Word: abedi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...organizations had a strong human link as well, grounded in the friendship between B.C.C.I. founder Agha Hasan Abedi and Bank of America's A.W. (Tom) Clausen, who was chairman during 1970-81 and 1986-90. When regulators seized B.C.C.I. offices around the world last July, three of the seven directors on its board were former high-ranking Bank of America executives. On that same day, the California bank disclosed that it still had $177.4 million of B.C.C.I.'s money in its accounts...
While munitions-control experts in the U.S. have evidence that B.C.C.I. played a role in the delivery of munitions-grade nuclear hardware and technology to Iraq and Iran, it is the Pakistanis who are the chief beneficiaries of Abedi's multifarious services. "You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services," says an international arms broker, who provided details of recent B.C.C.I.-generated orders for nuclear-bomb supplies for Pakistan. "And in Karachi his bankers are surprisingly patriotic...
...Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, including a B.C.C.I.-brokered sale of midrange ballistic missiles to ( the Saudis in 1988. By way of explanation, they cite B.C.C.I.'s close banking relations with China, where $400 million in assets were frozen after the bank's offices were shut down in July. Abedi's bank had been the first Western-style bank allowed to operate on the communist mainland, in part because of Abedi's early support of CITIC, the Chinese investment company that is the doorway to China's military-industrial complex. China, starved for hard currency, has thus far not signed...
Arms dealers are not the only ones to describe a pact between Abedi's bank and China's weapons industry: according to State Department sources, China has also used B.C.C.I. as a middleman in Silkworm missile sales to Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Silkworm missiles sold to Iraq and Saudi Arabia were equipped with sophisticated Israeli-manufactured guidance systems, the government sources say. Arms dealers who have done business with B.C.C.I. say its officers attracted illegal deals because the bank provided documentation and letters of credit for arms being shipped, for example, as agricultural machinery, and that it routinely...
...spite of the virtual global shutdown of B.C.C.I., the bank remains intact in its traditional haven, Pakistan. Though other press reports maintain that Abedi is physically frail and often incoherent, TIME has interviewed several business associates who say he remains a major figure in the international weapons trade. He has held a press conference within the past month, and is in the process of licensing a new bank in Pakistan, called the Progressive Bank...