by antiaristo » Wed Nov 02, 2005 10:22 pm
What's the connection? BCCI.<br><br>The rogue bank that was allowed a completely free hand because of British perfidy.<br><br>Today Her Majesty invoked the Treason Felony Act against the creditors.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>3.15pm <br>BCCI liquidators drop case against Bank <br><br>Mark Tran and agencies<br>Wednesday November 2, 2005 <br><br>One of the longest and most expensive lawsuits in British history collapsed today as liquidators for the rogue bank BCCI dropped their case against the Bank of England.<br>The liquidators - accountants Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu - dropped the case after <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>the chancellor of the high court said it was no longer in the best interests of creditors for the litigation to continue</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1607012,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/s...12,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>The rest is triumphalism by the Establishment.<br><br>It's no coincidence this has happened at this moment in time. It's the Plame case and its Iran Contra roots that lead straight to BCCI.<br><br>Look at the evidence in the creditors hands.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Lord Bingham, now Britain's most senior law lord, concluded that over-worked Bank of England regulators had made an innocent mistake when they designated BCCI a Luxembourg bank in 1980. <br><br>They had done so despite the fact that it was no secret that BCCI's Luxembourg holding company was a little more than a brass plate, with most meaningful operations run out of offices at 100 Leadenhall Street in the City - a stone's throw from the Bank of England. <br><br>Lord Bingham said: "In applying this new and unfamiliar statutory regime [the 1979 Banking Act], it was necessary for the Bank, first of all, to understand what was meant by 'principal place of business'. That was a legal question. <br><br>"Those who handled this matter in the Bank had many applications to process in a very limited time, and did not recognise this as a question to be asked. So no legal advice was sought ... <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The question was simply never addressed."</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>Mr Pollock will challenge this conclusion, pointing to internal Bank papers, seen by the Guardian, which appear to show senior banking supervision officials and lawyers had indeed, from the outset, raised the question of whether BCCI should be more appropriately classified as a British bank. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>As early as February 1979</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> Frank Hall, a senior lawyer at the Bank, wrote an internal memo to colleagues concerning the imminent Banking Act. In it he said: "I should be grateful if you could let me know whether ... there are any companies which are not registered in the UK but which have their principal place of business or place of central management or control here ... but which we should not want to recognise." <br><br>Copies of the memo, which was circulated among senior department officials, show several hand-written annotations. "I can't think of any, can you?" says one, to which another official replies: "No." <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>"But for this - BCCI?"</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> appears in the sidelines, written in the hand of Peter Cooke, the head of banking supervision. <br><br>Mr Pollock will argue this critical exchange fits into a catalogue of alarming internal reports on BCCI, each of which ended in the Bank wringing its hands behind closed doors but ultimately shirking its regulatory responsibilities. <br><br>He is likely to stop short of direct criticism of Lord Bingham, but his remarks may, at the very least, call into question the fullness of information supplied by the Bank to the Bingham inquiry. <br><br>A string of other internal memos make clear the Bank's state of panic. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>In 1982 BCCI was described as "on its way to becoming the financial equivalent of the SS Titanic!".</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>Another paper from the same year insists BCCI's status as a Luxembourg bank "has always been something of a fiction ... I believe <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>it would be wrong for us to continue to allow a large international banking group to carry on business on a largely unsupervised basis".</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>The following year yet another Bank analyst wrote a report on BCCI entitled <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>"Why action is now urgently required".</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> It suggested the Bank was left with "two basic choices": to close BCCI down or to insist it be redesignated a UK bank, under full Bank of England supervision. <br><br>Later memos, Mr Pollock may suggest, show shades of cowardice behind the Bank's intransigence. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>"It is hard to see how we can to other than turn a blind eye</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> ... since we have accepted [BCCI] up to now," wrote one Bank official as the charade of BCCI's Luxembourg status wore increasingly thin. <br><br>Mr Cooke himself even described the late BCCI chairman Agha Abedi as <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>"the living personification of Uriah Heep</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->".<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/story/0,14169,1123143,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/bcci/s...43,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Ladies and Gentlemen, the Establishment are soiling themselves over what's coming out (Love to Charles and Camilla).<br><br> <p></p><i></i>