International Groups Meeting To Address Terrorist Financial Networks And Shipping And Aviation Risks In The Middle East

On October 15, 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury convened the first meeting of the Counter-Hizballah International Partnership (“CHIP”) with the goal of building multilateral cooperation to target and dismantle global financial networks used by Hizballah to fund its agenda. Over 30 countries participated in the meeting, which took place during the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Fall Meetings.

The CHIP program seeks to establish better channels of information sharing between financial intelligence units, strengthen terrorist financing risk assessments, develop targeted financial sanctions regimes, and prosecute terrorists and their financial facilitators on an international level. The program further aims to leverage all available financial tools against Hizballah.

The Partnership plans to send technical experts to the International Law Enforcement Coordination Group, which will meet in December in The Hague. The Coordination Group has focused on countering Hizballah's terrorist activities for several years. The new Partnership will support those activities by attacking the financial systems supporting those activities. This increased level of international collaboration will most likely lead to tougher and broader sanctions regimes. For commercial entities, the increased focus on Hizballah may lead to greater anti-money laundering due diligence requirements. We also would anticipate that given Hizballah's presence in Latin America, trade-based money laundering may also be identified as a result.

More recently, on October 21, 2019, the United States, Bahrain, and Poland, acting as co-hosts, opened a meeting of the Warsaw...