Word: noriega
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Superlatives are quickly exhausted: it is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein and the Colombian drug barons. B.C.C.I. even accomplished a Stealth-like invasion of the U.S. banking industry by secretly buying First American Bankshares, a Washington-based holding company with offices stretching from Florida to New York, whose chairman is former U.S. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford...
...themselves cut off from their funds. Political sniping broke out in Britain when members of the opposition Labour Party attacked regulators for hastily closing 25 branches of B.C.C.I. across the country. Panama pleaded with the Bank of England to return $18 million of government funds that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega had squirreled away in B.C.C.I. accounts in Britain. In the African republic of Botswana, officials kept the local B.C.C.I. branch open and guaranteed all loans and deposits to prevent...
...early years a cell's financier would cart the money to a local bank and wire it to Panama. The cartel had a personal banker there: First Interamericas Bank, owned by Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela. In 1985 the U.S. government forced Manuel Noriega to close Interamericas and required U.S. banks to report all large cash transactions...
...vivid page from a worldwide scandal that began with B.C.C.I.'s indictment in 1988 for money laundering. Investigators now view B.C.C.I. as the largest criminal corporate enterprise in modern history, a secret banking network that served drug smugglers, tax evaders, arms dealers and rapacious tyrants, including Panama's Manuel Noriega. Four grand juries are probing the bank, while investigators from the New York district attorney's office, Congress and the Department of Justice are grappling with mountains of seized records. Most prominent among those embroiled in the scandal is former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. He is chairman of the largest...
Gelb also labeled Bush's pre-war Middle-East policy as "indifferent and ignorant," saying that in allowing for the build-up of the Iraqi military capability, the administration repeated the policy errors that led to the rise of Manuel Noriega in Panama...