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American law forbids banking institutions from providing service in American currency to people on the sanctions list. In effect, the U.S. authorities have found ways of imposing the rules on companies and banks that are not incorporated in the United States – as long as an American entity is also involved in the process of receiving the money. According to the legal precedent on the matter, it’s enough for the foreign bank to use a U.S. information system for the sanctions to apply to it.
Gertler claims in response to this report that based on a legal opinion he commissioned, the sanctions do not apply to the dollar activity attributed to his associates in DRC, one reason being that Afriland has no link to the United States. However, in an interview he recently gave to the French radio station RFI, Patrick Kafindo, director of the Afriland branch in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, admitted that the bank itself believes that the sanctions regime applies to it and claimed that the bank enforced them and froze accounts connected to Gertler. In fact, the bank documents reveal that the accounts of Gertler’s associates, including his wife’s, were quite active, and allegedly took in tens of millions of dollars.