In July 2004, Osen LLC filed the first civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against Arab Bank, on behalf of American terror victims. Linde v. Arab Bank was brought under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), and after 10 years, on September 22, 2014, an 11- jury panel found Arab Bank liable for knowingly providing financial services for Hamas.
Now the NJ based Osen is taking on the already troubled HSBC. The feisty attorney, who blogs regularly in the Times of Israel, represents 230 plaintiffs in the class action suit Freeman v. HSBC, Bloomberg reports.
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The lawsuit gets its name from the lead plaintiff, Charlotte Freeman, whose husband, an Army captain, was killed in a 2007 attack by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Karbala, Iraq.
Also among the plaintiffs is Lisa Ramaci, widow of American journalist Steven Vincent, who was murdered outside the southern Iraqi city of Basra, three days after publishing a NY Times op-ed in which he exposed Iranian infiltration of Iraq’s police force.
The theory behind the lawsuit, which puts the blame for terrorist acts on bankers, claims causation: HSBC transferred hundreds of billions of dollars for Iranian state entities which, in turn, moved those funds for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard and for Hezbollah. Both groups were involved in training and arming Shia terrorists in Iraq, and those terrorists murdered hundreds of Americans, including Vincent and Freeman.
Shand Stephens, the attorney who represented Arab Bank against Osen, suggested his rival’s “evidence in this case is a mile wide and an inch deep.”
Mind you, Stephens is a partner in DLA Piper, the largest law firm in the world, with an army of 4, 200-lawyers. It took 10 years, but they ended up losing — because a NY jury will convict the Arab terrorist side 10 times out of 10, depth of evidence notwithstanding.
Can the global banking industry be held liable for the detonation of improvised explosive devices and destruction of lives thousands of miles away from their posh offices?
“It may sound wild-eyed or quixotic, but that’s what we’re trying to do, ” Gary Osen states.
It’s what he does.
