False Profits

The deception began with its name, for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was never truly a bank. BCCI was, from the start, a monstrous fraud: behind a convincing facade, a shadowy group of Pakistani financiers and Arab sheikhs organized a criminal enterprise of unprecedented proportions. Now, in this authoritative book, two award-winning journalists tell the shocking story of how BCCI used an array of schemes to steal billions of dollars and ultimately buy political influence in the United States and around the world. BCCI’s charismatic founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, liked to speak about his bank’s “moral mission.” BCCI would be the first global Third World bank, a financial institution committed to aiding people in developing countries. Instead, Abedi and his allies did exactly the opposite, robbing innocent depositors of their savings, assisting dictators in the looting of their countries’ treasuries, and doing a brisk business with terrorists and drug lords. With the help of Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, and other notorious villains, BCCI built an empire that operated in seventy-three countries and controlled $30 billion in deposits. But BCCI also had a political agenda: by secretly taking over the largest banking institution in Washington, D.C., and corrupting a host of powerful politicians, the bank’s backers tried to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. To the men from BCCI, Washington was a city for sale, and here for the first time are full accounts of BCCI’s troubling relationships with Clark Clifford, Jimmy Carter, Orrin Hatch, and several members of George Bush’s administration and family. The authors also explore the bank’s ties to the murky world of intelligence, and prove that both the CIA and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency were deeply involved in BCCI – perhaps from the beginning. How did this criminal rampage last for nearly twenty years? Rarely was BCCI hindered by regulators or law enforcement officials; even after the bank