Bloomberg revealed that a private bank in Luxembourg provided advice to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, on how to attack the financial markets in Qatar in 2017, which marked the beginning of the blockade imposed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt on Doha.
The agency said, in a lengthy report published on Sunday, that bin Zayed was one of the largest clients of Banque Havilland, a private bank owned by British financier David Rowland, and that he was known in the corridors of the bank as the "president."
Emails, documents, and legal files reviewed by Bloomberg revealed the extent of services that Roland and his private bank provided to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, which went beyond financial advice to helping place the bank’s president, at the time, on the board of Human Rights Watch after it published reports. She criticizes the Emirates human rights record.
According to the agency, the bank drew up a plan in 2017, which was sent through a contractor with the bank who was working in the British Foreign Intelligence (M6) to the Emirati ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al-Otaiba.
The plan includes a coordinated attack to drain Qatar's foreign currency reserves by reducing the value of Qatari bonds and increasing the cost of insuring them.
Bloomberg stated that Qatar last year filed a lawsuit in Britain against Bank of Havilland, and the lawsuit accuses the bank of launching a campaign aimed at harming the country's banks and its national currency (the riyal).
The agency indicated that a spokesman for the bank denied carrying out a plot against Qatar.
Al-Jazeera had previously published a report that included details of an Emirati plan to harm Qatar's economy.
Bank of Havilland building in Liechtenstein (Reuters)
Foci of corruption
According to an internal document seen by Bloomberg, Mohammed bin Zayed owned an account in Havilland Bank valued at $ 38 million in 2012, and an internal document described his family as "the key to the bank and the network of its shareholders."
She explained that the beginning of the relationship between the owner of Bank of Havilland, David Lowland, and the current crown prince of Abu Dhabi, dates back to the 1990s.
The agency stated that Bank of Havilland is not an ordinary financial institution, as documents and emails have shown that the company specializes in doing business that others may reject.
Its agents included alleged criminals in corruption hotspots such as Nigeria and Azerbaijan.
Its owners have sought to do business in sanctioned countries such as North Korea and Zimbabwe, according to the same documents.