BCCI Latest: Bank of England BCCI legal bill hits £55m

[emad]

Robert Lea, Evening Standard
17 June 2004

Snip

THE Bank of England is increasing its legal budget to a staggering £21.2m this year to fight off the £1bn claim for compensation from the creditors and depositors of bust bank BCCI.

Over this year and the preceding two, the Bank's spending on defending the BCCI claims will have lined the pockets of its solicitors, Freshfields, by up to £55m.

The Bank will also have swelled the coffers of Nicholas Stadlen, its leading counsel in the case, and his Fountain Court chambers, who also represented British Airways in its infamous 'dirty tricks' litigation with Virgin Atlantic.

Latest figures from the Bank of England reveal that spending on the BCCI case, which opened at the High Court in January, soared last year by more than 50% to £21m.

More:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid79509?source=

Expect this one to go the full 15 rounds and consider putting a zero onto the present estimate for the BoE's legal expenses. Why? The most damning evidence so far - subpoenaed security/intelligence files from Thatcher's reign - has been gagged, but is being heard on appeal in House of Lords, and BCCI litigants very confident of winning that appeal.

The awful stuff they are trying to hide? That in 1982 the Bank of England knew that the KGB was using BCCI London HQ to clear payments made via its Liechtenstein and Luxembourg operations to numbered offshore accounts in the Netherlands Antilles, Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Florida Keys belonging to one Ken Lay. Payments originated from Libyan interests involved with Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation (ABC - 33% owned by Libyan State at that time) via its Manama OBU (offshore banking unit).

And that a Russian-born woman domiciled in London and Suffolk, UK - who worked as a senior executive at UK chemical/textile giant Courtaulds - had a son with Lay, born circa 1961, who stole a UK/US investment portfolio (commercial & residential property, stocks and shares, real estate, industrials et al) worth approx $5 billion managed by Merril Lynch, Bank of America and Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp. The proceeds of that heist were mortgages raised on the properties, which ended up in Lay's offshore coffers.

None of the above is is in the public domain as yet but forms part of the affidavit of former BCCI London General Manager John Hilberry, who dissappeared late in 1986 after doing a plea bargain with the UK Special Branch and Fraud Squad. Hilberry has since been living under a new ID and is prepared to testify to this - and more - once both the plaintiffs and defendants' counsels have laid out their opening arguments.

What persuaded him to testify after agreeing to the plea bargain? He had a daughter, an estate agent, called SUZIE LAMPLUGH, who "disappeared" in July 1986. This 'missing person' case officially never solved, but last year credible, verifiable evidence emerged as to her fate: her assailant, the murder weapon and what happened to the body.

The trail then leads to UK-resident ex-pat chums of the former Pahlavi dynasty thrown out of Iran after the fall of the Peacock Throne, and a close-knit coterie of Zoroastrian cult devotees running a global money-laundering account network via BCCI branches worldwide. In particular, Tony Blair's chum Mittal - the steel tycoon who did so well out of Romanian contracts after doshing up the UK Labour Party, relatives of Benazhir Bhutto and Pakistan's General Musharraf.

Eat your heart out, BFEE....

[seemslikeadream]

1. emad who actually calls the shots at Bank of England?

just curious.

[emad]

18. At the moment it is John Scarlett, newly-appointed head of MI6 -

the man who compiled Poodle's dodgy-dossier about Saddam having WMDs and yellow cake uranium - who has advised the present Governor of the Bank of England Sir Eddie George, that allowing BCCI litigant access to UK military/security/intelligence files from 1979 onwards would be damaging to national integrity.

However, previous Lords' ruling categorically stated that such grounds are inadmissible and that the only damage would be to the personal standing of UK politicians such as Thatcher and Major. Further, that to exclude crucial evidence from the BCCI lawsuit could be argued to be a perversion of the course of justice, given the other evidence about to be presented to the court.**

Bank of England technically is independent of Downing Street/Treasury since 1997; however, it has been protected up til now by precedent as opposed to legal statute because it is the custodian of highly secretive accounts held by the UK Royal Family as well as government accounts.

** John Hilberry's affidavit names all the UK politicians who received backhanders from the Soviet Union via BCCI accounts, to gag the KGB's former involvement in UK mainland terrorist bombings accredited to branded fronts like IRA, Provisional IRA, loyalist paramilitary organisations and their affiliates in |Eira and Europe. This testimony makes it very difficult to gag other intelligence files on the grounds of threatening UK security because Hilberry lists all the numbered accounts, dates and methods of payment and analysis of theswe transactions provenance.

From The Guardian:

What spooks told Old Lady about BCCI

MI6 and the Bank had suspicions, so why was nothing done, creditors ask in the High Court. By Conal Walsh

Sunday January 18, 2004
The Observer

On a spring day in 1989, Roger Barnes of the Bank of England's supervisory division sat down for a meeting with officers from MI6. The officers asked him to tell them what he knew about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
Rumours of fraud were starting to swirl around the giant Pakistani-Arab bank, whose main office was in Leadenhall Street in the City.

Barnes's reply was unsettling. According to the MI6 officers, he told them that BCCI had 'no natural or established customer base there was no obvious, respectable explanation as to how it came to grow so quickly and became so profitable ... it was widely assumed that the BCCI management were less than meticulous as to what funds they handled'.

Other Bank of England officials were more forthright, telling MI6 of allegations linking BCCI to drug gangs in Colombia and to the military regime of General Manuel Noriega in Panama.

But if the Bank knew of alleged unsavoury dealings at BCCI, why didn't it investigate them? That is the question at the heart of the blockbuster legal case that began at the High Court in London last week.

Two years after the meeting between Bank officials and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), BCCI collapsed in the world's biggest- ever banking fraud, leaving £7 billion in undeclared debts and thousands of depositors empty-handed. BCCI's creditors are suing the Bank, which regulated the financial industry at the time, accusing it of deliberately failing to protect them.

The Bank denies the claim, saying that it had assumed BCCI should be supervised by Luxembourg, where it was officially registered, rather than by the authorities in Britain, where it did most of its business.

But Gordon Pollock QC, the barrister leading the creditors' case, spent last week arguing that the Bank had early warning of trouble at BCCI, and is likely to seize on further evidence of this from the intelligence community.

The Observer's account of Barnes's 1989 meeting with MI6 comes from a top-secret document compiled by Lord Bingham, whose official investigation into the BCCI debacle was issued in a report in 1992. The document - known as 'Appendix 8' - deals with the role of the intelligence services in the BCCI affair. Unlike the rest of Bingham's report, it has never been made public - until now.

Some passages in the 30-page appendix remain 'blacked out' for security reasons. However, the document makes it clear that the Bank received a host of additional warnings from intelligence agencies about alleged misconduct at BCCI.

In August 1989, the Bank was made aware of intelligence suggesting that BCCI was in serious financial difficulty and had only been bailed out by a valuable Abu Dhabi oil account. Officials at Threadneedle Street appear to have done nothing to investigate BCCI's solvency.

According to Bingham, the Bank was also told twice that 'the Panamanian Ambassador to the UK, a Noriega appointee, was engaged in moving funds from accounts held with BCCI in London to other accounts elsewhere held by Noriega front companies and nominees'.

Further reports claimed that BCCI branches in Pakistan, Luxembourg, Argentina, Colombia, Panama and Paraguay were suspected of money-laundering and drug-trafficking. Some of the suspects in the Paraguayan operation were based in the UK. But in no case, apparently, did the Bank send in its investigators.

If the Bank of England was sometimes relaxed in its approach, so too were the intelligence agencies themselves. In 1990, an unnamed source told them that BCCI's Gibraltar office was involved in a vast money-laundering exercise which the Gibraltar government itself was happy to tolerate. This disclosure was described by the British Embassy in Madrid as 'important and depressing', but there is no evidence that the UK acted on it.

According to Bingham, spy chiefs also discovered that Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist, held accounts worth at least $50m in a London branch of BCCI (see below), but decided to discreetly monitor the accounts rather than freeze them.

The US authorities disagreed with this tactic. But the British insisted that they should not step in, even when it became apparent that the accounts were being used to sell military equipment to Poland, in breach of arms export controls.

In the end, however, the affair ended embarrassingly: Nidal's organisation got wind of the British surveillance and emptied the accounts before they could be seized.

A mole in the bank

Bingham's newly declassified intelligence archive reveals a ham-fisted attempt by British intelligence to 'turn' a senior BCCI employee in an attempt to get details of what was going on inside the crime-riddled bank.

This employee was Ghassan Qassem, the Jordanian manager of BCCI's branch in Sloane Street, London. Part of Qassem's job was to look after multi-million-dollar accounts held on behalf of Warsaw-based SAS Trade. This company, Bingham reports, wassecretly identified by Western intelligence agencies in 1986 as a front for the Abu Nidal terrorist organisation.

For a time, Qassem was not approached by intelligence agencies, because he had been arrested in Syria in connection with a kidnapping. Some of the details Bingham gives of this bizarre episode remain classified, but apparently the BCCI man was not charged, and returned to London.

In July 1987, he was contacted by MI5 and MI6 officers, who told him what they had discovered about the SAS Trade accounts. A surprised Qassem agreed to pass on information about the accounts.

He turned out to be a loose cannon, however. From the start, Bingham writes, Qassem failed to disclose all he knew. By June 1989 'the Security Service were becoming a little unsure that they were receiving Qassem's full co-operation, and thought that an additional source would be valuable'.

They recruited his assistant, but he 'did not prove a satisfactory informant' and was eventually suspended by BCCI for alleged misconduct.

At the end of that year, Qassem began to claim his life was in danger as a result of his co-operation with the intelligence services.

He also became involved in a dispute with his line manager and filed an employment tribunal case against BCCI, claiming the bank was victimising him 'for his role in looking after the accounts and the accounts of drug traffickers, even though he had acted in accordance with the bank's wishes'.

Before these allegations could be made public, BCCI - to the likely relief of British intelligence - settled the case out of court, paying Qassem £36,700 if he agreed not to publicise his claims.

He did not stay silent for long, however. In July 1991, Qassem caused a stir by appearing on BBC Panorama, describing his MI5 contacts. 'Much of what he said,' concluded Bingham, 'was factually correct.'


From:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1125482,00.html

More:

BoE lied to judge over BCCI, court told

Mark Milner
Friday January 16, 2004
The Guardian

Bank of England officials were yesterday accused of lying to the Bingham inquiry into the £10bn collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991.
Claims that they had assumed BCCI should be supervised by Luxembourg, where it was registered, rather than by the authorities in Britain, where it did most of its business, were attacked by Gordon Pollock QC in the high court.

Mr Pollock is acting for the liquidators of BCCI who are suing the Bank for about £1bn.

On the third day of the hearing, Mr Pollock said the court should reject the argument the Bank would put forward that officials believed that under the 1979 Banking Act responsibility for supervision lay with the country of incorporation.

He drew attention to three banks - Banco Español en Londres, International Resources and Finance and BCCI - which were incorporated within the European Economic Community but outside Britain.

In the first two cases Bank analysts had written to the institutions questioning them in detail about where their "principal place of business" was. This was to determine which was the proper authority to take on the job of supervision - that of the country in which they were registered or the Bank because of the extent of their British business. IR&F, like BCCI, was registered in Luxembourg.

In the case of BCCI there was no such investigation of where central management and control was located; rather a determination that BCCI would be dealt with under that part of the act - section 3.5 - which allowed the Bank to rely on supervision from Luxembourg.

"There is not a single scrap of evidence that anyone raised a similar issue with BCCI. Why? Because they had decided in advance that BCCI was going to be treated come what may under 3.5.

"It could not have been overlooked, could not have been an honest mistake and so when they said to Lord Justice Bingham 'Oh well, we did not really think about this' and, when they led Lord Justice Bingham simply to believe that they made this automatic assumption that they did not understand the act, they were simply lying." The Bank's argument that it identified only two categories of banks, domestic and foreign, so officials had never realised there was an issue over "principal place of business", was simply not true.

Mr Pollock is acting for BCCI liquidator Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu which is alleging misfeasance in public office against the Bank and several officials and claiming £850m damages over their role in the BCCI collapse.

In the third day of a non-jury trial, which is expected to last for up to a year, Mr Pollock said that it stuck out "like a sore thumb that the Bank did not follow normal practices and normal behaviour" in relation to BCCI.

The Bank did not conduct the proper investigation either by the "most extraordinary oversight" or, if that explanation was rejected, because officials either knew, or were frightened of, what such an investigation would reveal.

Mr Pollock alleged a decision was taken at a high level in the Bank's banking supervision division that BCCI's principal place of business was a non-topic as far as its authorisation under the act was concerned.

By 1979 there was a mass of information that BCCI's centre of operations was in Britain. Mr Pollock noted that Lord Justice Bingham - whose report was published in 1992 - had expressed incredulity that anyone could have looked at the issue of BCCI's principal place of business without concluding that it was in London.

"Lord Justice Bingham was sold a pup," said Mr Pollock.

The hearing continues on Monday.

From:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1124454,00.html

Good factual background describing the class action:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1123003,00.html
Pre-trial manouvering:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1123002,00.html
Archive material:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1132271,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1132265,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1132257,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1132272,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1132373,00.html

[Octafish]

2. And Kenny Boy's how UNOCAL fits in.

This BFEE dung rung a bell:

Meet the New Boss

By Matthew Callan
Freezerbox
January 17, 2003

EXCERPT...

(9-11 Commission Chairman and former NJ Gov. Thomas) Kean is also a director at Amerada Hess, a petroleum company whose green and white gas stations are a familiar sight in the New York metropolitan area. The Hess family is well known for its ownership of the New York Jets, but their company is less famous for being a partner in Hess-Delta, an oil exploration and development joint venture incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Little is known about Delta-Hess's interests besides its investments in the Caspian Sea region, Azerbaijan, and other former Soviet republics. What is known is that Hess's partner in this joint venture is Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, a company with some extremely suspicious executives.

SNIP...

Khalid bin Mahfouz, head of Saudi Arabia's powerful National Commercial Bank, has led a storied and very public career in fraud. He was implicated in the BCCI banking scandal during the early 1990s, when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International robbed depositors of $10 billion. He eventually paid a $225 million settlement to escape prosecution. In the mid-1990s, he was caught in a citizenship-for-sale scandal, in which he courted investors for business ventures in Ireland, in exchange for Irish passports and huge tax exemptions.

SNIP...

It would not be the last time the men crossed paths. In December 1997, the London Telegraph reported that Taliban representatives were close to signing a deal with Unocal, a California-based oil company, to construct a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bin Mahfouz's Delta Oil was heavily involved in the negotiations, and acted as a liaison between the Taliban and Unocal. At the same time, incidentally, Enron CEO Ken Lay (Kenny Boy to the President) was contracted to conduct feasibility studies for the Unocal-Delta joint venture. Unocal publicly urged the Clinton administration to recognize the Taliban, despite Osama bin Laden's very welcome presence in the country it controlled. Clinton was reluctant to do so, however, and the Afghan pipeline project hung in negotiations limbo for years—as recently as January 2001, the Bush administration was still meeting with Taliban representatives to work out an oil deal. There is no reason to believe that Delta, and therefore bin Mahfouz, had relinquished its interest in the Afghan pipeline by this time.

Shortly after the fall of the Taliban, Bush installed Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal consultant, as president of Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, late of Unocal and a former Taliban supporter, was appointed as the US special envoy to the country. Assuming the Unocal-Delta joint venture still formally exists, President Bush has as much of a link to terrorism as the man he appointed to head the September 11 commission.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/analysis/2003/0117boss.htm

[Carl Brennan]

3. I thought I saw it at DU. The Ambassador to Afghanistan

was also on the board of Unocal.

[Octafish]

4. Appointed Afghan President by the Murkin pretzeldunce.

D'ya think Smirk remembers when he could buy good terrorists who would stay bought? He probably never thought he'd have to buy another one so soon. Here's great background from the time before 9/11.

Taliban in Texas: Big Oil hankers for old pals

HOUSTON - The Taliban must have had a ball in this Texas city when they came to visit the control tower of Planet Oil in the late 1990s to negotiate the Trans-Afghan Pipeline (TAP). One can imagine Mullah Omar's finest, in full black-turbaned regalia, at the Houston Galleria - amid all those blond, dermatologically sublime trophy wives credit-carding their way to the Valhalla of conspicuous consumption at Saks, Macy's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. Not to mention all those steak houses! And all those sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) - not only Kandahar-friendly Toyota Land Cruisers but Durangos, Silverados, Pajeros, Discoveries and even BMWs!

Of course this was ages before the cluster-bombing of the Taliban back to Jurassic Park became the secret casus belli for the "war on terra" after September 11, 2001. And it was before those gas-guzzling SUVs had to deal seriously with soaring oil prices, or at least not to the heights we are seeing now. On Monday a barrel of US light crude hit US$41.65, the highest price since the New York Mercantile Exchange launched its crude-oil contract in 1983.

Between the Taliban taking over Kabul in September 1996 and the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in the summer of 2001, neither the administration of president Bill Clinton nor that of his successor, President George W Bush, ever designated Afghanistan as a terrorist or even a rogue state: the Taliban were wined and dined as long as they played the Pipelineistan game in Central Asia (see Pipelineistan revisited, December 24-25, 2003). Unocal - which had put the CentGas Pipeline Consortium in place - hired Henry Kissinger as a consultant. Unocal also hired two very well-connected Afghans: Zalmay Khalilzad, a Pashtun with a PhD from the University of Chicago and former Paul Wolfowitz aide, and Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from Kandahar. In 1996, both Khalilzad and Karzai were ultra-pro-Taliban. Karzai is now Afghanistan's US-backed ruler. Khalilzad also made splendid career moves: Bush-appointed National Security Council member (working under Condoleezza Rice), "special envoy" to Afghanistan (only nine days after the Karzai government was sworn in), and current US ambassador.

The Taliban didn't want to play ball: every time, they wanted more money and more investments for the roads and the infrastructure of their ravaged country - until an exasperated Washington decided to finish them off. This was discussed in Geneva in May 2001, at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, and finally at a Berlin hotel, also that July, a meeting involving US, Russian, German and Pakistani officials. Asia Times Online later learned in Islamabad that the US plan was to strike against the Taliban from bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan before October 2001. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened, providing Washington the perfect excuse to go it alone.

CONTINUED...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE18Aa03.html

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, Carl Brennan! Where ya been?

[Karenina]

5. Be forewarned

The B.C.C.I. coloring book is technicolor psychedelic and can trigger siezures in the uninitiated... ;-)

[seemslikeadream]

6. Karenina remember when Octafish had that last siezure

I didn't think we'd ever snap him out of it!

[Octafish]

7. Funny you should mention that...

Analysis

June 18, 2004
Business Editor's Commentary

Hard to sell idea of stakeholders

By Patience Wheatcroft

TAKE a copy of Yellow pages, hand it to an individual and ask him or her to find you a plumber. Around a quarter will be unable to do so.

SNIP...

Only lawyers will gain in BCCI action

FOR most people, the circumstances that have led the Bank of England to be fighting a massive court case have long been forgotten, if they were ever understood. The story of the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, laced as it is with international politics and potentates, is the stuff of fiction, rather than normal life in London’s banking circles. What happened has become as obscure as the Schleswig-Holstein question. Yet it is providing a rich feast for the lawyers, and a drain on the resources of the Bank of England, much to the irritation of its Governor. He has had a busy week making headlines on the housing market and querying the Chancellor’s growth forecasts, but on neither topic does he sound quite as cross as he does about BCCI.

The Bank is not without blame in the affair. That BCCI might more properly have been characterised as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International was regularly remarked upon in Fleet Street and the City as it continued to trade in Britain. A braver, or more alert, Bank would have stopped its operations rather than preferring to ignore the problem and leave it to other regulators to sort out. Few in Threadneedle Street today would disagree with that view. But the Bank of England cannot be sued for negligence, and so the lawyers are claiming that deliberate dishonesty was involved.

The chances of this being proved are slender in the extreme. Yet the Bank is running up £100 million bill for defending its integrity. It has no choice. To settle out of court would be effectively to concede that there was a conspiracy at The Old Lady that resulted in thousands of depositors losing money. Those creditors have now recovered 75p in the £1, but that has not deterred the liquidators and their lawyers from pursuing the case in search of further funds for creditors, and, naturally, themselves.

The Bank has already been held to account for its failures in this scandal. The creditors have clawed back much of what they lost. It is long past time that the lawyers were told to abandon their pursuit. Sadly, though, the courts have sanctioned continuation of this miserable affair, and the pursuit of many innocent individuals who fulfilled their role at the Bank perfectly properly. That Sir Edward George should find himself being called into the witness box is a nonsense, as is the liquidators’ determination to pursue this case any further.

SOURCE:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-1149336,00.html

Thank you, Queenie LaRouche. And for the other side of the BFEE...

Governor angered as BCCI costs look set to hit £100m

By Gary Duncan and Martin Waller

THE Bank of England’s Governor vented his anger yesterday over its continued embroilment in the BCCI court case, which is set to cost the Bank up to £100 million to defend.

Its total legal bill for the 2003-04 financial year alone reached £21 million and the same amount is being budgeted for the new financial year. The annual cost is about 10 per cent of the Bank of England’s overall operating budget of about £240 million a year.

In his first public comments on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International affair, Mervyn King made clear that he is livid over the High Court action’s continued impact on the Bank of England.

Detailing his frustration and annoyance in the Bank’s annual report, he wrote: “There are important policy reasons for resisting claims of this kind against public bodies . . . It is, in any event, impossible to contemplate settlement of an action in which 22 present and former members of this country’s central bank are accused of dishonesty.”

SNIP...

The Bank of England, along with other regulators, cannot be sued for negligence. But the liquidators of BCCI, who are bringing the case, aim to show the Bank is guilty of “misfeasance in public office”, a heavy burden of proof meaning they acted in bad faith, or knowingly, or recklessly, failed in their supervisory duties.

SOURCE:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-1149347,00.html

[Octafish]

8. Nothing is harder to realize than the facts.

Nothing is more difficult to understand than the Truth.



BCCI, THE CIA AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE

Introduction

The relationships involving BCCI, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of BCCI. The CIA's and BCCI's mutual environments of secrecy have been one obvious obstacle. For many months, the CIA resisted providing information to the Subcommittee about its involvement with and knowledge of BCCI. Moreover, key players who might explain these relationships are unavailable. Some, including former CIA director William Casey, and BCCI customers and Iranian arms dealers Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi, are dead. Others, including most of BCCI's key insiders, remain held incommunicado in Abu Dhabi. While promising in public hearings to provide full cooperation to the Subcommittee, to date the Abu Dhabi government has refused to make any BCCI officers available for interview by the Subcommittee. Former BCCI chairman Agha Hasan Abedi remains severely incapacitated due to a heart attack. Finally, some persons in a position to know portions of the truth have denied having any memory of events in which they participated and of documents which they reviewed.

A baseline for assessing the BCCI-CIA story is the CIA's official record of its use of BCCI and its targeting of the bank, as set forth in several hundred CIA records created from 1982 through 1992. That record was, by and large, accurately represented by CIA acting director Richard Kerr in public testimony on October 25, 1991, supplemented by more detailed, classified testimony on October 31, 1991. Unfortunately, that record also contains ostensible gaps in knowledge on the part of the CIA about the activities of key contacts in the Middle East for U.S. intelligence -- including BCCI shareholders Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, and BCCI customer and Iran/Contra arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi -- which strain belief.

Outside the documentary record provided to the Subcommittee by the CIA, there is additional material, consisting of BCCI documents, testimony from BCCI officials and insiders, and extrinsic, circumstantial and historic information describing other substantial contacts between BCCI and the intelligence community. These include contacts between BCCI and:

** former U.S. intelligence officials, including a former head of the CIA;

** former and current foreign intelligence officials; and

** individuals engaged in covert operations on behalf of the United States government, including in the Iran/Contra affair.

In addition, the Subcommittee has received allegations of meetings between former CIA director William Casey and BCCI's head, Agha Hasan Abedi.


CONTINUED...

http://www.american-buddha.com/bcci.affair.11.htm



Let's Sink the BFEE!

[seemslikeadream]

11. Something the founder of BCCI Agha Hasan Abedi said

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid72921?source...

Bank officals had 'talked elliptically about special services to rich clients' from the BCCI boss. 'If you wanted little boys, you got it, if you wanted little girls you got it, money in suitcases or seats at the opera.'


http://calgary.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/7214_comment.php
Dyncorp in the article!!
.....Young Russians and Ukrainian women that wish to immigrate to Israel are often smuggled into the country destitute and at the mercy of their pimp. More disgusting is the role the United States government plays in facilitating this global sex trade. Instead of banning the previously mentioned Dyncorp from further defense contracts, the regime of George W Bush rewards it in granting major contracts for the Iraqi war. Even more shameful is the wink and nod the state department grants the Saudis. The Arabian Peninsula has long been known to be purchasers of slaves. Mostly the slaves came from India or Africa however, with the advent of the oil wealth the Saudis have became more selective and are known as high-end buyers. The Saudi Arabian Government continues to refuse to sign the United Nation’s treaty on slavery and extradition treaties. There have been several incidents in the past where the media has reported a slave of a Saudi prince brought into the United States escaped. The State Department then intervenes and returns the escaped slave to the Saudi prince and the incident forgotten. The State Department exempts the Saudi princes from normal custom procedures. A child slave bought by a Saudi prince can be delivered to his plane and allowed to depart without the required passport for the child. One fortunate victim that became entangled in the Saudi sex........

[Carl Brennan]

24. I wonder if this has anything to do with all

the missing children in the US?

Abedi should be put on trial for this alone.

[Karenina]

27. Be careful Carl!!!

Venture down this hole and you may end up in CHINA!!!

Where's that DJ? Cue up the Police!

Too much information is runnin' through my brain
Too much information, it's driving me insane... :silly:

[seemslikeadream]

13. ENRON to BCCI connection

This was a great post of yours Octafish


... involved with the ENRON to BCCI connection. Pug Wynokur, for one. And here's info from one whom I hope testifies in any and all BCCI related litigation:

Smug Pug:
Stealing Enron

The Real Deal With Catherine Austin Fitts

EXCERPT...

On May 7th, 2002, Herbert S. Winokur, Jr., Chairman of the Enron Finance Committee, testified before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in a hearing titled "The Role of the Board of Directors in Enron's Collapse." Mr. Winokur's comments and opening statement covered the board's role, off shore partnerships, his role in the special board committee, the Powers Committee, as well as Enron's illegal trading activities in the California energy markets.

The May 7th testimony was interesting in terms of linkages between the "privatization" efforts of Enron in California that showed remarkable similarities with other "privatization and deregulation" activities of Enron and other companies of which Mr. Winokur and his partners are investors or board members.

SNIP...

The report raises sufficient questions to merit a serious investigation as to whether Harvard Management personnel and/or one of the funds that manages money for Harvard, Highfields Capital, engaged in insider trading or were complicit in a "pump and dump" fraud scheme in connection with Enron securities and offshore partnerships. Highfields was established by a Harvard Management employee and is reported in Harvard's tax return to be its largest vendor, paid approximately $30MM in one year. Enron's former CEO, Jeff Skilling, is a former partner of Ron Daniels, Harvard's Treasurer who manages Harvard Management. Pug Winokur was a member of the Harvard Corporation while serving as Enron's Finance Chairman and has intimate dealings with Harvard Endowment though the investment activities of Pug's company, Capricorn Holdings that co-invests with Harvard. Whether or not Harvard Endowment is an investor in any of Capricorn's investment partnerships is a question that cries out for some sunshine.

Harvard Watch's report illuminated Pug Winokur "yah-yah" in a most gracious and complete way. Subsequently, Winokur "resigned" from the Harvard Corporation. Harvard's President Summers is also implicated in Enron fraud as well as $3.3 trillion of missing money and gold manipulations at the US Treasury and questionable "privatisations" in Russia and elsewhere. Not surprisingly Summers said goodbye to Winokur through the press in a manner that was cool to say the least.<3> Syndicate players like Harvard Endowment need quiet frauds that do not threaten their tax exemption or their "brand". Their need for quiet is an opportunity to use illumination to get our money back. Harvard Watch has demonstrated what one small group of volunteers can do. Imagine the cumulative effect of many such groups?

CONTINUED ...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/archive/scoop/stories/2d/cc/200206050039....

One of my own personal favorites is one Wendy Gramm:

(Kerry subcommittee's BCCI report, no copyright problems)


CAPCOM

Introduction

In the entire BCCI affair, perhaps no entity is more mysterious and yet more central to BCCI's collapse and criminality than Capcom, a London and Chicago based commodities futures firm which operated between 1984 and 1988. Capcom is vital to understanding BCCI because BCCI's top management and most important Saudi shareholders were involved with the firm. Moreover, Capcom moved huge amounts of money -- billions of dollars -- which passed through the future's markets in a largely anonymous fashion.

Capcom was created by the former head of BCCI's Treasury Department, Ziauddin Ali Akbar, who capitalized it with funds from BCCI and BCCI customers. The company was staffed, primarily, by former BCCI bankers, many of whom had worked with Akbar in Oman and few of whom had any experience in the commodities markets. The major investors in the company were almost exclusively Saudi and were largely controlled by Sheik AR Khalil, the chief of Saudi intelligence. Additionally, the company employed many of the same practices as BCCI, especially the use of nominees and front companies to disguise ownership and the movement of money. Four Americans, Larry Romrell, Robert Magness, Kerry Fox and Robert Powell -- none of whom had any experience or expertise in the commodities markets -- played important and varied roles as frontmen.

While the Subcommittee has been able to piece together the history of Capcom and can point to many unusual and even criminal acts committed by the firm, it still has not been able to determine satisfactorily the reason Capcom was created and the purposes it served for the various parties connected to the BCCI scandal. It appears from the available evidence that Akbar, BCCI, and the Saudis all may have pursued different goals through Capcom, including:

-- misappropriation of BCCI assets for personal enrichment.

-- laundering billions of dollars from the Middle East to the US and other parts of the world.

-- siphoning off assets from BCCI to create a safe haven for them outside of the official BCCI empire.

SNIP...


Despite suspicions about highly unusual transactions, CFTC Chairperson Wendy Gramm told the Subcommittee:

In terms of finding trading violations or Commodity Exchange Act violations that perhaps could support money laundering, we did not find any discernible pattern...o one has ben able to --at least other law enforcement officials have not been able to find money laundering in Capcom US, to our knowledge, as of now.(133)

Money laundering, as Chairperson Gramm testified, is not even a violation of the Commodities Futures Trading Act. Incredibly, it appears that the CFTC and the self-regulatory organizations have never even made a criminal referral for possible money laundering:

Senator Kerry. ave you ever specifically referred, or have any of the exchanges ever made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. We have raised concerns.

Senator Kerry. Have you made a criminal referral for money laundering?

Dr. Gramm. No. Not-- not specifically in that regard...

Continued...

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/21capcom.htm

[susu369]

15. Ah, Khalilzad's "splendid career moves"

Indeed, he studied with the best:

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:lcHIjn_g-lgJ:rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402rwoir.php+%2Buniversity+%2Bof+%2Bchicago+%2Bkhalilzad+%2Bchalabi&hl=en

Wolfowitz, Chalabi, and Khalizad all studied under nuclear strategist Albert Wohstetter at the University of Chicago. Wohstetter, a RAND nuclear weapons analyst who was an advocate of a flexible nuclear weapons strategy with precision-guide bombs, was also a mentor to Richard Perle.

--snip--


Among the neocons who relied on Chalabi for information about the strength of the Iraqi resistance and promoted him as just the man to replace Saddam Hussein were his University of Chicago connections (including Wolfowitz, Shulksy, Khalilzad, and Schmitt) and Vice President Cheney. Other Chalabi partisans were found in the Middle East offices of the Pentagon and State Department, including Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Michael Rubin.

--snip--

Great thread :kick:

[Octafish]

26. Albert Wohstetter's seems to be the real-life "Dr. Strangelove."

... who's spawned a mighty nasty cabal of little Strangelove clones populated with the likes of Comblicker Wolfowitz, Pearl Harbor Perle, Scooter Libby and the rest of the neocon swarm.

There's not much on Albert Wohstetter via GOOGLE. One reference above is the result of my poor Portugese translation from:

http://online.expresso.pt/1pagina/artigo.asp?id=24744808

PS: Thanks for the great link to the archived Right Web folk, too, susu369! Anyone interested in fighting the BFEE needs to check out and chip in:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/about.php

[Carl Brennan]

28. Thanks. Unocal assisted Osama.

Unocal assists Osama, Unocal higher up Robert Oakley is/was Ambassador to Pakistan. Unocal assists Osama: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/afgnstan/afgn11.htm

"An analyst for the International Institute of Strategic Studies wrote: "The Saudis started financing the Taliban as an anti-Iranian force. Some observers believe that the US perceived them as useful, not only for enforcing the US containment of Iran, but also providing it with a new niche to secure ideological leverage against the anti-US forces of Islam in the region, and for expanding Washington's access to Central Asian resources. At least two international consortia-one led by UNOCAL of the US and Delta oil of Saudi Arabia, and another by Bridas of Argentina perceived the Taliban as potentially helpful as a source of security in their bid to construct a $2.5 billion pipeline across Afghanistan to export gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia.
"As the Saudis pumped millions of dollars into their budget, mostly through Pakistan's ISI, as US officials established regular contacts with the militia leaders, as UNOCAL dubbed the Taliban take-over as a 'positive development', and as the drug traffickers made lucrative deals with them, the Taliban became unstoppable."

[Octafish]

9. Is James R. Bath a former DIRECTOR of BCCI?

There's a web site that posits that (great time-lines and links, too)...

http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/EntityDisplay.php?Entity=BathJR&Start=1972

emad aisat sana, anyone know if it's TRUE?

[Octafish]

10. Why BCCI matters...Smirko's chum Bath benefitted House of bin Laden, Bush.

The Tangled Path to a Response
As we prepare to retaliate for last week's atrocities, let's take time to be sure of our targets
BY JOHN MECKLIN

EXCERPT...

In the late 1980s, when I lived in Houston and earned my keep as an investigative reporter, I spent months looking into possible connections among Texas business and political figures and Middle Eastern notables associated with the fascinatingly fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International. In the end, my BCCI investigations didn't add up to a whole lot; chasing worldwide fraud is not a particularly rewarding pursuit for a local reporter without an expense account. As an offshoot of my research, however, I ran upon, and wound up writing some stories about, a Houston airplane broker named James R. Bath.

Among his varied business activities, Mr. Bath represented, as a sort of business agent, at least four prominent and wealthy Saudi Arabian citizens in their U.S. investments. According to public records, those citizens included Salem (sometimes spelled Salim) bin Laden, the favored son of the founder of a great Saudi construction empire, and one of dozens of half-brothers of a then-obscure man named Osama bin Laden.

Bath's associations did not exclusively involve Saudi petrodollars. Among other things, he also counted as a friend and minor business partner another man who, except for his family connections, was not well known to the wider public: George W. Bush.

SNIP...

Time, which first confirmed the Bath/ Bush investment connection, wrote this about the airplane broker: "Bath controlled a fleet of companies connected to his aircraft business, and he enjoyed unusual carte blanche to direct the U.S. investments of several wealthy Middle Easterners. Associates confirm that Bath has brokered more than $150 million in private plane deals in recent years, concentrated in sales and leases to Middle Eastern royalty and other influential figures. ... The firm that incorporated Bath's companies in the Cayman Islands is the same one that set up a money-collecting front company for Oliver North in the Iran-contra affair."

CONTINUED ...

http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2001-09-19/mecklin.html

[seemslikeadream]

12. let's go way back for a moment

Senator Harry Truman when investigating the national defense program, as committee chairman told newsmen before Farish testified: "I think this approaches treason. Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his "indignation" at the senators, and claimed he was not "disloyal."After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the US Navy to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force.
Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that tFarish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy I.G.'s share in certain patents because "in the event of war between ourselves and Germany .. .it would certainly be very undesirable to have this 20 percent Standard-I.G pass to an alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest.
In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942.
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later. With this double death the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William...overlapping the intelligence and financial worlds-The Bush Farish axis started George Bush's career.

A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later US President Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on corporations' collaboration with the Nazi. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that begun back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he know there was a war on?
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/listservs/spoons/woodco-greens.archi...


When George Bush was elected vice president in 1980, Texas mystery man William Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush's personal wealth in a "blind trust." Known as one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment. Note #3 Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and confidante….
President Bush can count on Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.

On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President's money manager) had pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline...

---wasn't Thyssens, Prescott's Dutch biz partner, part of the I.G. Farben/Austwitz deal?

interesting, too, that Farish's daughter married one of the Harrimans, the large shareholder in Union Bank, from which Prescott was also enriched, though not to the same degree as Harriman.

[gandalf]

14. kick for another interesting BCCI thread

:kick:

[emad]

17. Awesome! I particularly like the para:

"Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft"!

Each time I take my morning constitutional past Winfield House in Regent's Park Outer Circle it makes me think the armed cops outside the residency may just have their firearms pointed not at any potential North London snipers or dodgy Al-Qaeda-type visitors to the Mosque opposite, but at Poppy's bagman Uncle Stamps himself! Whippeeeee!!!

[emad]

16. J R Bath was listed in the 1982 MEED Middle East Financial

Directory as a consultant director of BCCI Holdings - the Luxembourg-based parent company (MEED: Middle East Economic Digest, a London-based business publisher). The entry in the Luxembourg section of the Directory was supplied by a completed questionnaire from the London admin HQ of BCCI, signed by Generqal Manager John Hilberry!

Supplementary information about Bath's involvement included a PO Box address in Nassau, Bahamas which was eventually found out to be a solicitor's office dealing with the offshore financial interests of Armand Hammer. Other data showed that Bath was a minority shareholder along with one ABDUL-MAGID BREISH (Libyan-born General Manager of Manama-based banking giant Arab Banking Corporation, who was charged early in 1991 at the start of Gulf War One, with espionage for the Soviets under Mikhail Gorbachev) in a subsidiary company representing BCCI inrerests in Iran.

I don't have a link to this but this information - including the Directory questionnaires - form part of the litigants' evidence bundle in the BCCI class action in the London courts.

Edit:
Octafish: Your post#10 refers: "The firm that incorporated Bath's companies in the Cayman Islands is the same one that set up a money-collecting front company for Oliver North in the Iran-contra affair."

[Octafish]

25. Cotopax ... Skyways Aircraft Leasing ... Cayhaven Corporate Services...

... all spells BFEE.

Bin Laden’s Brother-in-law Had Close Ties to Bush

by Tom Flocco *
AmericanFreePress.net * And Scoop.co.nz
August 28, 2002

EXCERPT...

Perhaps Mahfouz’s most interesting Houston investment through his agent, CIA-linked Jim Bath, was Skyways Aircraft Leasing. Skyways began on July 2, 1980 as a company called Cotopax Investments, registered in the Cayman Islands, according to Pete Brewton’s The Mafia, CIA & George Bush.

In off-shore, money-laundering, “shell-corporation” traditional style, the Skyways Board of Directors met one week before Cotomax notified the Cayman Island authorities that the company name had been changed -- after 29 days.

“The directors named Mahfouz’s envoy James Bath as president and director, and then resigned. All of the stock was made into bearer stock, which meant that it belonged to whoever possessed it,” according to Brewton.

And in his sworn lawsuit against Bill White, Bath refused to reveal the owners of Skyways stock. But Brewton’s research revealed that documents filed in another lawsuit indicated that Mahfouz owned Skyways.

One of the original subscribers to the renamed Cotopax Investments, Cayhaven Corporate Services, Ltd., was also a subscriber to I.C., Inc. -- incorporated in 1985 -- but curiously found in the very center of a chart drawn by Oliver North, found by investigators in North’s White House safe. The chart showed the private network that provided support and money to the Iran-Contras -- another story with multiple legs.

CONTINUED...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/bin_ladens_brother_in_law_had_close_ties_to_bush.htm

[emad]

29. More Bath/BCCI:

Snip:

Among George W.'s investors was James R. Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who had a flourishing aviation business with sheiks of the Saudi peninsula. Mr. Bath owned a piece of a Houston bank in which Mr. Pharaon, the BCCI front man, had been a controlling shareholder.

Mr. Bath also invested money in the U.S. for Mr. bin-Mahfouz, the Saudi banker who would go on to become a leading shareholder in BCCI. According to Mr. Bath's personal financial statements, produced in unrelated litigation, Mr. Bath invested $50,000 with George W. Bush, becoming a 5% partner in Arbusto. Mr. Bush says he was aware Mr. Bath was representing Saudi investors but that at the time "had never heard of BCCI."

Snip from:
http://www.random-abstract.com/archives/00000292.html

Ghaith Pharaon = very dodgy arms dealer and chum of Kissinger;

Edit:
"It is therefore not surprising to find James R. Bath on the list of shareholders in two other companies controlled by George W. Bush - Arbusto '79 Ltd. and Arbusto '80 Ltd. In the late 1970s, James R. Bath, a wealthy Texas entrepreneur, invested $50,000 in these companies to get them off the ground. At the time, he was the U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden according to the terms of a 1976 trust agreement. It came out later, in 1993, in an official U.S. document, that he was also the legal representative of Khalid bin Mahfous.

The two entities founded by George W. Bush were later merged with Harken Energy; all traces of these transactions have disappeared. Khalid bin Mahfouz was very active in Texas at the time. During a deposition before the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), James R. Bath claimed to own Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd. which in fact belonged to Khalid bin Mahfouz.

In 1990, Mahfouz procured a loan of $1.4 million for James R. Bath, allowing him to buy a stake in the Houston Airport. Following Salem bin Laden's death in 1988, Khalid bin Mahuouz took back this holding."

Snip from:

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/Investcorp.htm


Link to Richard Helms/BCCI:


"The connection between the Bush and bin Laden families can also be traced to the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in the 1990s. Members of the Anglo Pakistani bank’s board of directors included Richard Helms and William Casey, business partners of George Bush senior and former CIA agents. During their time at BCCI both Helms and Casey worked alongside fellow director, Adnan Khasshoggi, who also represented the bin Laden family’s interests in the US."

From:
http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/ds2/rebuildcarl.htm

[emad]

19. Anyone have anything on forthcoming Bank of America V BCCI?

And any Kerry involvement? Just a thought after finding this:



Old Lady won't be keen on President Kerry

Conal Walsh on how the Democrat was a big critic over BCCI

Sunday February 15, 2004
The Observer

If John Kerry, the Democrat from Massachussetts, gets to the White House this November, they won't be cheering his victory in Threadneedle Street.
He may be riding high in the US presidential race today, but Kerry first came to Britain's attention as the senator who accused the Bank of England of turning a blind eye to fraud at BCCI.

Kerry led the Senate's investigation into BCCI's multibillion-dollar crash, and here's what he had to say: 'The Bank of England delayed unconscionably in closing BCCI, and millions of investors were hurt... It was negligent and costly... I'm saying very directly that the Bank of England had sufficient information in front of it to close BCCI 15 months earlier than it did.'

That was back in 1992, and it's not something the Bank needs to be reminded of. But Kerry is probably one of the few people in the world who know the vast and complex BCCI affair inside out. He is one of the Old Lady's sharpest critics and, come New Year, he could also be the world's most powerful man.

Which can hardly be comforting to the Bank as it seeks to defend itself against a huge compensation action brought by BCCI's victims at the High Court in London. This began last month and will still be going on beyond Kerry's likely endorsement as Democrat candidate, and even, probably, beyond his showdown with George W Bush.

At the time, the Bank tried to dismiss Kerry's conclusions as 'extraordinary' and having 'no factual basis'. But later it was also pilloried by the official British report into the BCCI disaster, and these days not even the Bank denies that it was at fault. After all, it was financial regulator when the London-based finance house collapsed in 1991 with £7 billion of undeclared debts - the biggest banking fraud in history.

But the Bank strongly denies it was deliberately negligent. This is the central claim made by BCCI's creditors in the current London trial, and threatens to overturn the Bank's legal immunity (as a Government agency) from being sued.

Lawyers for the creditors, who are demanding damages of £1bn, have spent the first few weeks of the trial airing internal Bank memos. They seem to show that Threadneedle Street long suspected BCCI's involvement in a range of criminal activities, but chose not to intervene - allegedly in the expectation that it could shift responsibility for a messy scandal on to regulators abroad.

Among the intelligence received by the Bank during the Eighties were claims - later proved true - that Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, and Abu Nidal's terrorist organisation were using BCCI accounts to launder money. Bank officials also had long-standing doubts about BCCI's solvency, but apparently did not step in.

Further questions are going to be asked about what Ministers, civil servants and some of the City's top institutions knew about BCCI before its meltdown. Meanwhile, BCCI is fast becoming a fashionable subject again in Washington, too, as the US media pore over their would-be president's record.

Kerry spent almost two years leading the powerful Foreign Relations Sub-committee's investigation of the meltdown, memorably describing BCCI's activities as 'a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers'. He damned the Bank in his 800-page report, as well as Price Waterhouse, BCCI's auditor.

Some commentators suggest Kerry 'went easy' at the time on Clark Clifford, a prominent Democrat and former US Defence Secretary with ties to BCCI. On the other hand, one of the (unheeded) recommendations he made in his report - that US authorities actively pursue evidence that BCCI was being used to fund an incipient Pakistani nuclear programme - now seems prescient, given recent revelations about Pakistan's role in nuclear proliferation.

Kerry plans to make a crackdown on banking secrecy and tougher regulation a key component of his campaigning rhetoric. For the Bank of England, that could yet mean an unwanted role in America's presidential race.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1148263,00.html

Also:
Bankable reputation

Mark Tran remembers John Kerry as courteous and careful in his Senate investigation into BCCI. Whether these qualities are Bush-beating is another question

http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1137002,00.html

[seemslikeadream]

20. Bank of America

Is there a relationship with Riggs Bank, uncle John Bush's bank?

[emad]

21. Don't know if anything new has been posted since this DU:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=557727

[seemslikeadream]

22. Thanks so much for sending me back to myself - Princess Haifa

Bush redacted the Saudis to protect his uncle


The checks from Princess Haifa (which ended up in the hands of hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi) were drawn on Riggs Bank in Washington D.C. One of the chief officers of Riggs Bank is Jonathan Bush, an uncle of President George W. Bush.

According to Margie Burns in her article titled Bush-connected firm provided security at World Trade Center, "Given that Jonathan Bush, the president's uncle, is a Riggs executive, it is difficult to understand any obstacle for US authorities pursuing the recently reported "Saudi money trail." The princess's charitable activities were processed through Riggs, but attention focused on the Saudis seems not to extend to the US bank they used."

So this is most likely one of the main reasons why information relating to the funding of Al Qaeda by the Saudis has been redacted from the report. If Bush was really serious about starving the terrorists of their funding, he'd have to start by seizing Saudi money from his Uncle Jonathan's bank in Washington D.C.

So it appears to me, that the redaction of the Saudi information from the 9-11 Report had more to do with covering the President's own ass from the embarrassing fact that his own uncle was part of the Saudi money trail that enabled two of the hijackers to crash a plane into the Pentagon, and very little to do with jeopardizing our national security at all.
http://www.opednews.com/duncan_bush_should_cry_uncle_and_releas.htm

well...isn't that a surprise...NOT..in other news,,,plane crashed today


Small Plane Crashes Near BWI
May 14, 2004 4:50 pm US/Eastern

(WJZ) A small cargo plane carrying checks and financial documents crashed Friday morning into a residential home near the Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Ferndale, Anne Arundel County. The pilot, 34 year-old Thomas Lennon, of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania was killed. Lennon was the only person on board. The plane clipped some trees and smashed a truck and boat but did not injury anyone on the ground. The plane came to rest near the front door of a home on Ferndale Road. It left a path of wreckage 300 feet long.


~snip~

The plane is owned by Atlanta-based Epps Aviation. It flies checks and other financial paperwork for banks throughout the Northeast. An Epps company spokesman says its the first fatality in the over 20 years they've run the business.
more:
http://wjz.com/localstories/local_story_135144400.html

Feb 26: Questions regarding Riggs handling of Saudi accounts


From Feb 26

Lawyers for 9/11 Victims Seek Bank Records

Washington (AP) - The D.C.-based parent company of Riggs National Bank has been subpoenaed by lawyers representing the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawyers are seeking information about how the company handled the Embassy of Saudi Arabia's bank accounts.

The attorneys say they want to know whether Riggs may have helped facilitate the transfer of millions of dollars in funds to the hijackers - or to so-called charities that funnel funds to al-Qaida.
http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0204/128985.html

Washington Post headline Saturday: Web Site Cites Bush-Riggs Link


A political Web site written by a Democratic operative drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28396-2004May14.html
Riggs Fined 25 Million for Laundering Saudi money linked to 911


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20942-2004Apr17.html

Investigators are looking at the Saudi accounts for evidence of money laundering, which is the use of complex transactions to hide the origin or destination of funds related to illegal activities such as drug smuggling or terrorist acts. The investigators have reached no conclusions about the reasons for the transactions in the embassy accounts, including the personal accounts of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

[emad]

23. Some by Michelle Mairesse "The Bush-Saudi Connection":

http://www.hermes-press.com/BushSaud.htm