The US Treasury Department on Thursday issued new Hezbollah-related sanctions, designating Lebanese businessman and the Iran-backed group's financial facilitator, Ahmad Jalal Reda Abdallah, as well as his companies.
Mr Abdallah, five of his associates and eight of his companies in Lebanon and Iraq have been added to the sanctions list of the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the department said.
Mr Abdallah is a Hezbollah official and an active member of its global financial network, the Treasury said.
He has supported the group for decades, carrying out commercial activities in various countries where the profits are transferred to the Iran-backed group, the department added.
Founded in 1982 by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and classified by the US and other western countries as a “terrorist organisation”, Hezbollah is a powerful group in Lebanon due to its heavily armed militia that has fought several wars with Israel.
It grew stronger after joining the war in Syria in 2012 in support of President Bashar Al Assad.
The US said Mr Abdallah used senior employees and relatives to establish new businesses throughout the Middle East on behalf of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah on Sunday faced an electoral setback when the group and its allies lost their parliamentary majority in elections in Lebanon.
Reuters contributed to this report
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Mashrafe Mortaza (captain), Tamim Iqbal, Liton Das, Soumya Sarkar, Mushfiqur Rahim (wicketkeeper), Mahmudullah, Shakib Al Hasan (vice captain), Mohammad Mithun, Sabbir Rahaman, Mosaddek Hossain, Mohammad Saifuddin, Mehidy Hasan Miraz, Rubel Hossain, Mustafizur Rahman, Abu Jayed (Reporting by Rohith Nair in Bengaluru Editing by Amlan Chakraborty)
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Our legal advisor
Ahmad El Sayed is Senior Associate at Charles Russell Speechlys, a law firm headquartered in London with offices in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Experience: Commercial litigator who has assisted clients with overseas judgments before UAE courts. His specialties are cases related to banking, real estate, shareholder disputes, company liquidations and criminal matters as well as employment related litigation.
Education: Sagesse University, Beirut, Lebanon, in 2005.
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What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
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