• MB News
  • March 20, 2010
  • 5 minutes read

Muslim Brotherhood figure dropped from UN Terrorist Finance list

Muslim Brotherhood figure dropped from UN Terrorist Finance list

The U.N. Security Council has quietly dropped Yourself Nada, a prominent financial and diplomatic representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, from an international sanctions list directed at restricting the activities of alleged terrorist financiers. 


The Bush administration had added Nada, his companies, and a key business associate to the U.S. terrorist-finance sanctions list in the wake of 9/11 The delisting of Nada, was announced and posted on the Security Council’s Web site.

There was no explanation to the Security Council’s decision to drop financial sanctions against Nada and his companies—sanctions intended to curb their ability to conduct financial activities anywhere in the world. But Victor Comras, a former adviser on financial sanctions to the U.S. State Department and, later, an adviser to the committee that produced the sanctions lists, says he finds the U.N. action troubling. Stressing that "When Nada was put on the U.N. sanctions list, it was done with great public fanfare".

Comras also noted that given the fact that all listing and delisting decisions by the U.N. sanctions committee have to be unanimous, at some point, in his view, the Obama administration would have had to signal that it was willing to go along with Nada’s delisting. Nada and his companies were placed on a terrorist-finance sanctions list maintained by the U.S. Treasury before they were added to U.N.’s list

 Nada confirmed to "Newsweek" that he was aware that his name had been dropped from the U.N. sanctions list however it was still on the American list adding that he had applied for his name to be taken off the U.N. list a year ago

A respectable individual, Nada served for years as a semiofficial diplomatic representative of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has also been issued a 10 year unjust and harsh military sentence in Egypt with leading member Khayrat El-Shater. However the sentence was issued while he was abroad.

The Bush administration had exhibited the use of financial sanctions which it and the U.N. Security Council both regularly imposed on companies and individuals without first offering them any chance to contest the sanctions listing. This was viewed as an efficient method of ending terrorist networks without having to disclose intelligence secrets in public.  Human-rights activists however objected that these measures were unfair and illegal.

A European diplomat, who requested  anonymity, offered that the U.N.’s decision to drop Nada from its sanctions list may have come about because of political occurrences in Switzerland. The Swiss Parliament’s foreign-relations committee approved draft to create a method under which the Swiss government would have to stop imposing international financial sanctions against people on the U.N. list in circumstances where little had been proved against them.

Swiss authorities carried out extensive criminal investigation of Nada and his financial network however it was ultimately "suspended" without the issuing of any criminal charges