Thematic Subject Area II: Confronting Terrorism
Working Group 9
Terrorist Finance

March 8th, the International Summit on Democracy and Terrorism will host an eight member working group which will how terrorists acquire the necessary resources to carry out their operations and ways to make it more difficult for them to fund their campaigns. Topics to be covered are:

• The most common means by which terrorists collect money.
• Success rate of international initiatives employed to address the problems of terrorist finance, thus far, and which loopholes need to be closed.
• What is the potential contribution of the financial community in the fight against terrorism; and whether bankers and governments can be persuaded to cooperate.
• Is global action necessary?
• Identification of the most pressing obstacles to effectively stopping terrorist financing, and how they can be overcome.

The conclusions of this working group and 16 others will be incorporated into the Agenda of Madrid, which will be published on March 11th, 2005.

Working group members will include:

Working Group Coordinator:

• Loretta Napoleoni (Italy-UK), former chief economist of a UK based Russian bank and adviser to the National Bank of Hungary. Initially researched funding of Italian terror groups, and has since focused on Islamist terrorists. Author of Terror Inc.: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism (Penguin 2004)

Members:

• Rico Carisch (USA), freelance journalist and analyst. Produced articles, research reports and TV documentaries about trans-national crime and corporate subterfuge in under-regulated trade environments and failed states.
• Carlos Castresana (Spain-USA), visiting professor at the University of San Francisco. Served as a District Judge for a number of years before becoming a public prosecutor in the Spanish office against corruption. Authored the formal complaint and subsequent reports in the case against Pinochet.
• Daryl Champion (UK-Lebanon), journalist at the Daily Star in Beirut. Has researched Middle Eastern affairs for two decades. Author of The Paradoxical Kingdom (Columbia 2003), which analyses the political, financial and economic undercurrents of Saudi Arabia.
• Michael Chandler (UK-Germany), Chairman of the former UN Monitoring Group, that oversaw the implementation of sanctions against al-Qaeda. Twenty-five years as a British Army officer, then several high-level appointments in EU and UN missions, including establishing Bosnia's State Border Service.
• Nick Fielding (UK), senior reporter at the Sunday Times, London. Focuses on terrorism and intelligence issues. Co-authored Masterminds of Terror (Mainstream 2003), which contains the only interviews ever conducted with some of the principal organisers of the 9/11 attack.
• George Magnus (UK), senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank. Formerly chief economist of UBS and SG Warburg. Senior economic research positions at Chase Securities, Bank of America and Lloyds International.
• Ganesh Sahathevan (Malaysia-Australia), journalist who investigated financial mismanagement in Malaysia prior to the financial crisis in the 1990s. Now researching and reporting from Sydney, he continues to focus on South East Asian business, economic and politics.
• Jan Boyer (USA), fellow at the Institute for International Economics, Washington. Formerly chief executive at Softbank, FleetBoston and Salomon Smith Barney. Formerly Senior Advisor at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation