Judge Menashi, in a separate dissent, agreed that the president’s recognition of Afghanistan as a state should persist, but argued that the Bank no longer qualified as an agency of that state. He pointed out that the Afghan banking law the Panel relied on – which says bank capital belongs to the State of Afghanistan – is effectively defunct, and the 2017 doctoral dissertation cited by the Panel merely reiterated those defunct legal formalities, without reflecting who actually controls the institution today. On the TRIA question, Menashi highlighted what he described as a distorted outcome: Under the rules at the time of the panel, if the government had waited to freeze the assets until after the Taliban formally took over the bank, the funds would have been available to victims, but because the government took quick action to block the assets as the Taliban was seizing power, victims might not have been able to recover. Menashi observed that the law concerns actual ownership, not ownership frozen in time.
2nd Circuit blocks insurers from recovering $7 billion in frozen Afghan bank assets & more related News Here
