The Somali-owned, international money transfer company, Dahabshiil, was cleared on Friday by the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit of allegations raised by one Harbi Hussein in an attempt to link the reputed remittance company to terror financing.
The case was filed in April 2016 against Dahabshiil and its affiliates in the United States by attorney Joshua D. Arisohn, a partner with Bursor & Fisher, who represented Mr. Harbi, son of the late Somalia MP Saado Ali, the ‘estate of Saado Ali Warsame’ and other members of her immediate family.
The Plaintiffs-Appellants Harbi Hussein, Ayanle Ali, Maryan Ali and Riyak Ali appealed a January 27, 2017, opinion and order of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Caproni, J.) which dismissed their first amended complaint with prejudice.
The US appellate court upheld the January ruling of the District Court, deciding ‘that the order of said District Court be and it hereby is affirmed’.
The appeal court, upon deep consideration of materials and arguments presented by the plaintiffs and complainants/defendants (Dahabshiil) in the case, adjudged:
“Here, plaintiffs failed to raise a plausible allegation that defendants performed any banking services in favor of al-Shabaab while acting with the requisite mental state. In their complaint, plaintiffs assert that four transfers originating in Minnesota were made by defendants on behalf of al-Shabaab. However, the complaint also indicates that all four transfers were sent by individuals unaffiliated with defendants, who deliberately concealed the nature of the transactions by sending the money under false names, or to individuals with no public association with al-Shabaab. The remaining allegations in the complaint are highly generalized and do not contain enough detail to “nudge[ ] their claims across the line from conceivable to plausible.”
“As a result, the complaint does not provide a plausible basis to infer that defendants, either individually or collectively, knew or were deliberately indifferent to the fact that their services were used to send funds to al-Shabaab on any specific occasion.”
Realizing that the defendants could not be linked to Al Shabaab in any plausible form tried to smear the services of the reputable company in a mountain of unfounded generalizations, speculation and flimsy allegations that the court espied and dismissed as such.
“The remaining allegations in the complaint are highly generalized and do not contain enough detail to “nudge[ ] their claims across the line from conceivable to plausible.”
Summing up its ruling, the appellate court concluded “We have considered the remainder of plaintiffs’ arguments and find them to be without merit. Accordingly, the order of the district court hereby is AFFIRMED”.
Similar, trumped-up charges have been raised against the company by a notorious blackmailer and extortionist – Dahir Alasow, misused his Dutch citizenship by abysmally using the amorphous umbrella of media freedom as a vehicle to exhort people of money, information or power. He never concealed the part he played in egging the plaintiffs to file a case against Dahabshiil in the US in order to substantiate his flagging, personal crusade against the company’s reputation.
Same as the final adjudgment of the US appellate court in the case of Harbi VS Dahabshiil, Dutch courts had found Alasow’s attempts to defend his allegations to link Dahabshiil with Al Shabaab shallow, unsubstantiated and meritless on a number of occasions.
Dahabshiil has more than 24000 outlets throughout the world and is one of the fastest growing remittance companies in Africa as it is one of the most compliant in international laws regulating the money transfer, in particular, and the finance sector, in general.
