The Andorra Hustle, a documentary film written and directed by the award-winning filmmaker Eric Merola will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime on September 4, 2020.
Andorra, a tiny, independent country situated between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains with a total population of 80,000 people found itself at the center of one of the most convoluted and outrageous bank robberies in modern history: on March 10, 2015, Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), a private bank in Andorra, was shut down by Spanish, American, and Andorran governments in Spain’s efforts to destroy the Catalonian Independence Movement thus leaving dozens of innocent civilians facing prison for money laundering crimes that never existed, and scores of innocent families have had their entire life savings stolen from them.
The incentive for the Spanish government to destroy BPA was part of Spain’s ongoing “Operation Catalonia” – a covert state-sponsored war-like operation to undermine the progress of Catalonia’s efforts to separate from Spain due to generations of humanitarian and economic repression Madrid has inflicted upon Catalonia. America’s incentive was to protect Spain’s interests, as an ally of the United States. Andorra’s incentive appears to be purely economical on behalf of its leadership.
BPA was targeted due to the assumption that members of the top Catalonian leadership (President Jordi Pujol, President Artur Mas, and Vice President Oriol Junqueras) had their money stored at BPA. Spanish Police were of the opinion that destroying the bank accounts of the Catalonian leadership would help win their war against Catalonia.
A little known fact presented in The Andorra Hustle: America’s FinCEN (US Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) has the power to shut down any bank in the world with a single press release called a “Section 311” – part of the USA Patriot Act—without requiring any evidence of wrongdoing, under the guise of “protecting the world’s financial system”. Spanish Police presented fake evidence of money laundering to America’s FinCEN, resulting in America issuing a “Section 311” against BPA. In the weeks following, the American private equity firm J.C. Flowers purchased the newly destroyed BPA at an 86% discount—precisely verbatim as Spain warned would happen to BPA.
Most mainstream news reporting on the closing of BPA have reported that BPA was shut down due to money laundering activity concerning the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, the Venezuelan government, and Russian and Chinese mafias. This documentary examines these money laundering charges in a forensic fashion, proving that BPA was categorically innocent of these crimes. The Andorra Hustle gives the audience a well-researched narrative that contradicts all mainstream news coverage of these events.
Director/producer, Eric Merola is an internationally award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. During the first decade of Merola’s career he had investigated various stories within the realm of innovative medical science. Merola’s first documentary, Burzynski, had been viewed by millions and had garnered numerous international awards, including the national and city awards for “Best Documentary” at HumanDoc in Warsaw. Burzynski also won “Best Documentary” on America’s The Documentary Channel, and was later distributed on Netflix worldwide. Merola’s other films include The God Cells: A Fetal Stem Cell Journey and Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering. In 2020, Eric Merola has signed a Hollywood deal to adapt his previous documentaries into a scripted dramatic series, in collaboration with Ryan Farley, the Emmy-nominated writer and producer of Netflix’s Ozark.
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