BCCI liquidators withdraw lying claim

Financial Times
By Nikki Tait, Law Courts Correspondent
Published: November 30 2004 02:00 | Last updated: November 30 2004 02:00

Liquidators of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, who are suing the Bank of England for almost £900m in damages,yesterday withdrew anallegation that the former head of the Bank's supervisory department had lied to other international regulators.

The allegation was made by the liquidators' lawyers shortly after the ground-breaking trial opened this year. They claimed that Peter Cooke, head of the department in the early 1980s, had deliberately misled other international regulators over the 1975 Basel Concordat and its guidance on how banks with international branches should be regulated.

They said Mr Cooke's action had been motivated by the Bank's concerns about BCCI and its desire to ensure that responsibility for supervising the maverick bank remained offloaded to the Luxembourg authorities. BCCI, which eventually collapsed in 1991 owing more than £10bn, was formally incorporated in Luxembourg, but ran the bulk of its business from London.

Gordon Pollock, QC, told a High Court judge yesterday that the allegations about misleading international regulators were now being withdrawn.

More:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/16036fe0-4274-11d9-8e3c-00000e2511c8.html

THIS DEVELOPMENT is not surprising given the intense amount of lobbying recently by both Margaret Thatcher and sources connected directly to former President George Herbert Bush.

Lest anyone forgets, Thatcher has just stumpted up a £165,000 bail bon for her son who is in the dock accused of financing/masterminding the Equitorial Guinea Coup for which Simon Mann was given a 34 year jail sentence last week and former EG President Moto sentenced to 63 years in absentia.

Also not forgetting that Bush1 is not sitting too pretty at the moment as his brother Jonathan Bush is CEO of a subsidiary of the RIGGS BANK which is directly implicated on the coup.

From my own contacts I would say that there is a very fine line between persuasion and actually suborning of witnesses. In this case BCCI plaintiffs have no choice because the main witnesses who could have supported this allegation of deliberate misleading of the other international regulators over the 1975 Basel Concordat.

Standlen's comments in the second part of the article sound thin and desperate. The Bank of England knows that all it takes is for security/intelligence files from MI5 and MI6 on Thatcher, ex-Bank of England Governor Robin Leigh Pemberton and all the former London-based general managers of BCCI to be subpeonaed.

Also of great importance is the testimony of former BCCI general Manager John Hilberry, whose evidence started the domino effect.

For some time the official line is that he "disappeared" after turning in evidence to the Met's fraud squad, was given a new identity and relocated until such a time as he could appear in a witness stand to put the record straight in the public domain.

I now understand that Hilberry was murdered but that a sting operation was put in place following detailed evidence as to the hirecd contract killer, his payees and crucial forensic evidence not yet discussed publicly.

You should send your post and all BCCI updates to Paul Krugman, David Corn, David Sirota and Joe Conason.

anything you send their way. The press here certainly isn't getting any information.

action that led to the closure of BCCI in the US. Wonder if he knows about this too...

I'm sure Krugman et al are quite capable of reading the Financial Times on their own. As for the rest, I think they'll want more than a post on DU.

.

This extract from The Guardian in August 1999 is relevant:


BCCI liquidators sue sheikh for £289m

Dan Atkinson
Wednesday August 11, 1999
The Guardian

Liquidators winding down the scandal-hit Bank of Credit and Commerce International are personally suing a Middle Eastern ruler for £289.4m they claim he owes the stricken bank. The debt, which dates originally from 1975, will be pursued in the high court in London.
BCCI, until its collapse in July 1991, was majority owned by the sheikh and government of Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates. This action is against the sheikh of a fellow UAE state, Sharjah.
........................

Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi - an alumnus of Exeter university - was hit by tragedy in April, when his 24-year-old son, also Mohamed, was found dead at the family's Wych Cross Place home near East Grinstead in Sussex. Heroin and alcohol were found in his system, and the East Sussex coroner ruled his death to have been caused by the non-dependent abuse of drugs.

......

Sharjah is one of the smaller emirates in a federation dominated by Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Despite oil and gas reserves, its wealth is relatively modest and attempts to make it a thriving dormitory zone for Dubai stalled when the sheikh prohibited alcohol. It is thought Sharjah may have difficulty paying the claim should it lose in court.

See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,280547,00.html

The Shaikh's son's death was always viewed as highly suspicious.....maybe a kind of Cliff Baxter-type of suicide.....

The intelligence files about this in the UK were mothballed and tombstoned pronto.

Thank you

opinion which, as an expert witness in the BCCI London class action as well as my previous testimony to Bob Morgenthau when he shut down BCCI in NYC in 1990/91, is valid I would say.

:kick: and thanks!