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George W. Bush’s uncle Jonathan heads this investment firm that was bought out in 1997 by Washington-based Riggs Bank (see Carter Beese). He founded its subsidiary, J. Bush & Co., of which he is chair. Riggs Bank has a history of dubious money dealings. It maintained the accounts of the Russian bosses of CIA spy Aldrich Ames and owned a stake in the company that moved funds for outlaw Russian oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky (see Thomas Renyi). Federal regulators cited Riggs Bank in 2003 for violating money-laundering laws, which require banks to reports transactions of $10,000 or more. The bank failed to file these reports on tens of million of dollars worth of Saudi transactions that often exceeded $1 million apiece. The FBI has probed how tens of thousands of dollars from the Riggs bank account of Saudi Princess Haifa flowed to the families of two Saudi students who subsidized two Saudi terrorists involved in the September, 11th attacks. Princess Haifa, daughter of the late King Faisal, is married to Saudi Arabia’s U.S. ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The Bush administration insisted on censoring sections of a 2003 Congressional report on the 2001 terrorist attack that dealt with Riggs accounts held by Saudis. Attorneys for September 11th victims subpoenaed this information in 2004. The U.S. Comptroller of the Currency listed Riggs as a “troubled institution” after the bank failed to act on 2003 regulatory orders to tighten anti-money laundering controls. Riggs pled guilty in 2005 for failing to report suspicious transactions involving high-risk foreign customers including former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. It agreed to pay $41 million in civil and criminal fines. Federal prosecutors also are probing allegations that a former Riggs exectuve conspired with Equatorial Guinean President Theodore Obiang Nguema to divert Exxon Mobil oil royalties from government accounts. The bank’s president and ex-chair stepped down from the board of the bank holding company in 2004. Jonathan Bush is an ex-chair of the New York Republican State Finance Committee. Bush credits the investors sent his way by this banker uncle as a key to his “success” in the Texas oil industry in the early 1980s. Jonathan Bush was a Yale classmate of William Donaldson, George W. Bush’s second chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Membership
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Of Special Interest
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| Profile last updated
Mar 22, 2005
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