BCCI Banker - Khalid Bin Mahfouz was Buried Today

[Octafish]

Mr. Bin Mahfouz was a principal in BCCI,
the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, among other things…

Khalid Bin Mahfouz buried

Arab News

JEDDAH: Prominent Saudi businessman Khalid Salem Bin Mahfouz, who once headed National Commercial Bank (NCB), died of heart failure on Sunday. Born in 1949, Bin Mahfouz is survived by his wife Naelah Kaaki and three children, Abdulrahman, Sultan and Eman.

According to the family, the second son of NCB founder Salem Bin Mahfouz (who passed away in 1994) felt a pain in his chest Saturday night while at home in Jeddah’s Al-Andalus district and was rushed to a hospital. He died just before Isha prayers the following day. He was laid to rest at Al-Faisaliah cemetery in Jeddah early Monday morning.

With a personal wealth estimated to be around $3.2 billion, Bin Mahfouz ranked 24th in Arabian Business magazine’s list of the world’s richest people in 2008.

SNIP...

Bin Mahfouz was a poet, a supporter of sports and had shares in a number of press organizations, including the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (or SRMG, which publishes Arab News). His son, Abdulrahman, is a member of the SRMG board of directors.

SOURCE:

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=125575&d=18&m=8&y=2009

He was second from the right in the photo above.

Here's a small bit more on Mr. Bin Mahfouz as a prominent man of business and banking:

Khalid Bin Mahfouz: 1949 – 2009

Asharq Al-Awsat
18/08/2009

By Amal Baqazi in Jeddah

"Do for this life as if you'll live forever, do for the afterlife as if you'll die tomorrow"

This was the principle adopted by prominent Saudi businessman, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, the former director of the National Commercial Bank who passed away on Sunday after suffering a fatal heart attack.

SNIP…

Shayef also revealed to Asharq Al-Awsat that the expansion and the rapid growth seen in the National Commercial Bank's operations throughout Saudi Arabia, as well as its expansion in the international field, was one of the most prominent achievements made by Khalid Bin Mahfouz.

Shayef added that Mahfouz was able to introduce new services across all of Saudi Arabia, including investment funds and the financial corporate sector bank. Shayef also pointed out that Mahfouz began his career in banking and was involved in this industry for almost 35 years during which he had a staff of more than 5,000 employees.

CONTINUED...

http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=17810

The thing is, the money wasn't always used as it was supposed to and sometimes wasn't returned to the rightful owners. Take BCCI, for instance.

Myth of a ‘legendary banker’

Saturday, August 08, 2009
NationalCorruptionIndex.org

This is with reference to the article “A legendary banker” by Sirajuddin Aziz published on these pages on Aug 5. The article was an attempt to re-invent a rather forgotten hero: Agha Hassan Abedi, the “highly acclaimed pioneer of the then strikingly notable Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).” Besides paying glowing tribute to the banking legend, Mr Aziz innocently (dis)informs his readers: “The bank was shut down… in fact forcibly closed by a college of regulators. The bank was highly liquid, but not comfortably profitable. It didn’t suffer from any non-treatable financial malaise unknown to the global banking industry, but that it was shut down was more a consequence of the interplay of diabolical political and regulatory suspicion.”

Alas! Matters were not that simple. When the BCCI (“Bank of Crooks and Criminals International,” according to the late Benazir Bhutto) was shut down, its closure was presented in a manner that the now-defunct bank was portrayed as a victim of US imperialism. This was perhaps half-true. The now-defunct bank was partly controlled by Khalid bin Mahfouz while another leading shareholder was Kamal Adham – once the chief of Saudi intelligence and a business partner of Raymond Close, former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. It was through these channels that Saudi Arabia was able to fund the Contras in Nicaragua and UNITA in Angola.

Many US institutions, including the National Security Council and the CIA, had accounts with the now-defunct BCCI (a former CIA director admitted this saying that the accounts were used to finance the Afghan jihad). The now-defunct bank’s branch in Monte Carlo was used in the $17 million arms sale to Iran by Washington.

In a story in Time magazine published on July 29, 1991, the now-defunct bank had a network which according to the publication operated as an intelligence-gathering apparatus for the now-defunct bank’s top management.

Farooq (SNIP)

Sigtuna, Sweden

SOURCE:

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=191966

Of course, DU Talked about all this, way back when.

CIA ,James Bath, BCCI, Bin Laden and Bush family

Questions Linger About Bushes and BCCI

Analysis by Lucy Komisar*

EXCERPT...

U.S. Congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the U.S. branch's Iraqi loans.

Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank's international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.'s national security advisor. That connection makes the Bush administration's surprise and indignation at "oil for food" payoffs in Iraq seem disingenuous.

Important Saudis were influential in the bank. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA's liaison in the area, became one of BCCI's largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975.

Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief. The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 to 30 percent of the stock for nearly one billion dollars. Bin Mahfouz was put on the board of directors.

The Arabs' interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-1980s said that "its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause."

The Bushes' private links to the bank passed to Bin Mahfouz through Texas businessman James R. Bath, who invested money in the United States on behalf of the Saudi. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret "proprietary" airline it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and Bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush's oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.

When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Jackson Stephens of the powerful, politically-connected Arkansas investment firm helped it secure 25 million dollars in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland. As part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

SNIP...

*Investigative journalist Lucy Komisar's chapter, "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad," appears in the new book "A Game as Old as Empire", just published by Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco). (END/2007)

CONTINUED...

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37213

Gee. What does that mean to us today?

Well, one prominent American politician wanted to get to the bottom of offshore banking, way back last year:

Baucus Committee: We Prefer Different Approach To Tax Haven Problem

By Zachary Roth - February 25, 2009, 4:55PM
TPM Muckracker

Baucus Committee: We Prefer Different Approach To Tax Haven Problem
By Zachary Roth - February 25, 2009, 4:55PM

Yesterday, we revealed how a bill that might have sought to close off-shore tax loopholes -- and which might have helped catch Allen Stanford -- died in Max Baucus' Senate Finance committee in 2007.

Now, a Finance committee aide has provided an emailed statement to TPMmuckraker, making the case that the committee didn't take up the bill, sponsored by Carl Levin, because Baucus differed with some aspects of the bill's approach, and noting that Baucus is working on a separate bill to address the problem.

In a nutshell, according to the statement, Baucus favors an approach more targeted at giving the IRS the necessary tools to detect tax cheats than was the Levin bill, which took a broader tack.

CONTINUED...

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/baucus_committee_we_prefer_different_approach_to_t.php

Sen. Baucus must've forgotten about this important legislation crafted to stop offshore tax havens and curb international money laundering, with all his hard work on health care and all.

Which brings us back to the point: Although he could afford the best health care in the world, Mr. Bin Mahfouz passed when he was only 60 years of age. May his soul find rest and peace and the light.

[Octafish]

1. Sheik Khalid was close with James R Bath, Bush's TANG Buddy.

Joseph Trento detailed the relationship.

[Karenina]

4. Whatever happened to that Bath feller...

:shrug:

[Octafish]

5. I feel very sorry for Mr. Bath and just about all who come into contact with that Circle.

Sourcewatch - James R. Bath.

If the evidence weren't so damning, I'd feel sorry for The Circle, too.
I certainly feel sorry for the souls of those in it and those they've, eh, touched.

[Karenina]

7. What I find sooo strange

is he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. ;-)

[Sebastian Doyle]

2. I wonder if he and Novak

rode down to Hell on the same elevator? :evilgrin:

[Octafish]

3. Interesting question. My first thought was he's gone to Paraguay...

...thinking: "Perhaps he'll have the estate next door to Kenny Boy Lay."

Mr. Novak, while well-paid for his services on behalf of Big Greed and the War Party,
was on the same team, but not in the same demographic.

[conscious evolution]

6. Another war criminal gets away.

Burn in hell motherfucker.

[Octafish]

11. Ménage a Trois: Oil, Money, BCCI, and the CIA

The title, from a 1991 article, explains a lot about the mess we're in today.
The article should serve as an indictment of the survivors.

Ménage a Trois: Oil, Money, BCCI, and the CIA

Fred Dexter
Covert Action Quarterly 39
No.39(Winter 1991-92)

EXCERPT...

The Background

To understand this relationship between the bank and the Agency, one has to go back in time to the mid‑1970s ‑ a period when the U.S. was suffering from oil shocks and felt threatened by the OPEC cartel. At the same time the Arab states were deeply worried by a variety of threats to their stability. These oil‑rich states, especially the United Arab Emirates, were as vulnerable as they were rich. They felt imperiled simultaneously by Islamic fundamentalism, militant Marxism, military coups, pan‑Arab nationalism, as well as Cold War dynamics in the region.

Between World War I and the 1970s, the United Kingdom protected the rulers of the oil‑rich states and imposed stability. By the mid‑1970s, with Britain in decline, the sheikhs were reluctantly forced to look to the U.S. for backing. Because of the U.S. tilt toward Israel, they viewed the U.S. as an unreliable ally at best and as a potential antagonist at worst. They were prepared, however, to enter into a pragmatic alliance. The U.S. was in a far stronger position than any other country to offer the economic and political prizes most cherished by the Middle East regimes: a free flow of oil, arms, and stability.

Within the CIA also, a pragmatic perspective on the problematic relationship was gaining prominence. Aside from any ideological anticommunism these elements feared that if certain Arab states drifted toward the Soviets for support to prop them up against internal and external threats, the U.S. would be increasingly vulnerable to the use of oil as a weapon. A convergence of interests was shaping up.

Into this picture came Agha Hassan Abedi, an Indian‑born Pakistani banker who had lost his United Bank of Pakistan when it was nationalized by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1971. Abedi, who had been placed under house arrest by Bhutto in the late 1960s, was determined that what had happened to him and his holdings would never occur again.

Abedi needed capital to start a new bank. The oil‑rich sheikhs needed a good banker to manage their petrodollars. The CIA needed a mechanism for getting better intelligence on the Third World and to move money for operations there. The result: a ménage a trois joining Middle Eastern money, Pakistani banking expertise, and the CIA.

CONTINUED (Go into the Archives and click issue 39 and then the appropriate article)...

http://mediafilter.org/caq/

One man's war criminal is another man's war monger.

[Solly Mack]

8. K&R

[blm]

9. Until there is truth and reconciliation on BCCI, Americans will continue to be SAPS to their leaders

and ignorant but useful idiots to the global fascists.

[bobthedrummer]

10. K&R+ "Organized Crime, The CIA and the Savings and Loan Scandal"

(Third World Traveler page)
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/S%26L_Scandal_CIA.html

I'm So Old I Remember Gates McGarrah, Hjalmar Schacht (BIS) and Robert Vesco too...

Thanks for posting this my friend.