Former Ghana international Stephen Appiah believes Alexander Djiku’s game would develop under new Fenerbahce head coach Jose Mourinho.

Djiku will play for the former Chelsea and Manchester United manager next season.

Responding to Jose Mourinho’s arrival at the club, Appiah, a Turkish Super Lig icon, expressed optimism that Djiku’s stint under Mourinho would be productive.

He emphasised Mourinho’s track record of developing successful African players like Didier Drogba, Solomon Kalou, Michael Essien, and Mikel Obi.

“As you rightly said, Jose Mourinho has been very good with African players and I think everyone he’s worked with proves themselves including Didier Drogba, Solomon Kalou, Michael Essien, Mikel Obi and a lot of them,” Appiah, who is a former Black Stars skipper told Responsible Gambling.

“We have Djiku who has been able to win the hearts of the fans with the way he carries himself around and the way he approaches the game and I hope that with the arrival of Mourinho, he will be able to take his game to the next level.”

Stephen Appiah made over 60 league matches for Fenerbahce between 2005 and 2008. During his tenure with the Turkish giants, the former Ghana captain won two titles: the 2006/07 Turkish Super League and the 2007 Turkish Super Cup.

An accident involving pupils from Yilo Krobo Senior High School (SHS) and Somanya SHS resulted in one death and around ten injuries.

According to Accra-based UTV, the tragedy occurred when their car, registration number GG 4311-15, crashed into a river.

According to reports, the event occurred at 5 p.m. on Monday in Akorley, a Somanya neighbourhood.

According to an inscription on her hand, the dead is a female named Peace who was 14 years old.

The reason for the collision is unknown, however, the Motor Transport and Traffic Directorate (MTTD) Police who reacted to the emergency assumed the road was slick after a rain.

The injured were brought to Somanya Hospital, where several were treated and released.

According to US court documents, a British bank that dodged punishment for money laundering processed billions of dollars in transactions for terrorist organisation donors.

Standard Chartered, one of the UK’s top banks, escaped punishment from the US Department of Justice after Lord Cameron’s government intervened on its behalf in 2012.

According to new documents filed in a New York court, the bank violated sanctions on Iran by conducting thousands of transactions totalling more than $100 billion between 2008 and 2013.

An independent expert has found $9.6 billion in foreign exchange transactions with persons and corporations classified by the US government as aiding “terrorist groups” such as Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban.

In response, the bank denied the whistleblowers’ assertions, stating that their prior charges had been “thoroughly discredited” by US authorities.

Sanctions violated. Standard Chartered was publicly accused of manipulating transaction data on Swift, an international payment system used by hundreds of financial institutions, to move billions of dollars via its New York branch on behalf of sanctioned entities such as Iran’s Central Bank.

However, in September 2012, George Osborne, then chancellor of Lord Cameron’s administration, quietly intervened on the bank’s side.

Three months later, the US Department of Justice declined to pursue the bank.

The foreign exchange transactions described in the court files have yet to be disclosed, and it is not argued that Mr Osborne or Lord Cameron were aware of them at the time.

The bank has twice acknowledged violating sanctions against Iran and other nations, first in 2012 and then in 2019, paying penalties totalling more than $1.7 billion. However, it has not confessed to making transactions for “terrorist” outfits.

Two whistleblowers, including Julian Knight, a former Standard Chartered executive, passed over private bank files to US authorities in 2012.

They say that US government entities presented false claims to a court to have their whistleblower award application rejected.

The US authorities investigating the bank successfully asked to have their case dropped in 2019. An FBI agent told a judge that there was nothing that “indicated or suggested that the bank had engaged in improper US dollar transactions” after 2007.

The whistleblower’s charges were disregarded as “meritless” by US officials, who claimed no fresh crimes were discovered.

However, independent research by David Scantling, an expert with decades of expertise investigating criminal bank transactions for the CIA, refutes this.

In a court filing last Friday, he claims that the spreadsheets contain records of over half a million separate transactions between 2008 and 2013, which were “cloaked,” meaning they were not immediately visible in the spreadsheets but could be extracted using a simple technique familiar to analysts in his field.

His affidavit states that the records include many transactions by Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) “with or on behalf of Iranian banks, Iranian companies, and Middle Eastern money exchanges that, according to [the US government], finance designated foreign terrorist organisations.”

He claims SCB performed transactions for a bank acting as a front for the Central Bank of Iran despite claiming to have ceased operations in Iran in 2007.

That occurred at the same time that it borrowed an average of $2 billion per day from the Term Auction Facility, a US government-created emergency programme designed to help banks weather the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

“The newly extracted data simply cannot be reconciled with the government’s representations to the court in this matter that the [whistleblowers’ evidence] contains no evidence of undisclosed sanctions violations,” the declaration filed by Scantling states.

The transactions include those of Fatima Fertiliser, a Pakistani fertiliser business infamous for exporting explosive chemicals used by the Taliban in roadside bombs that killed or injured hundreds of British and American soldiers in Afghanistan.

SCB, Liverpool FC’s shirt sponsor, allegedly enabled 73 transactions for a Gambian front business headed by Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, a prominent Hezbollah financier.

Daniel Alter, former chief counsel at the latest York Department of Financial Services, which initially investigated SCB for violating penalties, described the latest revelations as “shocking” and “exponentially worse” than what the bank disclosed in 2012.

“This shows a frightening connection to not just commercial entities, but terrorist organisations, terrorist front companies for organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Taliban – things that make up a regulator’s nightmare – and we didn’t know that: it was never disclosed to us. And it wasn’t apparent in the data that we had,” Mr Alter told the BBC. “It’s a whole different story”.

SCB, with its headquarters in London, primarily serves consumers in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Mr Osborne’s secret intervention on the bank’s behalf put it in danger of criminal prosecution for money laundering by the US Department of Justice.

On September 10, 2012, Mr Osborne wrote to Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Tim Geithner, then-Treasury Secretary under President Barack Obama. He met them the next month.

Two months later, the bank was fined $300 million but avoided prosecution by entering into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), which is a type of corporate probation. There was no prosecution of any particular bank officer.

In the same month, Mr Knight presented US authorities with proof suggesting the bank’s misbehaviour was considerably worse than previously confessed and extended after 2007.

SCB committed to a second DPA in 2019 for transactions between 2007 and 2011 and was fined an additional $1.1 billion.

‘Meritless’
The FBI and US Department of Justice declined to comment. Neither Lord Cameron nor Mr Osborne reacted on the record.

SCB stated that it was “confident the courts will reject these claims”. It stated that US officials had earlier ruled that the whistleblowers’ accusations were “meritless” and “did not show any violations of US sanctions”.

However, the whistleblowers say that the US authorities committed “a colossal fraud on this court by falsely denying” that the whistleblowers submitted “previously unknown, damning evidence”.