Word: pakistani
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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THEY WERE BOTH SELF-MADE MEN WHO BUILT THEIR empires on the ill-placed confidence of lenders and investors. One of the con men was a Pakistani banker who exercised influence from Washington to Beijing but was in fact running a financial supermarket for criminals. The other was a 300-lb. tabloid tycoon whose fatal plunge into the Atlantic was one of the most bizarre finales in business history. When their empires came crashing down in 1991, the debacles raised pointed questions about the laxity of financial regulations around the world...
...mountain of bewilderingly complex information that has been made public about B.C.C.I. has made it easy to lose sight of why so many are agitated about this rogue Pakistani bank or why its connection to a former White House aide should be such an egregious sin. B.C.C.I. was the largest criminal enterprise in history, a bank whose principals stole an estimated $12 billion from their depositors. In the U.S., B.C.C.I. used Miami as a staging ground for the largest single drug-money operation yet recorded, secretly bought and helped run the largest bank in Washington, and played a key role...
With that kind of muscle, B.C.C.I. was able to secure substantial business from one of the world's pre-eminent makers of military aircraft, Dassault Aviation, the French company that produces the Mirage jet fighter. According to Arif Durrani, a B.C.C.I.-financed Pakistani arms dealer now doing time in a U.S. federal prison for illegally providing Hawk antiaircraft missile parts to Iran during the Iran-contra era, one of the biggest Mirage dealers in the world is a Pakistani multimillionaire named Asaf Ali. "Just as Ghaith Pharaon fronts for B.C.C.I. to purchase banks and businesses, Asaf is B.C.C.I...
...recent deal, Asaf, displaying the political dexterity of a superpower, brokered the sale of 49 Mirage 2000s to India and then, to maintain parity, provided Pakistan with a similar number of new and used Mirages. To fill the Pakistani order, investigators looking at the deal say, he rerouted nearly two dozen Mirages, yet to be paid for, originally brokered through B.C.C.I. to Peru. A political scandal enveloping B.C.C.I. in Peru focuses in part on the financial transactions in the on-again-off-again Mirage deal. But last week a Dassault spokesman, Francois Prigent, briskly dismissed any responsibility. "The shipment...
...arrest last month of a retired Pakistani general brought into sharp focus B.C.C.I.'s role in selling nuclear secrets. General Inam ul-Haq, who was arrested in Germany, has been sought since 1987 by U.S. authorities in connection with the purchase of nuclear weapons-grade steel for Pakistan's bomb-development program. The Justice Department says that B.C.C.I. was Inam's financier, and the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The alarm has spread to other branches of the U.S. government. In a recent letter to Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairman John Glenn, a Democrat from Ohio...