FBME Bank

FBME. It was established in the early 1980s by two Lebanese brothers, Ayoub-Farid and Fadi Michel Saab, and went by its full title – Federal Bank of the Middle East – until the mid-2000s, when it became FBME Bank. FBME was described as “a financial institution of primary money laundering concern” in a notice of finding published in July 2014 by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (Fincen). Regulators in Tanzania and Cyprus now retain control over the bank’s business. The Appleby law represented the Cayman Islands holding company of FBME Bank for at least a year after the US Treasury published an extraordinary roster of allegations against the bank, and acted as its agent for more than a decade beforehand. FBME, which was banned from the US financial system in 2017, denies all the allegations against it. It said Appleby regularly carried out full compliance checks on FBME Ltd, which it took on as a client in 2004. Revelations from Appleby’s internal files, obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, were exposed in the Paradise Papers investigation.