A heist-movie mood propels this rigorous doc about the role of an obscure bank in a US plan to undermine
Catalan separatism
The subject of Eric Merola’s film at first seems small: how a private bank in the tiny mountain nation of Andorra found itself at the centre of a conspiracy. But its real interests are wide-reaching: the tactics used by the US government to disrupt Catalonia’s independence movement, and the modern face of
American interventionism.
The hustle hinges on the murky section 311, a provision in the US Patriot Act that grants the Treasury Department sweeping powers in relation to any bank in the world, under the guise of protecting the world’s financial system. In 2015, the provision was used against Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) on the grounds that it was being used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of criminal gangs in
Russia,
China and
Venezuela.