Two bags of money and a lot of trouble in Beirut Tony Kazal: Exonerated in Beirut. At 2.15pm, Tony Kazal hung up his phone and climbed into the car. He repeated to his driver the instructions he had just been given - drive to the Grand Cafe in Raouche and wait for Mohammad Saadeh and Hassan Chahine. He carried a bag containing €370,000 he had transferred to Lebanon that morning from his accounts in Dubai. It was May 18, 2009. Months earlier, he had been approached in Dubai by Roger Abi Nader, who had a business proposition. Would he be interested, Abi Nader asked, in a covert currency exchange to help some of his contacts in Lebanon? The amount would end up being $US1.2 million. Later, Kazal was impressed when he saw Saadeh get into a car with diplomatic plates. "He told me that it belongs to the Iranian embassy, and I trusted him even more," he later told investigators. Saadeh was a senior associate of Hezbollah, Abi Nader said. And the money, from somewhere in Africa, was Hezbollah money. As Kazal's car stopped outside the cafe in Beirut, Saadeh and Chahine were waiting. Kazal had agreed to do the currency swap at what was promised to be a lucrative commission. A militant group financed by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah is best known for high-profile attacks against Israeli interests abroad. But in 2008 it became part of the government of Lebanon. The US and Canada regard it as a foreign terrorist outfit. The men asked Kazal to follow them in their Range Rover. Both cars pulled out onto General de Gaulle Avenue. They wove north, past marinas and football stadiums, through back streets, before turning on to the Avenue de Paris. The Range Rover stopped outside the opulent Phoenicia Hotel in downtown Beirut; Chahine climbed out and walked to Kazal's car. He told Kazal to take the wheel and leave his driver at a nearby petrol station. Kazal thought all this "was due to security reasons, given their sensitive prominent positions." Chahine asked to see the money. He opened the bag, did a quick count, and turned back to the Australian. Police later recorded that Chahine then announced that there was $US1.2 million in the Range Rover. Kazal was to be advanced not just the $600,000 he had expected but twice that, including a down payment on a second exchange. Meanwhile, Saadeh had driven south through Beirut and stopped at the Marriott Hotel. Chahine took the bag and they walked towards the Range Rover. Saadeh showed him a bag of money and an assault rifle in the car. "He opened a bag containing 12 sets of US dollar bills, which he then counted in front of me before closing the bag," Kazal later told police. Chahine told him to take the bag, return to his hotel and count it there. He arranged to meet a friend who had a money counting machine. But Kazal was in for a shock. Soon as we opened the bag, I was surprised to see that the sets were full of white papers and on top of each set there was a $100 bill. Initially, Kazal believed the notes on top were counterfeit. He phoned Chahine, who tried to reassure him there had been a misunderstanding. The police files suggest he later promised to repay Kazal his money, but failed to do so. Finally, in November 2011, after two years of police inquiries, a Beirut court found Chahine, Saadeh and two others should be prosecuted for deception and fraud. The police also interrogated Kazal. Q: "Do you believe that exchanging such a big amount of money on the street and inside a car is a proper and correct thing to do? Why didn't you go into any legal bank or exchange office to do such a transaction? A: "Our agreement was not to carry out the exchange operation in the street. It was to do it in a safe place such as a Hezbollah office. It only happened this way on the street and in a hurry because they told me that security reasons necessitated this. The court exonerated Kazal of the original charges against him. And that is the curious feature of the case. Kazal did not bring the initial complaint to the courts; Chahine had claimed, and the court ultimately didn't agree, that Kazal had stolen money from him. At Al Dirwandi, a Beirut cafe, Chahine claimed he and Kazal had agreed to set up and jointly fund a new business, a travel agency and hire-car company. Chahine said he had given Kazal $100,000 for this purpose but Kazal became hard to contact. He told the police Kazal "finally called me saying he will try to return my money since the Ministry of Tourism refused to ... grant him the right to open the company. I waited but he never got back to me and when I tried to search for him I discovered that he had left the country. These claims were thrown out. Do you know more?