Financial Times
By Nikki Tait, Law Courts Correspondent
Published: November 30 2004 02:00 | Last updated: November 30 2004 02:00
Liquidators of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, who are suing the Bank of England for almost £900m in damages,yesterday withdrew anallegation that the former head of the Bank's supervisory department had lied to other international regulators.
The allegation was made by the liquidators' lawyers shortly after the ground-breaking trial opened this year. They claimed that Peter Cooke, head of the department in the early 1980s, had deliberately misled other international regulators over the 1975 Basel Concordat and its guidance on how banks with international branches should be regulated.
They said Mr Cooke's action had been motivated by the Bank's concerns about BCCI and its desire to ensure that responsibility for supervising the maverick bank remained offloaded to the Luxembourg authorities. BCCI, which eventually collapsed in 1991 owing more than £10bn, was formally incorporated in Luxembourg, but ran the bulk of its business from London.
Gordon Pollock, QC, told a High Court judge yesterday that the allegations about misleading international regulators were now being withdrawn.
More:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/16036fe0-4274-11d9-8e3c-00000e2511c8.htmlTHIS DEVELOPMENT is not surprising given the intense amount of lobbying recently by both Margaret Thatcher and sources connected directly to former President George Herbert Bush.
Lest anyone forgets, Thatcher has just stumpted up a £165,000 bail bon for her son who is in the dock accused of financing/masterminding the Equitorial Guinea Coup for which Simon Mann was given a 34 year jail sentence last week and former EG President Moto sentenced to 63 years in absentia.
Also not forgetting that Bush1 is not sitting too pretty at the moment as his brother Jonathan Bush is CEO of a subsidiary of the RIGGS BANK which is directly implicated on the coup.
From my own contacts I would say that there is a very fine line between persuasion and actually suborning of witnesses. In this case BCCI plaintiffs have no choice because the main witnesses who could have supported this allegation of deliberate misleading of the other international regulators over the 1975 Basel Concordat.
Standlen's comments in the second part of the article sound thin and desperate. The Bank of England knows that all it takes is for security/intelligence files from MI5 and MI6 on Thatcher, ex-Bank of England Governor Robin Leigh Pemberton and all the former London-based general managers of BCCI to be subpeonaed.
Also of great importance is the testimony of former BCCI general Manager John Hilberry, whose evidence started the domino effect.
For some time the official line is that he "disappeared" after turning in evidence to the Met's fraud squad, was given a new identity and relocated until such a time as he could appear in a witness stand to put the record straight in the public domain.
I now understand that Hilberry was murdered but that a sting operation was put in place following detailed evidence as to the hirecd contract killer, his payees and crucial forensic evidence not yet discussed publicly.