Word: centrust
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...Altman, who served as attorneys for B.C.C.I. throughout the 1980s, have denied knowing it owned First American. The other two secretly owned banks were the National Bank of Georgia, which Ghaith Pharaon, a Saudi tycoon and B.C.C.I. front man, acquired from Carter Administration official Bert Lance, and Miami's CenTrust Savings. Pharaon used B.C.C.I. funds to become a partner of financier David Paul, who built CenTrust into a giant house of cards before it collapsed last year at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1.7 billion...
Even as countries strove to pierce the veil of deceit and corruption that shrouds B.C.C.I., fresh disclosures of the bank's influence peddling came to light. TIME has learned that Pharaon helped keep CenTrust open for a year longer than its bankrupt condition warranted after acquiring a total of 1.5 million CenTrust shares, or more than 5% of the S&L's stock, in 1988 and 1989. CenTrust was so shaky by late 1988 that regulators for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Atlanta had decided to shut it down...
Pharaon and Paul, who is a target of a Miami grand jury investigation of CenTrust, struggled to keep the institution's doors -- and coffers -- open. Pharaon assured regulators that he was backed by oil-rich Arabs who would keep CenTrust solvent. When that tack failed to deter officials, Pharaon and Paul flew CenTrust's corporate jet to Washington to give similar promises to M. Danny Wall, who chaired the Home Loan Bank Board at the time. (Wall recalled the meeting in an interview but said he could not remember the outcome.) After the session, regulators said CenTrust could remain open...
...once regulators let CenTrust stay in business, B.C.C.I. whisked the $30 million back into its own accounts. By the time CenTrust formally went bust in 1990, the yearlong delay in closing the thrift may have cost American taxpayers as much as $1 billion in extra bailout expenses...
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...