False alarm over “FBI’s closure of Cameroon’s Diplomatic Accounts in USA”

Highly placed sources at the Ministry of Finance and the Cameroon Embassy in Washington have dismissed as false, some press reports that the FBI has ordered the closure of the accounts of the Cameroon diplomatic missions in Washington and New York. But after investigating the facts in the story The Median arrived at the conclusion that it was a false alarm after all.

By Ayukogem Steven Ojong in Yaounde

 Barack Obama

Paul Biya

It was a false alarm after all! Cameroon’s diplomatic accounts in the USA are very safe and are not being investigated, at least presently, The Median has confirmed. We got the confirmation from the Cameroon Embassy in Washington and the Ministry of Finance here, when we went all out to either confirm or falsify the report published in the USA-based online publication, Cameroon Journal and by-lined by a certain Chris Fobene, that the FBI had ordered the closure of Cameroon’s diplomatic accounts in New York, USA. The report was copied and pasted in some local tabloids here.

                A very reliable source at the Cameroon Embassy in Washington, whose identity we are withholding for obvious reasons, dismissed categorically the reports as “false and uninvestigated.” The source explained that the Cameroon diplomatic accounts lodged at the Sterling National Bank based in New York were never closed by the FBI, as Cameroon Journal claimed in their report. “The Sterling National Bank undertook a couple of restructuring measures, one of which was the suspension of diplomatic banking, for reasons of compliance; and they notified all diplomatic missions banking with them of this measure, not just the Cameroon diplomatic missions,” explained our source, who added that the bank also changed its name and is now called Providence Bank.

                The source maintained that the closure of the diplomatic accounts at the Sterling National Bank (now Providence Bank) had nothing to do with investigations by the FBI. It hinted further that the USA Department of State has already given new orientations to the diplomatic missions concerned on other banks they can contact for the reopening of their diplomatic accounts.     

                Another clarification we got from our Washington source was that the two persons mentioned in the report as Kingpins in the “money laundering” transactions- Francois Ngoubene and KingeMonono, are truly and respectively the pay-masters of the Cameroon Embassy in Washington DC and the Cameroon Permanent Mission to the UNO in New York. But the names as written in the report were not as they appear on their official documents of the two diplomats, but rather the names they are called by their peers and acquaintances. 

                Besides, the source wondered aloud whether it was possible and professional for the FBI to divulge the names of these diplomats to the press if truly it was carrying out an investigation at the Cameroon diplomatic missions.

                For their part, authorities of the Treasury Department at the Ministry of Finance here have also dismissed the facts in the report as baseless and ungrounded. A strategically placed official at the treasury department, who begged not to be named in our report, said if any such thing ever happened in the USA then it should have been contained in the final report of control missions that were recently dispatched to the USA to carry out routine control on the management accounts of both the Embassy in Washington and the Permanent Mission at the UN in New York.

                The MINFI source wondered how possible it is for private individuals to lodge their money in diplomatic accounts owned and managed by the government. “Even if some individuals succeeded to get their money into the government’s accounts, how would they retrieve the money, giving the intricacies and the many procedures involved in the process to take out money from the government’s accounts?”

                The MINFI official hinted that the only way private individuals, especially Cameroonians in the USA, can put money into the diplomatic accounts is through the payment of fees for consular cards.

                It should be mentioned here that Francois Ngoudene, one of the alleged “Kingpins” in the money laundering racket, was the finance officer at the Embassy in Washington, who testified against the former Cameroon Ambassador to Washington, Mendouga, who is presently serving a 10-year prison term for his role in the fraudulent and scandalous purchase of the presidential plane – The Albatross.

I    Cameroon Journal in its report speculated that FBI’s closure of the New York-based diplomatic accounts could be linked to her investigations into the huge healthcare fraud that was recently uncovered in Washington DC and which indicted many Cameroonian doctors and nurses resident in DC of defrauding the US government of millions of US Dollars. The reporter speculated that these fraudsters might have used the diplomatic acounts in New York to transfer the money to Cameroon.

    Interestingly, Cameroon Journal also said that at the time of doing their story they were still unable to link the closure of the diplomatic accounts in New York to the health care fraud in DC. It admitted that even the FBI could not confirm there was any link between the healthcare fraud and the closure of the accounts. It should however be mentioned that some Cameroonians whose names were mentioned in the scandalous healthcare fraud in Washington DC are currently living freely in Cameroon and with some owning expansive estates and running huge business concerns.