This book exposesrms deals, peddling influences, bribing politicians, defrauding depositors, sponsoring spies--and how it collapsed like a house of cards. Dirty Money is packed with as much espionage and intrigue as a Ken Follett novel. 25 pho tographs.
From the two Time correspondents who cracked the story, the definitive book on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International: an explosive, fast-paced expose of one of the largest criminal conspiracies in history. Beaty and Gwynne's riveting first-person account not only puts all the pieces together for the first time, but brings to life the cloak-and-dagger intrigue that surrounded their investigation. 16 pages of photos.
Its nickname was the Bank of Crooks and Criminals, but BCCI was much more than just a dirty bank. Started by a shadowy group of Pakistani financiers and Arab sheiks, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International quickly became a global criminal organization. Now two award-winning journalists who have tracked BCCI for a decade reveal how these wolves escaped prosecution for so long and detail the roles of Jimmy Carter, William Casey, and members of the Bush administration and family. 8 pages of photos.
Financial crime affects virtually all areas of public policy and is increasingly transnational. The essays in this volume address both the theoretical and policy issues arising from financial crime and feature a wide variety of case studies, and cover topics such as state revenue collection, criminal enterprises, money laundering, the use of new technologies and methods in financial crime, corruption, terrorism, proliferation of WMD, sanctions, third-world debt, procurement, telecommunications, cyberspace, the defense industry and intellectual property. Taken together, these essays form a must-read collection for scholars and students in law, finance and criminology.
In recent years, we have seen massive fines and penalties dished out to almost every major bank in the world for breaking the law. Yet these banks are considered ‘too big to indict’ in today’s world, due to the threat of destabilizing the financial system... Double Standards travels 25 years back to explore the story of a bank, with roots in the Middle East, that rose to prominence and became the fastest-growing bank in the world. It was called the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, known as BCCI, and became the 4th largest bank in the world by 1991. It became the bridge between the Third World and the West and at its height was bailing out governments in developing countries, like the IMF or World Bank. It was also a favourite port of call for some more notorious clientele, like the CIA, who used the bank to facilitate its covert operations overseas. The Bank of England and US authorities shut the BCCI down amidst allegations of fraud in July 1991, making over 14,000 employees redundant and leaving over 1 million customers out of pocket. Double Standards revisits the actions taken by the Bank of England and the regulatory authorities with regards to BCCI and carries out an academic analysis to compare its treatment with the major banking scandals following the global financial meltdown in 2008. The malpractice that BCCI was accused of was on par with a parking violation compared to the actions of the bigger banks of today, yet the fines and penalties to these banks are not as severe as the punishment meted out to BCCI. Why was the bank shut and, more importantly, who benefitted from its closure? This informative analysis of BCCI’s rise and fall will appeal to those with an interest in finance and banking law.
For more than forty years, Clark Clifford was Washington's consummate Democratic power broker - attorney and adviser to the nation's most influential leaders. His 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, looked back on a remarkable career of public service. But the very year his autobiography was published, the Clifford legend began to crumble. Caught up in the scandal that destroyed the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the eighty-five-year-old Clifford was arrested on charges relating to his law firm's involvement with the outlaw bank. Though his case never went to trial, and his protege, Robert Altman, was found not guilty, Clifford's reputation was in ruins. How could such a man come to such an end? What happened? And why? In Friends in High Places, a noted investigative reporter and a chief investigator in the Senate inquiry on BCCI provide the answers. Drawing on original documents, more than a hundred interviews with Clifford's friends and adversaries, and fifty hours of interviews with Clifford himself, the authors reveal the drive and shrewdness that led Clifford to the pinnacle of power - and demonstrate convincingly that his involvement with BCCI was no aberration, but the bitter fruit of seeds planted at the beginning.
A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, Casey Michel's American Kleptocracy offers an explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known. "An indefatigable young American journalist who has virtually cornered the international kleptocracy beat on the US end of the black aquifer." —The Los Angeles Review of Books For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA. American Kleptocracy examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring took place: how states like Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company, and how post-9/11 reformers watched their success usher in a new flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S.; how African despots and post-Soviet oligarchs came to dominate American coastlines, American industries, and entire cities and small towns across the American Midwest; how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing trans-national crooks and despots, and how dirty money has now begun infiltrating America's universities and think tanks and cultural centers; and how those on the front-line are trying to restore America's legacy of anti-corruption leadership—and finally end this reign of American kleptocracy.