The Vienna-based UniCredit Bank Austria AG apparently terminated an account belonging to organizers of an anti-Israel conference slated for June that features Palestinian activists who reportedly have expressed support for the U.S.-designated terrorist movement Hamas and the abolition of the Jewish state.
The event bills itself as the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna and hosts a who’s who of hardcore opponents of the Jewish state and enablers of Islamist terrorism.
One scheduled speaker, for example, is Tony Greenstein, who, according to the British authorities, “has been charged with a terrorism offence as part of an investigation by officers from Counter Terrorism South East.” A British court convicted a second speaker, Ronni Barkan, last year for burglarizing and vandalizing the Bristol headquarters of an international defense technology firm.
In 2017, Barkan, his frequent colleague Stavit Sinai, and Palestinian Majed Abusalama disrupted “Life in Israel—Terror, Bias and the Chances for Peace,” a talk at Humboldt University in Berlin featuring Deborah Weinstein, a Holocaust survivor, and Aliza Lavie, a member of the Knesset from the centrist Yesh Atid party.
The [International Bank Account Number] for the UniCredit Bank Austria was scrubbed from the Anti-Zionist Congress website ostensibly within the past 24 hours.
The International Bank Account Number (IBAN) for the Anti-Zionist Congress was listed on the donation section as AT361200010043317154 and is a UniCredit Bank Austria account number. The IBAN for the UniCredit Bank Austria was scrubbed from the Anti-Zionist Congress website ostensibly within the past 24 hours.
When asked, Matthias Raftl, a spokesman for the UniCredit Bank Austria AG, did not immediately confirm the termination of the account. He explained: “All customer relationships of a bank in Austria are covered by the extensive protection of banking secrecy; it is therefore not possible for Bank Austria to issue a specific statement on (even potentially) existing customer relationships without a formal release from banking secrecy.”
He added, “We would like to emphasize that UniCredit Bank Austria, as an Austrian financial institution, is subject to stringent anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws and regulations and fully complies with applicable legal and regulatory requirements relating thereto. … UniCredit Bank Austria opposes all forms of extremism and terrorism and, in the event that customer relationships are not in line with its high values, takes appropriate measures, which may include the termination of business relationships.”
Other Austrian banks provided accounts to non-governmental organizations that boycott Israel and support Hamas, as well as to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist group responsible alongside the Japanese Red Army for the 1972 murder of two dozen passengers at the Tel Aviv airport, as well as the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight to Entebbe, Uganda, alongside the German Red Army. The group has conducted numerous terrorist attacks since targeting Israelis, Europeans, and Americans. As a result, the banks—Erste Bank, Bawag and others—pulled the plug on accounts with the enablers of terrorism and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel.
When pressed whether UniCredit Bank Austria terminated its account with the Anti-Zionist conference based on a possible violation of New York State law against BDS, Raftl repeated, “We take our obligation very seriously, that we do not issue specific statements on (even potentially) existing customer relationships without a formal release from banking secrecy, and we don’t do this off-record, either.”
UniCredit Bank Austria lists a Manhattan office. In 2020, the Austrian parliament condemned BDS as an antisemitic movement.
“How ironic that an anti-Zionist gathering run by Jews would convene in Vienna, the city where Theodore Herzl crystallized modern Zionism.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said prior to the account termination, “How ironic that an anti-Zionist gathering run by Jews would convene in Vienna, the city where Theodore Herzl crystallized modern Zionism. This, after he concluded that emancipation failed the Jews.” Anti-Israel activist Dalia Sarig-Fellner confirmed they chose Vienna to host the conference because they sought to symbolically reverse Herzl.
Raftl did not respond to Cooper’s statement. When confronted about the UniCredit Bank Austria account with the Anti-Zionist conference, Boris Gröndahl, a spokesman for the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA), said, “The determination, prosecution and sanctioning of money laundering and terror financing is not in the realm of the FMA but is the task of police, criminal prosecutors and the courts.” He noted, “We can’t comment on individual banks or their clients. Whenever we find that banks or other market participants aren’t observing the rules for the prevention of money laundering/terror finance, we publish the sanctions we impose on them on our website.”
Press queries sent to the Anti-Zionist conference, including main organizer Dalia Sarig-Fellner, were not immediately answered.
The past proved to be prologue and the UniCredit Bank Austria AG apparently discontinued the account to the Anti-Zionist conference to avoid possible legal exposure for enabling Palestinian terrorism and BDS.
