Treasury Has Sanctioned the Brotherhood’s Secretary General, and OFAC Says He Lives in Britain

The release, numbered sb0572 and titled “Treasury Disrupts Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas Financial Networks,” was issued in late July; the earliest date this desk can attach to it is a 24 July Jerusalem Post write-up logged in Britannica’s news feed. Its most consequential name is Mahmoud al-Abyari, described by OFAC as a United Kingdom-based senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Secretary General of the Muslim Brotherhood General Secretariat. OFAC says the action exposes “a multi-layered typology in which Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and Hamas-directed front organizations operate transnational fundraising channels,” and credits coordination with the FBI, the DEA and Customs and Border Protection. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: “The Trump Administration will relentlessly pursue terrorists and those who finance them. Whether operating under the guise of charities, businesses, or underground financial networks, those who enable Hamas will be exposed, sanctioned, and held accountable.”

The residency detail is the policy content. Lorenzo Vidino of George Washington University, speaking to Africanews after January’s chapter designations, framed the second-order effect precisely: “This decision will put strong pressure on U.S. allied countries: do they want to host organizations classified as terrorist by Washington?” The Charity & Security Network’s analysis of the same designations cautioned that their practical effect “will depend on the extent to which they have assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction,” and recorded civil-society arguments that the Brotherhood is a decentralised movement spanning social service organisations, political parties and paramilitary offshoots, making designation impractical. Washington has now designated four national chapters in eight months — Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Sudan — alongside further OFAC tranches on 21 January and 12 March.

Assessment: Designating an individual officer of a General Secretariat is a claim about structure, not just about a person: it asserts a centre where the movement’s defenders insist there is only a network. That legal theory is the thing to watch, because it is what any future British, German or Gulf action would have to borrow. The operative test is not the press release but the banking: whether a London-resident designee’s correspondent access closes, and whether the FCA or the Home Office is obliged to notice. Absent a UK response — and none has surfaced in what this desk has verified — the sanction is a message to Whitehall dressed as an enforcement action against a man.