Over the course of the past three years, a financial intelligence and auditing firm, K2 Integrity has inked deals with three MENA central banks to improve their capacity to combat money laundering and fraud. But K2 Integrity’s mandate goes well beyond that of a consulting firm, with its surveillance of money flows closely aligned with US and Israeli political interests. Tellingly, the firm’s top leadership is composed of former US Treasury officials that dismantled what Washington considered terrorist finance networks in the wake of 9/11, as well as developing sanctions targeting Iran and its allies, North Korea, and Russia.
K2 Integrity’s indirect links to Israel have also caused alarm in some quarters, not least because relations with Tel Aviv constitute a criminal offence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya.
Following Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza and decapitation of Hezbollah leadership left Iran's constellation of regional allies weakened. Sensing this, Washington has applied pressure on Arab states to strangle Iranian financial networks with at least part of this effort being conducted through K2 Integrity, while simultaneously unleashing a devastating war on Iran. Digging deeper, The New Arab (TNA) maps the web of relationships that connect K2 Integrity, Washington, Tel Aviv, and a new era of financial surveillance for MENA states. “Guerillas in grey suits” A man in a dark suit and glasses takes to the stage and sits opposite a moderator. The year is 2013 and he has come to the Centre for Strategic & International Studies in Washington DC to discuss his recently published book, Treasury’s War.
The author, Juan Zarate, has spent the last decade at the United States Treasury Department designing Washington’s arsenal of financial weaponry in response to 9/11. According to Zarate’s book, while US-led coalitions invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, “guerillas in grey suits” waged a “financial insurgency” against Washington’s foes and those that funded them, including groups such as Al-Qaeda, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Iran.
As deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, Zarate was among the architects of the US leveraging of its control over the global financial system to freeze out those it saw as supporting radical extremism, no matter whether or not those caught in the dragnet were “criminally liable”.
Among the adversaries against which Zarate did battle while at the Treasury was Iran. He writes that “the central bank of Iran [..] was willing to serve as a banking hub for Iranian illicit activities” and that the Treasury could take advantage of the bank’s vulnerability to “financial isolation”. Isolating Iran from the global financial system was a goal that once again became US policy on May 8 2018, when President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor Barack Obama in 2015. Zarate was not alone at the Treasury; his book also features two colleagues who worked closely alongside him at the Treasury to weaponise the US’ pole position in the global financial system: Daniel Glaser and Chip Poncy. Leaked US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks describe how Poncy, representing the Treasury as Director of the Office of Strategic Policy for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, attended a series of expert meetings on “terrorism finance” held in Prague as part of a EU-US summit in 2009.
According to the cables, the meetings saw Poncy lobbying EU leaders to change their approach to terrorism sanctions, which required a link between funds and violent acts to be identified for an entity to be sanctioned.
At a working lunch, he “repeatedly underscored” that the US government did not see Hamas and Hezbollah’s provision of social services as separate to the violent actions of their militant wings, despite the overwhelming majority of funds being spent on the former. He made clear that Washington wanted Brussels to “designate Hezbollah as a whole” and to take the “strongest possible countermeasures against Iran”.
Glaser, meanwhile, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crime, making trips through the 2000s to Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to lobby MENA states to align their AML policies with those of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and Washington's Global War on Terror. He also played a role in developing US sanctions regimes against Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
Leaked US diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks describe meetings between Glaser and the Israeli government where Glaser discussed strategy on applying economic pressure on Iran and designating Hamas-affiliated charities.
Many of Glasers’ efforts concerned cracking down on the cross-border movement of cash and the operations of Islamic charities, channels through which groups Washington designated as terrorists were known to receive financial support. Privatising the financial war on terror After their time at the Treasury department came to an end, Zarate, Poncy, and Glaser hung up their grey fatigues and gracefully slid through the revolving door between the public and private sector, establishing a company called Financial Integrity Network (FIN) in 2014.
Later, the company was absorbed by a financial crimes firm then known as K2 Intelligence (established in 2009 by the Kroll family), forming K2 Integrity in 2019, with the three veteran Treasury officials filling senior leadership roles.
The concentration of ex-sanctions officials among K2 Integrity’s senior management marks a departure from other international firms that would have likely been in a position to offer K2 Integrity’s MENA clients similar services. The top figures of the Big Four professional services firms usually have long track records in audit, tax, or consulting, rather than being ex-sanctions officials.
Neither Zarate, Glaser, nor Poncy, responded to requests for comment when approached by The New Arab . Subsidiary ties to Tel Aviv K2 Integrity’s Executive Managing Director Koby Bambilia is a former Israeli prosecutor and a retired army major.
Before the merger with FIN, K2 Intelligence had a subsidiary in Tel Aviv, K2G Global, which was responsible for cyber investigations. The Krolls’ firm spun out the subsidiary as a standalone cybersecurity company now called BlueVoyant in 2017, merging K2G Global, K2 Cyber Defense, and BitVoyant. K2 Integrity remains BlueVoyant’s largest shareholder. BlueVoyant’s leadership included numerous former intelligence officials. Ron Feler, BlueVoyant’s Global Head of Threat Intelligence, was formerly the deputy commander of Unit 8200. The Unit, in which Feler served for almost 26 years, is the Israeli armed forces’ cyber division responsible for spying on Palestinians. The head of BlueVoyant’s darkweb intelligence unit, Gad Goldstein, was a major general in the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. Among other high profile leaders of the firm was disgraced British politician and Jeffrey Epstein associate Peter Mandelson , who served as the chairman for European business. BlueVoyant later took $250 million in a funding round led by Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity firm founded and headed by Steve Mnuchin , who joined the cybersecurity firm’s board. Mnuchin served as Treasury Secretary in US President Donald Trump’s first administration (2017-21) and played a crucial role in the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran.
Mnuchin’s firm is heavily invested in the Israeli tech and cyber sectors, both seen as critical to Israel’s security, with Liberty Strategic Capital having an office in Tel Aviv. A former director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, was reportedly for a time discussing joining Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital.
Perceived connections to Israel, namely BlueVoyant, led to concerns over the agreement between the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) and K2 Integrity, since a 2022 Iraqi law criminalises relationships with “the Zionist entity”, including but not limited to the “diplomatic, economic, military, security, or cultural” spheres.
Osama Tuma Legal, a law firm based in Baghdad, told The New Arab in a written statement that for an entity to be found in breach of the anti-normalisation law, a direct legal connection such as an “established and influential institutional relationship” with Israel must be proven. Tuma Legal suggested that the law might not apply to K2, as "the decisive criterion is to verify whether the company is registered in Israel or under direct Israeli legal control." Pressure on Baghdad One of the direct outcomes of the United States’ Global War on Terrorism was the expansion of Iranian influence in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The Islamic Republic sought to bog down the Western coalition by supporting Shia insurgents and influencing the political process to prevent the formation of a government friendly to the United States. In response, the US Treasury - then staffed by members of K2 Integrity’s present day senior leadership - launched a "constriction campaign" against Iran, in which it sought to tie the Islamic Republic's financial institutions directly to the IRGC's efforts to destabilise the US-led occupation of Iraq.
Iranian networks also abused the daily dollar auction, the system designed by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) through which Iraq accessed the revenues from its oil exports, to secure US dollars in the face of Western sanctions.
Beginning in 2022, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve began severely squeezing Iraq's financial sector, to stop millions of dollars from flowing into Iran and Syria via fraudulent import invoices. The appointments of Iran hawks to top positions in the US Federal Reserve led to the adoption of more aggressive policies towards dollar smuggling from Iraq to Iran. Multiple sources with top-level knowledge of the relationship between Iraqi financial institutions and US authorities told The New Arab that the US threatened to cut off the supply of dollars from Iraq’s account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank to ensure CBI’s compliance.
Publicly available CBI records show that senior officials met with representatives of the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve seven times over the course of 2022. The New Arab understands that CBI signed two contracts with K2 Integrity in 2023. The first was in early February to audit CBI transactions while the other was signed in August to review the performance of the banks thought to have processed suspicious transactions. This, according to sources that wished to remain anonymous, granted the US firm almost unfettered access to the central bank’s transaction data as well as trade activity. US pressure on Iraq came to a head in July 2023, when the US blocked 14 Iraqi banks from transacting in US dollars - effectively cutting them off from the international financial system. US officials alleged, based on investigations conducted by K2 Integrity, that the blacklisted banks had laundered dollars on behalf of sanctioned individuals and to the benefit of the Iranian government. With regards to the role played by K2 Integrity, Renad Mansour, Director of the Iraq Initiative at Chatham House, told The New Arab that some Shia groups in Iraq have long seen the various ways in which the Treasury seeks to influence financial flows in line with US interests as an “economic occupation”.
Although he added that “others would say that the system was so corrupt for so long that this is necessary to clean up the banking sector.” Neither the CBI nor K2 Integrity responded to our requests for comment. Banque du Liban: opaque public procurement Banque du Liban (BdL) quietly signed a three-year contract worth US$12 million with K2 Integrity in mid-2025, presented by Lebanon’s central bank, as necessary for Lebanon to exit the FATF grey list. Grey-listing, applied to countries deemed to have weak anti-money laundering and counter terrorist regimes, exposes Lebanon to the threat of being cut off from the global financial system.
Although many recognise the need for Lebanon to be removed from the grey list, MPs and commentators highlighted the procedural irregularities that had tainted the agreement between the central bank and K2 Integrity
The BdL’s financial intelligence unit established a committee with the EU Global AML Facility just months prior, leading many to question the need for an expensive contract with a foreign firm.
Furthermore, the FATF gave Lebanon a 2026 deadline to exit the grey list, while the contract between the BdL and K2 integrity is expected to run until 2028.
MP Paula Yacoubian (Tahalof Watani, Forces of Change bloc) submitted a formal question along with several other MPs to the Lebanese government and BdL regarding the exact nature of the deal weeks before it was signed. Despite the legal obligation to issue a written response, their questions went unanswered until BdL announced the agreement as a fait accompli. In a written statement to The New Arab , Yacoubian said the agreement had been discussed “behind closed doors” and that opaque government procurement had “undermined trust in the government and its agencies for decades”.
Lebanon’s public procurement law stipulates that all government entities are subject to procedures designed to ensure transparency and competitive tendering under the oversight of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA). BdL circumvented this by citing an exemption for narrowly defined cases including cybersecurity, core banking systems, and sensitive infrastructure whose specifications cannot be publicly disclosed for security reasons.
A formal legal report by the head of the PPA published in late August 2025 rejected the central bank’s suggestion that the agreement with K2 Integrity fell into the categories that required secrecy. The report also stated that the PPA had not seen the details of the deal. The case was referred to the public prosecutor’s office, but to date the central bank has not clarified the details of the agreement.
Kroll Inc, the company established by Jules Kroll in the early 1970s, had originally been shortlisted to undertake a forensic audit of the BdL in 2020 following the Lebanese financial crisis, but a different firm was chosen due to the perceived connections Kroll Inc had with Israel. The contract to audit the BdL was later given to US firm Alvarez & Marsal instead.
Neither the BdL nor K2 Integrity responded to a request for comment in time for publication. Pulling tight Hezbollah’s purse strings Perhaps more tellingly, K2 Integrity was charged with mapping the cash economy, which has grown to dominate Lebanon following the implosion of the Lebanese banking sector in 2019. Cash economies are regarded as notoriously opaque and create ideal conditions for unmonitored financial flows. Washington has made it a stated aim to prevent Iran from using cash to transfer funds to Hezbollah, a goal the US has been pursuing since Zarate, Glaser, and Poncy’s days at the Treasury, but with renewed vim under Trump and given Iran’s current perceived weakness.
The Hezbollah-linked financial institution Al-Qard Al-Hassan (AQAH) was sanctioned in 2007. Israel has turned AQAH branches in Lebanon into an official target since 2024, with Amnesty International calling for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes for violating international law.
In November 2025, just months after K2 Integrity began mapping the Lebanese economy, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued sweeping sanctions targeting individuals accused of funnelling tens of millions of dollars in cash from Iran to Hezbollah using Lebanese exchange houses. It is unclear whether information gathered by K2 Integrity’s activities were used to target Hezbollah’s cash smuggling operations. Sehnaoui and Glaser In mid-2025, two men stood in the lobby of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington DC, arm around one another, grinning at the camera. On the left is Adi Ezra, a tenor who performed in Theodor, an opera about the life of Theodor Herzl, the ideological father of Zionism.
On the right is, Antoun Sehnaoui, a Monaco-based Lebanese banker and film producer who bankrolled the US-Israel Opera Initiative, which had been founded by K2 Integrity's Daniel Glaser following a “business trip to Tel Aviv”. Sehnaoui is the chairman and majority shareholder owner of Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL - Lebanon’s third biggest by assets and a bank regulated by the BdL). Behind the camera is Hagar Chemali, a former Treasury official and an advisor to Sehnaoui, who once described him and Glaser as “close friends”.
Glaser and Sehnouai’s relationship appear to go back a number of years, as originally reported by Daraj Media, but it is unclear when they first came into contact. In 2017 Glaser was appointed as an advisor to the SGBL chairman.
Glaser and Sehnouai’s relationship appear to go back a number of years, as originally reported by Daraj Media, but it is unclear when they first came into contact. In 2017 Glaser was appointed as an advisor to the SGBL chairman.
Sehnaoui also sits on the board of the Institute for Financial Integrity (IFI), a company that provides compliance and AML/CFT training services, alongside Glaser and Chip Poncy. Since 2025, IFI, in partnership with CBI and K2 integrity, has played a role in training staff at three Iraqi banks: the National Bank of Iraq, First Iraqi Bank, and International Development Bank.
Despite Sehnaoui’s role at IFI, his own banks face multiple investigations over allegations of financial crimes. SGBL faces a lawsuit in the United States in relation to allegations of money laundering: plaintiffs allege that the bank is liable for the damage caused by Hezbollah, as one of its predecessor banks , the Lebanese Canadian Bank, failed to close accounts belonging to the Shia group after the banks merged in 2011. Despite the allegations his banks face, Sehnaoui’s political alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv makes him a key ally for the Treasury's guerillas in grey suits.
Sehnaoui did not respond to our request for comment in time for publication. The Treasury goes to war (again) In a 1998 academic article, Juan Zarate, now K2 Integrity’s Chief Strategy Officer, argued that, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, surpluses of former servicemembers would sell their services to governments in the Global South. Zarate also predicted that governments would never truly command the loyalty of these mercenaries due to deep personal and professional links to the defence establishment back home. Instead, they would “act as agents of US foreign policy under the guise of private enterprise”.
Later, Zarate conceptualised himself and his colleagues at the Treasury as belligerents in a financial war against the US’ enemies, one fought with shell companies, sanctions, and financial flows. When the “guerillas in grey suits” left the United States government and eventually came to oversee K2 Integrity's operations in Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya, were they “act[ing] as agents of US foreign policy under the guise of private enterprise”? Additional reporting on Iraq by Dana Taib Menmy and Suadad al-Salhy .