Pakistan slams ‘scandalous’ article linking it with BCCI scam

Embassy spokesperson says it depicts complete lack of knowledge of facts surrounding the rise and fall of the bank

NEW YORK: A spokesman of the Pakistan Embassy in Washington Friday rejected as "misconceived and scandalous" an article in Foreign Policy magazine that linked Pakistan to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal in 1980s.         

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"The Op-ed piece speaks of a complete lack of knowledge and understanding of the facts surrounding the rise and fall of BCCI," Nadeem Hotiana, the embassy press attache, wrote in response to the article by Michael Kugelman, a senior programme associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think-tank.

The article is titled 'Remembering Pakistan's Biggest and Baddest Fraud Scandal'. "Regrettably, the title of the article is misconceived and scandalous as it attempts to establish unsubstantiated links between Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scam and Pakistan," Hotiana said in a letter to the magazine.

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"We simply fail to understand why the blame for the scam by a Bank, incorporated in Luxembourg with Headquarters in London, is placed at Pakistan's door, where only a few of worldwide 400 branches of the erstwhile bank existed."

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He maintained, "Moreover, the author has not explained how one individual, Agha Hassan Abedi, was responsible for every malfeasance of the bank, which being incorporated was a separate entity in the eye of the law. Very conveniently, the article has not mentioned that Abedi was also a British national."