Who is the Islamist in Switzerland who has monopolized the media most in the last decade? Tariq Ramadan, suspected of rape, or his brother Hani, director of the Geneva Islamic Center, and a strong advocate of stoning? Not at all, it is Nicolas Blancho, a 36-year-old convert with a long bushy red beard, chairman of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (CCIS), a structure whose true audience it is difficult to assess.
According to a French confidential note, the Qatar Embassy in Paris paid Arab students in France to buy as many copies of Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot’s book Qatar Papers as possible from booksellers and other points of sale.
After a first unsuccessful candidacy for the leadership of UNESCO in 2017, Qatar is actively preparing a new candidacy for the 2021 elections.
After having disappeared from the radar for years, particularly since the overthrow in October 2014 of the former Burkinabe dictator, Blaise Compaoré, of whom he was the “shadow adviser”, the Mauritanian Mustapha Oueld Limam Chaffi resurfaced as Qatar’s secret envoy.
Can you openly finance the ‘brain’ of the most spectacular and lethal terrorist attack in History, one that shook the foundations of the first world power and caused nearly 3,000 victims, and manage to avoid any prosecution or indictment?Even worse, can you be on the blacklists of the UN and the US Treasury and continue surreptitiously accessing your supposedly frozen assets to take out the tidy sum of 120 million dollars per year, i.e. $10,000 per month?
The Wall Street Journal’s recent revelations about failures and inadequacies of the UN sanctions program against the financing of terrorism, have made break out what many UN experts and officials knew and have denounced for many years.
A university scholarship programme, funded by Qatar in 2015, was to give about 100 Syrian refugee students the opportunity to continue their studies at the prestigious Sorbonne University. Three years later, the overwhelming majority of Syrian students were expelled from this programme under conditions considered by some to be “arbitrary and discriminatory”. At the same time, the nature and objectives of the program has changed, opening up to refugees of other nationalities, or even to students who would not even be refugees!
For months Qatar denied that members of the ruling family were imprisoned. The wife of Amir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani’s own cousin has just testified in Geneva before the UN.
From the book “Qatar Papers”, written by Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, readers have mainly retained the financial importance of the projects developed by the gas emirate in Europe through the NGO Qatar Charity. And also the salary of 35,000 euros paid each month to Tariq Ramadan by Qatar Foundation, created by Sheikha Moza, the mother of Tamim ben Hamad Al Thani, 38 years old and the Emir of Qatar since 2013.
After having previously written two books about the less brilliant aspects of Qatari politics, entitled “Qatar, The Secrets of The Safe” (Michel Lafon, 2013) and “Our Very Dear Emirs” (Michel Lafon, 2016), Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot return with a hard-hitting book entitled “Qatar Papers – How the State Finances Islam in France and Europe”.
