The BCCI Saga ABEDI – Past, Present and Future
Enshrined in any democracy is an individual’s “God Given” right to personal privacy. A natural corollary of this is the discretion exercised by financial institutions, the fundamental premise of the management of funds for any entity, personal and/or corporate individual and/or collective. To that end, banking is necessarily a secretive discipline, bankers may be taciturn by force of circumstances, reserve becomes their first nature. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, Jersey Islands, etc are famous havens for the depositing of excess funds, most of them can be said to be of illegal status, case in point the frustrating search for the Marcos billions. Secrecy in banking remains the greatest attribute for success, far from being any disqualification. Till the middle of this century, “private banking” was almost the sole domain of the Swiss. Even now the Nazi millions are hoarded away in safe Swiss custody, in many of the cases the owners have ceased to exist. On the other hand flamboyance is often considered an anathema by the conservative world of bankers and is treated with ambivalence bordering on apprehension. If you should add blatant aggressiveness to this you will have a volatile mix which is not conducive to the palate of the world of international banking, no matter that they themselves operate just as brashly, but from (and in) the shadows. To that end, Agha Hassan Abedi represented an anachronism, a banker in the traditional mould who kept the financial dealings of his clients confidential but who maintained an extremely high profile by moving comfortably among Kings, Presidents, Sheikhs, Princes, Senior Government functionaries, etc. While he confined himself to the oil-rich Kingdoms and States as well as the impoverished centres of the Third World he was tolerated, his move into the bastions of the developed world led to his ultimate undoing. However, one must caution here against any orchestrated litanies against the so-called Jewish lobby. Living in a world of conspiracies we have begun to believe that every action not to our liking is a conspiracy. One must indulge in self-criticism about one’s shortcomings before passing on the buck to all and sundry.
