulish profits.
The Germans say they’re focusing on stock-index, oil and gold futures, airline and insurers’ shares and options, Bundesbank President Ernst Welteke said, without identifying the securities involved.
German central bank research into trading before the attacks shows “that activities on international financial markets must have been planned and executed with the necessary knowledge,” Welteke said.
“There were share price movements at a whole series of companies, especially at airlines,” Welteke said.
Oil prices and Brent crude oil futures contracts gained almost 6 percent in the two weeks before the attacks – and soared as much as 13 percent on the morning of the terror attacks.
“Before the attacks, we had a rise in oil prices which cannot be explained by fundamental data,” Welteke said. “That may mean that people bought oil contracts which they later sold at a higher price.”
Trading in Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsure, was also about double the daily average volume over the past six months both on Sept. 6 and Sept. 7.
The Securities and Exchange Commission here is probing larger-than-normal trading of options in AMR Corp. and UAL Corp. Options traders said they noticed the unusually heavy volume before hijackers seized the airlines’ jets on Sept. 11.
Trading in some so-called “put” options, which rise in value when stock prices fall, surged as much as 285 times the previous average volume in AMR and UAL during the days before terrorists flew the hijacked United and American jets into the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the Pentagon.
The new task force set up yesterday includes investigators who were seasoned by years of work with an earlier EU task force set up 11 years ago to combat the illicit drug trade around the globe.