Word: altmans
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...departure of Clifford, a venerated Democratic Party elder, and bank president Robert Altman, who also resigned, came after intense prodding by the Federal Reserve Board. The regulators have been seeking to restore public confidence in First American (assets: $11 billion), which has been plagued by troubled real estate loans in the Washington area. Last spring the Fed tapped former Republican Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland to head a committee of directors to oversee First American. While Clifford, 84, and law partner Altman, 44, retained their titles, investigators told TIME that the Mathias group gradually took over their duties. "It started...
...then the Federal Reserve, which last month fined B.C.C.I. $200 million for secretly acquiring First American and two other U.S. banking companies, had decided that Clifford and Altman had to go. To shore up the bank, regulators picked former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to succeed his longtime friend Clifford as chairman...
Just as Pharaon came to CenTrust's aid, so members of Washington's power elite have frequently gone to bat for B.C.C.I. Jack Blum, the former chief investigator for Kerry's subcommittee, stunned the hearing last week by declaring that Altman and Clifford advised Amjad Awan, a B.C.C.I. official who had run the bank's Panama office, to flee the U.S. for Paris in 1988 to avoid a congressional subpoena. Altman, a fast-rising star in Washington legal and social circles, then reportedly arranged for B.C.C.I. to transfer Awan to Paris. But Carl Rauh, an attorney for Clifford and Altman...
...Raab charged that the Bush Administration had taken a "lackadaisical" approach to prosecuting B.C.C.I. in part because the bank used Beltway insiders such as Clifford and Altman to lobby federal regulators. "If you were to look at the Rolodexes at B.C.C.I.," he said, they would show "the blue chips of Washington influence peddlers." As a result, he said, "senior U.S. policy-level officials were constantly under the impression that B.C.C.I. was probably not that bad because these good guys who they play golf with all the time were representing them...
Whatever the reason, regulators around the world certainly allowed B.C.C.I. to flourish far too long. The alliance with Altman and Clifford's First American Bankshares was clearly -- and apparently successfully -- designed to win respectability in the American power establishment. The link with Paul's CenTrust S&L was a pipeline to the fast-buck financial arrivistes of the '80s -- a joining of hands by what history may well describe as the two great scandals of the century...