COLOMBIA
As Colombia was transformed during the 1980's from a country whose biggest cash crop was coffee, to one whose biggest cash crop was cocaine, BCCI decided to enter the Colombian market through buying Banco Mercantile, a troubled bank there.
It did so fully aware of the nature of most of the dollars that were being generated in Colombia. According to Abdur Sakhia, who was then on BCCI's top officials in the United States, BCCI's decision to acquire a Colombian bank was exceptionally controversial even within BCCI:
In December, around Christmas 1982, we had a meeting in Panama, and Mr. Akbar Bilgrami, who was indicted and convicted, and Mr. Amjad Awan, brought in a proposal of this bank in Colombia. We wanted to expand in Colombia in terms of a branch in Bogota which would do international business, but according to them the only way we could get an entry into Colombia would be to buy this bank.
I was vehemently opposed to the acquisition, one, because the bank was doing very poorly . . . I said: What are we going to do with all of this? We do not know what people they are, what type of clients they are, what are they doing in Cartagena, Cali, Medellin? How are we going to control this.
I had been to Colombia twice before this meeting to our office. We used to have a representative office in Bogota. And every time they would take me from the airport escorted by an armed guard to my hotel. . . I said: How are we going to manage offices in remote arts of Colombia when you cannot walk in Bogota unescorted? I said: We don't know what types of clients they are, what type of business they have, what type of money they have; we shouldn't go into this acquisition.
Later on I learned that we would now divide the operation into Caribbean and U.S. on one side and Latin America on the other side. So Colombia, Panama, Peru were taken out of my jurisdiction.(54)
We knew that the money that we would be getting in Colombia would be drug money. We knew that all the dollar deposits we would be getting would be drug money.(55)
Thus, when Sakhia complained about the concept of expansion into Colombia at a time when Colombia had already become lawless as a result of the drug trade, BCCI's response was to take away his jurisdiction over BCCI operations pertaining to Colombia, as well as its drug-producing neighbor Peru, and its drug-money laundering neighbor, Panama.
Akbar Bilgrami, convicted of money laundering in the Tampa case, told the Subcommittee that he could not, for legal reasons, discuss in any detail his activities in Colombia. He was willing, however, to make some general statements about the flow of funds from BCCI Colombia to the United States.
First, it was true that BCCI, like other foreign banks based in Colombia, was moving dollars out of Colombia into FDIC-secured banks in the United States. According to Bilgrami, one of the key goals of many of his Colombian clients was to obtain federal insurance for their cash deposits. Accordingly, BCCI would take their funds, and immediately transfer the funds to accounts set up in their names in First American, which BCCI secretly controlled, and in National Bank of Georgia, which BCCI then separately secretly controlled. According to Bilgrami, most of this was typical flight capital:
You know, all flight capital is questionable money: Tax evasion, drugs money, arms transactions, pure political corruption. But we were small, only able to take in $100 million yearly. Other banks were taking in a billion each. So we were losing out on that business. Credit Suisse was repatriating $1 billion per year in flight capital from Colombia. Union Bank of Switzerland, another $1 billion. We only handled $100 million. But that amount did go from BCCI Colombia into the United States.(56)
In Colombia, as in so many other nations, BCCI found that to stay in business, it had to pay bribes. Because the bank it had acquired was in such poor shape, and so near to collapse, the Colombian government had made no objections to BCCI's acquisition of it, and no payments by BCCI to officials were necessary. That changed, however, after BCCI bought the bank. According to Bilgrami:
Colombia was a unique situation. We never paid any illegal money to purchase the bank. But when we inherited the bank, we learned that it was a tradition to pay the treasurer of the bank commissions on the largest accounts. I asked Mr. Naqvi for clarification, you know, should we pay it? And he said to pay it in dollars so that it couldn't be traced to us. So we paid it, around $20,000 to $30,000 monthly.(57)
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