Word: abedi
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...Abedi's bank was designed from the first to appear to be financed by enormously rich Arabs from the gulf states. But sources close to the bank say that from the beginning, Abedi offered well-connected Arabs free stock in the bank by lending them the money to buy the shares without requiring repayment. Says an associate who has known Abedi since he created B.C.C.I.: "Abedi's genius was that he took the Middle Eastern custom of using front men to disguise his real interests and control and applied it globally...
...every account, Abedi was a brilliant banker, and his financial empire was built to make the movement of money as invisible as possible. His tangle of offshore corporations, banks, trusts and foundations is one of the most complex and secretive banking networks ever developed. As a result, his market includes tax avoiders, intelligence agencies, political bribers, arms dealers, narcotics traffickers and national leaders bent on looting their countries (Manuel Noriega was a customer). Former B.C.C.I. bankers estimate that 15% to 20% of B.C.C.I.'s multibillion-dollar cash flow involved flight capital -- "unofficial money," as they prefer to call...
B.C.C.I.'s modus operandi for gaining political influence was as simple as its banking methods were convoluted. The formula: money. Abedi found his opening wedge in the U.S. in late 1976, when he looked to Georgia, home of then President-elect Carter, and the rotund personage of Carter confidant Bert Lance. In deep financial trouble with his National Bank of Georgia and beset by regulators for past banking indiscretions, Lance was all too glad to be put on B.C.C.I.'s payroll as a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi declared Lance was his "unofficial ambassador . . . brought in to give...
...Abedi began playing his Lance card immediately, introducing Lance to his close business associate Ghaith Pharaon in Washington in late 1977. Pharaon, then 36, was a Harvard-educated Saudi who had parlayed royal-family connections into a Jidda construction fortune. He and a group of Arab investors from the gulf had earlier that year acted as fronts for Abedi's purchase of Pakistan's largest oil company. Now Abedi told Lance that Pharaon was, fortuitously it seemed, looking for an American bank to buy. Lance had resigned in September as Carter's budget director under charges of impropriety...
...Lance connection was paying off elsewhere as well. When Lance resigned, he hired Washington attorney Robert Altman to represent him. Through this connection, Abedi met Clifford, his key U.S. contact and a man who wielded precisely the sort of influence the Pakistani banker was looking...