LONDON, 20 May — Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the UK Treasury, the Bush administration and even the former international auditors Coopers & Lybrand, now part of PricewaterhouseCoopers, might rightly claim that they are being haunted by these unseemingly phenomena.
Needless to say, to the hundreds of small shareholders, depositors, savers and employees involved, these apparitions are in fact the reality of lost investments, savings and jobs.
In London Treasury officials have been fighting a legal bid by the creditors of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI), which crashed more than a decade ago, to force them to release confidential papers about the British government’s role in the collapse of the controversial bank.
A High Court decision in London is imminent and if it goes against the Treasury then the creditors, led by the bank’s liquidator Deloitte & Touche, would have access to papers and documents that could reveal what ministers, civil servants and regulators knew about BCCI before its notorious collapse with debts of more than $10 billion.
Last year, Deloitte & Touche won the right to sue the Bank of England for failure to properly supervise BCCI, whose operational headquarters was based in the City of London. In fact, the civil trial has been set to start in April 2003, almost 12 years after the actual collapse of BCCI and a full decade after Lord Bingham’s Report in 1992 into the collapse of BCCI strongly censured the Bank of England for its failure in supervising the Arab-owned institution.
Across the Atlantic, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, last week threatened to subpoena the White House to establish what contacts the Bush administration had with the failed US energy giant Enron Corporation, a large corporate donor to the Bush presidential campaign. The committee has failed to get any information from the White House since it put in such a request in early March this year. It has blamed White House counsel for refusing to cooperate and to provide the necessary information. Both President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were close friends of Enron CEO Kenneth Lay. The committee is trying to establish whether Enron and other energy corporates exercised undue influence on the Bush administration energy policy, which has been criticized by critics and environmentalists as pro-business and anti-environment.
In yet another scandal of yesteryear, the collapse in 1995 of blue-chip British merchant bank Barings, following 827 million pounds in losses which resulted from illegal trading by a “rogue” trade Nick Leeson, the accountants acting for Barings, Coopers & Lybrand have had their fine reduced on appeal from 1 million pounds to 250,000 pounds. A joint disciplinary tribunal in 2000 gave the accountants a severe reprimand for their audit failures at Barings.
There are those who stress that the much bigger scandal is the time it is taking for the wheels of justice to turn. The irony is that the very people that are trying to spike the wheels in the above scandals are the governments that are fighting a “just” war against “international terrorism” and money laundering.
Take for instance the BCCI case. Even though the Bingham Report castigated the Bank of England for its supervisory failures, the major part of the report remains confidential and out of the public information domain. A certain shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown at the time called on the Conservative government of John Major to release the evidence. Brown of course is the chancellor of the exchequer today and the Treasury still refuses to release the documents. So much so for “accountability”, open government and the audit culture that has supposedly sprung up in Western democracies in recent years. And the poor tax payer gets mugged yet again as costs spiral. In the case of BCCI, the UK government has already spent 10 million pounds in legal fees to keep these BCCI papers out of the public domain.
At the time of the BCCI collapse, many of us questioned the almost exclusive targeting of one financial institution, when in the original endictment document filed in the district court in New York named over 20 financial institutions suspected of being involved in money laundering activities. BCCI was just one of the names, many of whom were American banks, a few European banks (including two British-registered banks), and Israeli banks. And BCCI became the focus and was transformed into an instant pariah of international banking.
There was no doubt that BCCI was mismanaged. But both independent bankers and fairly senior BCCI officials who were not implicated in any wrong-doing, still maintain that BCCI as an entity could have been saved and transformed, especially since its chief shareholder, Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, was prepared to underwrite a major multi-billion dollar rescue and restructuring plan. At the time, Bank of England Governor Eddie George defended the decision to call in the liquidators and stressed that any rescue of BCCI was not sustainable because the extent of mismanagement and fraud was too deep.
Critics of the Bank of England and the US authorities stress that on the contrary, Abu Dhabi was willing to cooperate fully in its rescue of the bank, which would have had a complete overhaul of management and even shareholders. They stress that BCCI was condemned to the history books of infamy because of political reasons. It was seen as a Muslim-owned institution, and the first global financial institution from the emerging world to challenge the hegemony of the US, European and Japanese banking majors.
That the BCCI story has yet to be told, is not in question. The role of the Luxembourg Monetary Institute where the bank’s holding company was also incorporated, has never been exposed.
Simply saying that the collapse of BCCI was a CIA or MI5 conspiracy misses the point and does a grave injustice to the thousands of ordinary innocent depositors and savers, many of whom are incidentally Muslims.
The BCCI episode, like Enron, Barings and all the others, needs closure. So that people, corporates, banks and countries can get on with their lives.
The basic question of accountability and trust impinges on all — whether the West or the emerging world. As events in the US, Europe and Japan have show in recent months, corporate culture is seriously compromised, and the relationship between governments, political parties and corporates are increasingly becoming blurred.
The danger is that the West, with its financial and political clout, and superior lobbying and litigation, will once again ride roughshod. Accountability and justice will yet again be the losers.
