The Nation's Pulse/ Closing the BCCI Curtain
Adams, James Ring
Just how far does the BCCI conspiracy go? That's the question facing the investigators who broke open the global criminal enterprise that was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International now that...
...Stern has a distinguished career in public service cases—the voting rights division under Robert Kennedy, a series of coal mine disaster suits—but he is also a retired director and counsel of Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum...
...As anyone can guess who has read John le Cane or seen Helen Mirren play Lt...
...The disaster not only hurt honest depositors, it opened a once-in-a-lifetime window on the world-wide flow of dirty money...
...Some $12 billion of its $20 billion in assets had disappeared...
...A charge that Abedi's crew had bribed a U.S...
...Stern doesn't see a problem...
...In this case, Naqvi won hands down...
...A retort from Naqvi's lawyer indicates what sort of payments Morgenthau is looking at...
...Although Morgenthau's office plans to proceed with its own case against Naqvi, his defense may be able to get the court to throw it out on the grounds of double jeopardy...
...But Naqvi quickly got the notion that his federal captors weren't really interested in a full debriefing...
...He came to Occidental Petroleum in 1981, he told the Spectator, and never encountered Pharaon...
...This leaves it in the hands of Gerald Stern, the special counsel for financial institution fraud, a post created by Congress some four years ago to deal with the savings and loan disaster...
...As the Forward, the Jewish weekly, first reported, Clinton's appointments to Justice are riddled with conflicts of interest over the BCCI case...
...Gerald M. Stern, head of the division in charge of the case, told me his investigators didn't even have to use all of the debriefing days available to them...
...The letters on the plea bargain show how far D.A...
...You had to scare him with a long sentence," said one frustrated investigator...
...When the bulk of the bank collapsed over the Fourth of July weekend in 1991, shut down by an international consortium of bank regulators, it wiped out tens of thousands of small, immigrant-owned businesses in London, caused bank runs and riots in Hong Kong, and wiped out the national reserves of a dozen Third World countries...
...market, its illegally controlled proxies have put a heavy hit on American taxpayers...
...These questions erupted in early July when the Justice Department sponsored a plea bargain giving the number two man at BCCI a nine-year sentence, to be reduced by the two years and eight months he has already served under house arrest in Abu Dhabi...
...Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, Webb Hubbell's successor, represented Clark Clifford and Robert Altman when they tried to get their former employer First American Bank (a BCCI property) to pay their legal fees...
...But there is more than a chance that Justice has managed to sweep it all under the rug...
...The issue at the very least involves interrogation tactics...
...But Justice bargained away the threat of twenty years for racketeering...
...James Ring Adams is the author of The Big Fix: Inside the S&L Scandal (Wiley) and co-author (with Douglas Frantz) of A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World (Pocket Books...
...To protect these interests, the bank and its mystical founder Agha Hasan Abedi aggressively bought influence in political elites around the world, including those of Washington, D.C., Georgia, and Arkansas...
...It handled accounts for Medellin drug lords, for Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, for Palestine terrorist and arms dealer Abu Nidal, and for the Central Intelligence Agency...
...The deal provoked an extraordinary public protest from Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who picked up the case in the first place when the Bush administration tried to sweep it under the rug...
...Jane Tennison on PBS, a debriefing is a contest of patience, will, and intellect...
...He has basically said that unless Mr...
...El CORRESPONDENCE...
...Stern sounds sincere, but in light of the circumstances, it may be he should be seeking a ruling from the appropriate governmental ethics bodies, such as they are...
...Justice simply lacks the stomach to track suspected BCCI influence buying...
...And it rushed to wrap up the case, thinking it could master a two-decade old criminal conspiracy in two months...
...Perhaps more importantly, in the mid-seventies, Hammer sold a million shares of Occidental Petroleum to a Saudi businessman named Ghaith Pharaon...
...Federal Judge Joyce Green...
...Why is it, they're asking, that the Clinton administration, no more than the Bush administration before it, is showing such little curiosity about the worldwide connections of the BCCI, which include drug lords, terrorists, arms dealers, and spies...
...The implications are startling but, for the BCCI, hardly surprising...
...The son of the physician to the great Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia, Pharaon was one of the BCCI' s main front men in America, buying Bert Lance's National Bank of Georgia and taking a share of Centrust in Miami...
...A Wall Street Journal editorial pronounced Stern the one person at Justice free of BCCI influence, but that statement may have been too hasty...
...He is also a co-defendant with Naqvi on the BCCI indictment and a fugitive in parts unknown...
...She says she has recused herself "from the entire BCCI matter...
...Hammer was a shareholder in the predecessor bank to First American and tried (continued on page 73) The American Spectator September 1994 47 ADAMS / BCCI CURTAIN (continued from page 47) to mediate between factions on its board when Bert Lance first tried to take it over for Abedi...
...Desperate to cover its losses, the BCCI had made itself the central bank for all sorts of clandestine and illegal business...
...Justice Department has taken a dive on the case...
...This is no ordinary inter-agency spat...
...The secretly owned Independence Bank in California failed at a cost of $100 million, and BCCI Investment kept afloat the lurid Centrust Savings Bank of Miami, allowing it to double its losses before its $2 billion collapse...
...Naqvi 'fully cooperating,'" the lawyer wrote...
...Although American regulators refused to let the BCCI directly into the U.S...
...The BCCI, as they say in the Middle East, is the mother of all financial scandals, as well as the most exotic...
...And why is it shutting down questions about the bank's political penetration of the United States...
...That's the question facing the investigators who broke open the global criminal enterprise that was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International now that the U.S...
...Only the tiniest flavor of its global reach comes through the stock description—an Arab-owned bank run by Pakistani visionaries, chartered in Luxembourg, headquartered in London and active in seventy countries...
...S o it seemed like a major breakthrough when Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the first shareholder and current owner of the shards of the BCCI, delivered former BCCI chief Swaleh Naqvi, Abedi's right-hand man, 46 The American Spectator September 1994 to federal custody in May...
...Naqvi can provide evidence that some United States Senator, Cabinet official or state government official was involved in criminal activity, he will not find Mr...
...Morgenthau thinks this trail could lead...
...As we reported in the last issue ("Hillary, Refco and the BCCI"), the Manhattan DA' s office was already grumbling privately about his non-answers...
...B ut the problem goes far beyond individual embarrassments...
...Naqvi, he complained, "provided significantly inaccurate and incomplete responses to questions about payments made by BCCI to certain officials...
...senator or cabinet official would transform a somewhat arcane financial fraud into a historic political scandal...
...In the angry exchange of letters on the plea bargain, Morgenthau put it on the record...
...Naqvi has yet to provide significant, useful cooperation," he wrote to D.C...
...To other BCCI hands, this boast shows that the Justice team was naive and poorly prepared or worse...
...We never even heard his name when I was there," he said...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
