Netherlands Caribbean Bank

It looks like OFAC (an office within the Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Division of the US Treasury Department) is going to play hardball with the Netherland’s ING Groep, a massive banking, insurance, & financial services business evidently raking-in over 80 billion.

One of their subsidiaries, Netherlands Caribbean Bank, is jointly owned by the Cuban government (25%).

Ordinarily, Treasury likes to handle these sort of things diplomatically, a phone call, a letter, if necessary.

But on Friday (28 July 2006) OFAC put Netherlands Caribbean Bank on the notorious list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.

You don’t want your name anywhere near that nasty list.

http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/

So, it’ll be interesting to follow this story since it appears that ING was either kept in the dark or blew-off OFAC.

In any event, being that the Netherlands Caribbean Bank is only bringing in 25 to 50 million, I’m guessing that ING drops them like a hot potato.

(Evidently, the Bank is involved in supplying Cubans with ice crème paraphernalia, god forbid!

http://www.badcorp.com/company.cfm?action=view&caid=20884301)