An arranged marriage

  The United States Department of the Treasury’s designation in early February of Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) as a “financial institution of prime money laundering concern” hit the bank like a missile strike. And, as so often is the case with American ‘operations’ in the region, the collateral damage was high. Immediately blacklisted the world over and unable to deal in US dollars, LCB was “crippled,” in the words of a source close to Banque du Liban (BDL), Lebanon’s central bank. The Lebanese banking sector went into damage control mode, concerned it could be part of a wider targeting of the industry, with the designation the worst blow to the sector’s reputation since 2000, when Lebanon was placed on the Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a Paris-based inter-governmental body set up to promote the adoption of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulations (it