Reply #11: I am sure this is one of the reasons the big banks are lining up for * [View All]

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This house of cards has some very shaky foundations

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/10accounta.htm
BCCI AND ITS ACCOUNTANTS
Introduction

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I used to tell the Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Whinney to please review these reports and also please keep me informed, because you are more my eyes and ears than my own inspection division . . . Price Waterhouse had been doing its job, there's no way that this $1 billion exposure which was taken to $11 billion exposure in the course of 3 or 4 months could have happened.(2)

According to Rahman, Price Waterhouse (UK) had signed off on BCCI practices year after year without issuing any red flags, until suddenly, in April, 1990, it found massive deficiencies at the bank, in which, as Senator Kerry put it, "every red flag in the world was flying," raising the question of how Price Waterhouse could have missed all of BCCI's bad practices previously.(3) From Rahman's point of view, local auditors at each of BCCI's locations had the opportunity to review the underlying loan documentation from the beginning. Rahman believed that process of review was precisely what they had been hired to do and failed at. From his point of view, as chief financial officer, his job was to accept the numbers provided him and audited locally the accountants, and from there to put together the overall financial accounts of BCCI. Thus, the deceptions that took place were made possible through the auditors' failure to have looked sufficiently closely at BCCI's customer-by-customer financial records around the world, and especially in the Grand Caymans. As Rahman explained in an annotation to the report prepared by Price Waterhouse to the Bank of England in June, 1991 which helped bring about the closure of BCCI globally:

Price Waterhouse should have known from their audit of Grand Cayman over many years that deposits of BCCI were being misused. The 'fictitious' loan accounts were in most cases so obviously fictitious that the year after year audit of PW should have detected most, if not all. PW not only knew about ICIC Overseas accounts but irregularly "certified these accounts. . . It all happened in, or were initiated by Grand Cayman. . . done by a few people in an amateurish way, right under the nose of PW (Grand Cayman) and PW (UK), who had done audit of these units from their inception (1975.)(4)
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http://www.boston.com/news/politics/primaries/massachusetts/articles/2004/01/30/workers_at_several_companies_give_100000_or_more_to_bush_campaign/
Workers at several companies give $100,000 or more to Bush campaign
By Sharon Theimer, Associated Press Writer, 1/30/2004

WASHINGTON -- Employees of five financial services companies accounted for more than $1 million of the record $132.7 million President Bush raised last year for his re-election campaign.


All have executives who rank among Bush's "rangers," campaign volunteers who raise at least $200,000 each for Bush, or who are "pioneers," collecting at least $100,000 for the Republican.

Employees of Merrill Lynch individually gave at least $360,000. Workers at Price Waterhouse contributed at least $310,000; UBS, at least $230,000; and Goldman Sachs and MBNA, at least $220,000, reviews of Bush's 2003 campaign finance, reports by The Associated Press and nonpartisan Political Money Line found
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