The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Such a catalogue of criminality would, one might presume, have the US administration champing at the bit to close BCCI down. Not a bit of it. Which is where the allegation of «conspiracy» enters stage right. One of the companies which borrowed money from BCCI, Harken Energy, had on its board of directors one George W. Bush, the US president’s scion. BCCI lobbyists and advisers included Henry Kissinger’s consultancy, Kissinger Associates. The CIA, while denouncing BCCI on the one hand, was «float[ing] in and out of BCCI» (Kerry) on the other, was possibly using the bank to run funds to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and was definitely working to some unspecified end through BCCI’s affiliate, Capcom. Even smiling Jimmy Carter and rainbow coalition leader Jesse Jackson were receivers of BCCI’s largesse. In other words, a vast number of US luminaries had a vested interest in halting Kerry’s work — which is exactly what happened in 1989, when the Justice Department stalled his investigation. According to Washington Monthly, personal pressure from no less than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was put on Kerry to desist. To Kerry’s credit he refused to give up completely, and approached New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau with irrefutable evidence that BCCI was handling the accounts of the Colombian Medellin drugs cartel and diverting funds to the terrorist Abu Nidal. In 1990 the Bush administration gave BCCI a rap over the knuckles, but refused to close the bank down. That task fell eventually to the Bank of England in July 1991, although the publication of Kerry’s report (now co-authored by Senator Hank Brown) in the following year administered the coup de grâce. BCCI was indicted for money-laundering, bribery and grand larceny.

Shutting the doors of BCCI did not prevent $13 billion going missing — not that any of the monies went to the bank’s staff or small investors, the latter queueing fruitlessly to retrieve their deposits from BCCI branches. There are no answers as to where the missing monies went, although there are hints that some of the bank’s bigger clients received larger than usual remunerations in the run-up to the collapse.

An investigation by the French intelligence service found that one Osama bin Laden was a BCCI customer. It is within the bounds of possibility that bin Laden was among those who benefited in the last days of the BCCI criminal empire.

US Senator John Kerry’s investigation into BCCI was deliberately blocked by vested interests: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

J. Beaty and S. C. Gwyne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, 1993

Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, December 1992, 102nd Congress 2nd Session, Senate Print 102–140

Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, 1992

DOCUMENT: REPORT OF SENATOR JOHN KERRY ON «THE BCCI AFFAIR» TO THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, UNITED STATES SENATE, IN DECEMBER 1992

BCCI’s unique criminal structure — an elaborate corporate spider-web with BCCI’s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and his assistant, Swaleh Naqvi, in the middle — was an essential component of its spectacular growth, and a guarantee of its eventual collapse. The structure was conceived by Abedi and managed by Naqvi for the specific purpose of evading regulation or control by governments. It functioned to frustrate the full understanding of BCCI’s operations by anyone. Unlike any ordinary bank, BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking.

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