On the face of it, Ismail Ahmed has little in common with former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, but the similarity in their names has made it tricky for the UN financial official to do his job.
Ismail Ahmed is a vigorous British man of Somali origin; his almost-namesake is the partially blind, wheelchair-bound Palestinian militant leader whom Israel assassinated in Gaza three years ago.
The problem for Ismail Ahmed is that the late Sheikh Yassin is still subject to a US asset freeze on suspected terrorists as his name appears on the "Specially Designated Nationals" list of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Entering "Ismail Ahmed" on the Web site, which checks people against the OFAC list, produces a "100 percent match" with two suspects including the sheikh, on the basis of the men's shared names. While OFAC has detailed guidelines and a hotline to help banks distinguish between false hits and genuine matches, the name coincidence can make Ahmed's life difficult.
"It is a nightmare," said the 47-year-old, who has suffered problems and delays in making international money transfers, as well as questioning at airports. It is an ironic situation for a man employed by the United Nations as a financial services compliance adviser in a development programme for Somalia.
"With a UK passport, I still find it difficult to send money ... Imagine somebody, especially a receiver (of funds) who does not have a passport. There are no passports in some parts of Somalia. Already a lot of Somalis are facing difficulties with this," he said.
Beyond the problems for those involved, there are serious ramifications for Somalia, whose economy depends heavily on money transfers from its nationals abroad. Such remittances are equivalent to more than $1 billion a year, or more than 70 percent of gross national product, according to the World Bank.
Regulators and bankers charged with enforcing international terrorism sanctions imposed by the United States, UN, European Union and others say they frequently encounter problems with the quality of data on individuals named in the various lists.
"There are a lot of mistakes in the wording, especially in two types of names -- Latin American names and Arabic and Islamic names," said Hassan Nasser, financial compliance director at Dubai's Multi Commodities Center.
Some Arabic names are so common that, without additional information such as middle name and date and place of birth, it is impossible to tell if the person making a transaction is the same as the individual on the sanctions list, he said.
Richard Barrett, co-ordinator of the UN al Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team, said banks were "tearing their hair out" when faced with urgent decisions on whether to accept transactions by people whose names resemble those on sanctions lists.
He said the UN was working on ways to distinguish genuine terrorist suspects from innocent namesakes. That was particularly hard in places such as Afghanistan, where some people had only one name and were identified by their tribal affiliation. Even the date of birth might not be recorded.
While the UN has added only three new names to its sanctions list this year, it has updated data on 120 previously listed people in an effort to make identification easier.
Bankers cautiously welcome moves to "tidy up" sanctions lists, but say they want more. "There is always room for improvement," said Hany Abou-El-Fotouh, first vice-president for corporate governance and compliance at Arab Banking Corporation, Egypt, a small bank which gets on average 20 possible matches a day with Arabic names on sanctions lists.
"We on the compliance front expect more effort to be put into cleaning up or updating the lists, or supplementing them with key information to make our life easier." Ismail Ahmed, the British Somali, believes the problems may get worse before they get better.
Tougher EU rules coming into force on December 15 would mean money transfer companies must subject their customers to stricter registration and closer scrutiny, raising costs and making it more expensive to send remittances, he said. Longer-term, he fears his son Mustafa, 6, may also have problems with sanctions because he has a similar name to an Egyptian on the US OFAC list.
When Ahmed's second son was born 2-1/2 years ago, he said, "I had a huge argument with my wife" and rejected five names before settling on an unusual Somali one, Mahad, which he thought less likely to throw up a match. "I don't want him to face the same problems," Ahmed said.
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