Word: pharaonically
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Clifford and Altman are not the only U.S. connections to B.C.C.I. that the New York grand jury is looking into. Investigators suspect that wealthy Saudi businessman Ghaith Pharaon, who purchased the troubled National Bank of Georgia from President Carter's friend and onetime budget chief Bert Lance and later sold it to First American, has been a front man for Abedi. Banking regulators are probing another Pharaon holding -- Independence Bank in Encino, Calif. -- to see if Abedi or B.C.C.I. is the secret owner of that bank. And a federal grand jury in Miami is tracking Pharaon's and B.C.C.I...
Abedi began playing his Lance card immediately, introducing Lance to his close business associate Ghaith Pharaon in Washington in late 1977. Pharaon, then 36, was a Harvard-educated Saudi who had parlayed royal-family connections into a Jidda construction fortune. He and a group of Arab investors from the gulf had earlier that year acted as fronts for Abedi's purchase of Pakistan's largest oil company. Now Abedi told Lance that Pharaon was, fortuitously it seemed, looking for an American bank to buy. Lance had resigned in September as Carter's budget director under charges of impropriety...
...largest recipient of such loans was apparent front man Pharaon, who got at least $280 million. According to Price Waterhouse, the loans were "$100 million in excess of limits" and exceeded 10% of the bank's capital base. Most banks would hesitate to lend anywhere near that amount of capital to a single customer. Auditors also found millions of dollars passing through Pharaon's and his brother's accounts, including stock sales and transfers, yet could find no loan agreements, promissory notes or correspondence to explain the activity...
When regulators began circling closer in 1987, Paul acquired new partners in the form of Ghaith Pharaon and his invisible sponsor, B.C.C.I. With Pharaon came the presence of apparently deep Saudi pockets, which was precisely the assurance Paul and Pharaon gave when they met in 1987 and 1988 with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's then chairman, M. Danny Wall, to argue that the bank would be able to meet its commitments...
What Abedi coveted most was the prestige of a bank in the U.S., the nerve center of Western capitalism. After regulators rejected two B.C.C.I. bids for American banks in the 1970s -- Abedi wouldn't reveal all the information they wanted -- he helped Saudi billionaire Ghaith R. Pharaon acquire the National Bank of Georgia in 1978 from Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's former budget director. Soon after that, Lance helped Abedi orchestrate a raid on Financial General Bankshares of Washington. The purchasers were four Middle Eastern shareholders of B.C.C.I. The hostile bid triggered a three-year court battle in which...