Word: abedi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world's first banking powerhouse. Though it was incorporated in Luxembourg and headquartered in London, had more than 400 branches and subsidiaries around the world and was nominally owned by Arab shareholders from the gulf countries, B.C.C.I. was always a Pakistani bank, with its heart in Karachi. Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank's founder and leader until his ouster last year, is a Pakistani, as are most of the bank's former middle managers. And it was in Pakistan that the bank's most prodigiously corrupt division was spawned...
...what of Abedi, the genius behind it all? His heart attack and a later heart transplant stopped his direct control of B.C.C.I. in 1988, which proved disastrous for the bank. Already in trouble from too rapid expansion, and dependent on constantly increasing deposits to keep the cooked books from revealing the growing problems, B.C.C.I. could not hold together without Abedi -- as the audit released last year revealed. He resigned officially from the bank last year, and is living in semiretirement in Karachi. Authorities in several countries would surely like to get their hands on him. His connections with Pakistan...
...political value of Abedi's connections to wealthy Middle Easterners was never more apparent than in the case of CenTrust Savings Bank of Miami. CenTrust, acquired by real estate developer David Paul in 1983 and now infamous as the S&L that spent its money on bathroom sinks made of pure gold, raised eyebrows in the regulatory community in the mid-1980s when it invested massively in junk bonds...
...CenTrust float $200 million in bonds to shore it up. B.C.C.I. contributed $25 million of that amount. Bank regulators thus postponed CenTrust's death by more than a year and raised the cost of the eventual bailout by hundreds of millions. In the grand jury investigation in Miami, Abedi's bank stands accused of parking the $25 million temporarily to dress up CenTrust's books for the regulators...
...news that the world's fastest-growing international bank, no longer headed by its financial genius founder, was in deep trouble. Hundreds of millions of dollars was missing from its capital accounts, and hundreds of millions more consisted of loans granted to insiders to buy stock in Agha Hasan Abedi's banks. Such loans were never meant to be repaid, and now the accumulating interest charges had grown so large they could not be ignored. The reason for the grim announcement was an audit by the British office of the Price Waterhouse accounting firm that revealed for the first time...