Besides the funds it receives from Qatar and Iran, and the revenue it generates from taxing its population, Hamas also operates an extensive network of shell companies and businesses. Sean O’Driscoll explores the terrorist group’s complex financial web:
By examining business records and cross-referencing them with the sanctions lists, Newsweek’s investigation shows how Hamas is using some of its key personnel to set up such companies around the Middle East and elsewhere to run its financial empire—often in places where, one expert said, it may find tacit approval for such operations. They include businesses in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, and may even reveal how the group is expanding into Western Europe.
Newsweek found that one Yemeni business administrator is the joint owner of Hamas’s UAE property company, which owned an office block worth $150 million; is the co-founder of a Hamas-linked, publicly traded Turkish construction company; owns 20 percent of a Hamas front company in Saudi Arabia; and is on the board of another Hamas-linked Sudanese company. Separately, company records show an accountant from the West Bank is central to four major construction and real-estate companies in three countries: Turkey, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.
The network appears to be growing. A wealthy Sudanese businessman who had close ties to Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, and who is described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a “Hamas financier,” set up a Hamas-linked company in Spain last December, corporate filings show.
Read more on Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/2024/02/09/hamas-inc-property-empire-that-funded-militant-attack-israel-1860890.html