Word: abedi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Clifford and law partner Robert Altman, who is First American's president, are now under scrutiny by a New York grand jury seeking to determine whether the pair were knowing front men for one of the most ingenious bank tycoons of the modern age: B.C.C.I.'s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi of Pakistan. Clifford and Altman insist they were not, despite long and close connections. They were attorneys for B.C.C.I. from 1978 through 1990, as well as attorneys for First American, billing the two banks for more than $1 million during that period. Clifford, who has long defended Abedi, says...
...Abedi, who left B.C.C.I. last year after a stroke that followed a 1988 heart transplant, built his business on careful attention to the needs of top-drawer customers. In the bank's early days, B.C.C.I. officials in London could be roused in the middle of the night to make good on visiting sheiks' gambling losses. Abedi cultivated the friendship of former Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq and other Third World leaders. "He was a collector of people," says a Pakistani journalist who has followed Abedi. "He used Zia as a calling card...
...What Abedi coveted most was the prestige of a bank in the U.S., the nerve center of Western capitalism. After regulators rejected two B.C.C.I. bids for American banks in the 1970s -- Abedi wouldn't reveal all the information they wanted -- he helped Saudi billionaire Ghaith R. Pharaon acquire the National Bank of Georgia in 1978 from Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's former budget director. Soon after that, Lance helped Abedi orchestrate a raid on Financial General Bankshares of Washington. The purchasers were four Middle Eastern shareholders of B.C.C.I. The hostile bid triggered a three-year court battle in which...
...buyers were ! acting as individuals on their own behalf. When questioned about B.C.C.I.'s financial role in the acquisition, Clifford flatly told the officials that there wasn't any. Clifford became chairman of the bank, renamed First American, and his law partner, Robert Altman, became president. Clifford regularly briefed Abedi on the U.S. firm's operations. When queried on the briefings, Clifford explained that B.C.C.I. as adviser to the Arab owners of First American needed to know about the banking company...
...more witnesses, who were later secretly taped by teams of customs and IRS agents while being interrogated by Kerry's chief counsel. One provided details of B.C.C.I.'s money-laundering operations in the U.S. and Latin America. The B.C.C.I. executive described a B.C.C.I. management conference in Vienna at which Abedi openly displayed charts of B.C.C.I. holdings that included First American. This senior-level manager said Clifford and Altman were at the meeting...