Word: pakistani
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With Britain absorbed by the scandal, a London court suspended the liquidation of B.C.C.I. accounts in the country to seek a bailout for 120,000 local depositors, who held a total of $400 million in the bank. The outraged victims of the shutdown, who included Indian and Pakistani families and some 30 municipalities, stood to receive just 75% of their money, up to a maximum of about $25,000. But Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi who acquired control of B.C.C.I. for $1 billion last year, was still fuming because the clampdown shuttered the bank...
...with the putative mission of becoming the Muslim world's first banking powerhouse. Though it was incorporated in Luxembourg and headquartered in London, had more than 400 branches and subsidiaries around the world and was nominally owned by Arab shareholders from the gulf countries, B.C.C.I. was always a Pakistani bank, with its heart in Karachi. Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank's founder and leader until his ouster last year, is a Pakistani, as are most of the bank's former middle managers. And it was in Pakistan that the bank's most prodigiously corrupt division was spawned...
...typical operation took place in April 1989, when a container ship from Colombia docked during the night at Karachi, Pakistan. Black-unit operatives met the ship after paying $100,000 in bribes to Pakistani customs officials. The band unloaded large wooden crates from several containers. "They were so heavy we had to use a crane rather than a forklift," says a participant. The crates were trucked to a "secure airport" and loaded aboard an unmarked 707 jet, where an American, believed by the black-unit members to be a CIA agent, supervised the frantic activity...
...authorities sift through B.C.C.I. subsidiaries around the world, they are trying to cope with potentially massive losses of depositors' money. The Pakistani press spoke of "panic withdrawals," and one paper added that "smugglers and drug barons" were desperately trying to rescue their offshore accounts. In such countries as Nigeria and Botswana, officials were worried that central-bank deposits at B.C.C.I. might be lost...
Nowhere was the anguish and turmoil over B.C.C.I.'s collapse greater than in Britain, where the Bank of England froze more than $400 million of deposits in 120,000 accounts held largely by Indian and Pakistani families and small businesses. The outraged depositors included some 60 municipalities that had placed as much as $160 million of public funds in B.C.C.I. accounts. Customers may have to wait months to receive what is insured under British law: 75% of their money, up to a maximum of (pounds)15,000, or $24,000 at current exchange rates. Shaken B.C.C.I. depositors jammed hastily arranged...