Offshore Banking News With two months to go until the rainy season starts in the Caribbean, the phrase ‘it never rains but floods’ will soon be heard again across these Atlantic isles. Lincoln Fraser, the chairman of international banking and finance house Imperial Consolidated, would probably nod in agreement with the phrase as he peers out of his boardroom window. It emerged last month, readers will recall, that Imperial Consolidated was having trouble obtaining product provider support for its Alpha Plus fund range. It also came to light that the company’s Hint credit cards - cards that were developed in part to give investors easy access to the Alpha fund - had been been “terminated” only 11 months after they were launched. Now, to top it all, Imperial Consolidated is decamping from the Bahamas, the domicile of both card and fund. Offshore Banking News - UK Holding Company's Added to all this is the UK holding company’s being late in posting its accounts at Companies House in London and running the risk of an embarrassing £500 fine. A storm of publicity strong enough to send even the hardiest chief executive reaching for his umbrella, you might think. But these stories were merely the first gouttes d’eau before the real downpour started. This month it emerged that Imperial Consolidated is planning to sue Spanish newspaper El Mundo for libel following allegations of links between
the bank/finance group and international terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Imperial Consolidated chairman Lincoln Fraser was reported as saying that the allegations were “nonsense” fed to El Mundo by Mr al Kassar, a former Imperial Consolidated business associate and one-time arms dealer with an axe (pardon the pun) to grind. Offshore Banking News - The Spanish Press “The accusation made in the Spanish press that Imperial Consolidated is somehow controlled and working on behalf of Osama bin Laden for the purpose of procuring arms is fundamentally absurd,” said Fraser.
“The idea that Osama bin Laden would utilise Imperial Consolidated in order to do business with Monzer al Kassar is similarly ridiculous.”
Fraser added that the group acts as a money lender, generating profit by lending at a higher rate than the cost of its funds. Winter blizzards
But it is not just Caribbean centres that suffer from inclement weather from time to time. Switzerland, the ultimate destination for the ‘shy’ wealthy investor, has also suffered the odd blast of cold air. Last month, the country was criticised in a parliamentary report by the French money-laundering investigator Arnaud Montebourg. Offshore Banking News - The Report The report, an oeuvre of 400 words, essentially came down to this bare fact: Switzerland’s banks reported just 312 cases of money laundering last year. Not an impressive number on the face of it - even worse when you realise that this is less than one money-laundering report per bank. But Switzerland didn’t take too kindly to the metaphorical snowball slinging. the ‘centre of centres’ pointed out that, while France’s banks reported a far higher number of money-laundering cases last year (1655), a piffling 7 per cent were passed to the prosecutors for action. This compares very unfavourably to Switzerland, which passed 198 of its reported money laundering cases to the prosecutors. 
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