Reposting a very serious starroute post from 2004.....BCCI.

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Found this while doing a search on some BCCI connections, starroute, and thought I'd share it again with DU.


Lots of shady figures connected with First American

Edited on Fri Aug-20-04 04:21 PM by starroute
According to my notes, BCCI acquired First American at the suggestion of none other than Jackson Stephens, who was a director. That's the Jackson Stephens who was a fundraiser for Jimmy Carter (who had been his college roommate) and bankrolled Bill Clinton's early campaigns but then went over to Reagan in 1980. His wife managed Bush Sr.'s 1988 campaign in Arkansas. Daniel Hopsicker claims Stephens has been linked to everything from the drug-running at Mena, Arkansas to the theft of the PROMIS software and is also associated with Venice, FL.

His bank, Stephens, Inc., underwrote Harken's 1987 stock offering with a $25 million investment. The offering was placed with a London subsidiary of the Union Bank of Switzerland, which had connections with BCCI. The accord was signed by both Stephens and Saudi real estate magnate Abdullah Taha Bakhsh. (Bakhsh was partners with BCCI frontman Ghaith Pharaon and his banker was major BCCI shareholder Khalid bin Mahfouz.) The Union Bank didn't want to keep the Harken shares, so Bakhsh took them over, making him the holder of 17.6% of Harken stock.

Another BCCI frontman, Mohammed Hammoud, was a shareholder in CCAH, which was the holding company for First American. Hammoud made numerous investments in the US through the 1980's, being advised on these by his close friend, Charles Hostler, who was appointed ambassador to Bahrein in 1989. Hammoud supposedly died suddenly on May 3, 1990, just as the investigations into BCCI were heating up, but the corpse didn't match his description and the insurance companies refused to pay. The rumor was that he was about to reveal how deeply the Americans were involved in BCCI.

In October 1990, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh squashed the investigation into First American.

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1. sorry mods - this was supposed to be in GD.

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