Altaf Khanani

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Altaf Sattar Khanani is a Pakistani man who was born on the 2nd of May 1961 and went on to found a foreign exchange business called Khanani & Kalia International. On paper, a firm like that does something ordinary. It helps money change form and cross borders. Khanani's firm did that work for customers whom most banks would never have knowingly accepted. This documentary asks how a family business grew into a network that reached six countries. It asks who the clients were, and why their names alarmed governments on several continents. It also asks how a man at the center of such a network ended up pleading guilty in an American courtroom, and what happened to him afterward.

  139

• 2. A Memon Family

  ›

  Abdul Sattar Khanani was a street dealer and businessman, and he was the father of the future launderer. The family belonged to the Memon community and traced its roots to Gujarat in India. After independence, they migrated to Pakistan, and Altaf was born there in 1961. He did not enter business alone. He had a twin brother named Javed Khanani, and the two men worked together in the money laundering carried out through Khanani and Kalia International. Javed's story ended in 2016, when he reportedly committed suicide. That was also the year the family's fortunes were shaken by events far from Pakistan.

  253

• 3. The Hawala Network

  ›

  Among the methods the Khanani organisation used was hawala, a traditional system for moving value without relying on formal banks. Its reach was wide. Money passed illicitly between Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The clientele was as varied as it was dangerous. The source lists drug cartels and biker gangs among the customers. It also names Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Most chilling of all, the network moved money for the armed attackers behind the Mumbai attacks of 1993 and 2008. Those same six countries would later appear as the addresses attached to the network in an American government designation.

  6810

• 4. Arrest and Sentence

  ›

  In June 2015, a federal court in the Southern District of Florida indicted Khanani on fourteen counts of money laundering. He was not taken into custody until September 2016, when agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested him in Panama. He was then transported to jail in the United States. He chose a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit laundering. His sentence was 68 months in prison and a fine of $250,000. The American government also blacklisted him, his son Obaid Khanani and his nephew Hozaifa Khanani. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control went further and designated the whole network a Transnational Criminal Organization under the SDN list. Khanani walked out of prison on the 13th of July 2020.

  137910

• 5. On Screen

  ›

  In 2025, Khanani reached a popular audience through the Indian spy action thriller Dhurandhar. The actor Mushtaq Naika portrays him in the film. Dhurandhar draws on the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and it also draws on the story told in IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack. Placing a financier in a story built around those two events gives the character a role in the plot, even though his work happened in ledgers and transfers rather than on the front line.

  11