Editing Abedi Agha Hasan (section)

==BCCI Collapse and Controversies==
BCCI’s rapid growth masked systemic issues that led to its collapse in 1991, one of the largest banking scandals in history. Regulators in the United States and United Kingdom accused BCCI of fraud, money laundering, terrorist financing, and supporting Pakistan’s nuclear program. The bank was found to have perpetrated billions of dollars in fraud, cheating depositors in over 70 countries out of an estimated $15–20 billion. Abedi resigned as BCCI’s president in 1990 after suffering a heart attack, which followed a heart transplant in 1988. In 1991, BCCI was shut down, and Abedi was convicted by a United Arab Emirates court for fraud, receiving an eight-year prison sentence he never served due to Pakistan’s refusal to extradite him. The liquidation process, concluded in 2012, recovered $8.5 billion for creditors but incurred $1.7 billion in legal and professional fees. Critics, however, labeled him a “master charlatan” whose reckless ambition and unethical practices devastated small depositors.

Kerry Commission on BCCI:

"The relationships involving BCCI, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of BCCI. The CIA's and BCCI's mutual environments of secrecy have been one obvious obstacle. For many months, the CIA resisted, providing information to the subcommittee about its involvement with and knowledge of BCCI. Moreover, key players, who might explain these relationships are unavailable. Some including former CIA, Director, [[William Casey]], and BCCIs customers, and Iranian arms dealers Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi, are dead. Others, including most of BCCI insiders, remain held incommunicado in Abu Dhabi. While promising in public hearings to provide full cooperation to the subcommittee, to date, the Abu Dhabi government has refused to make any BCCI officers available for interview by the subcommittee. Former BCCI, chairman Agha Hasan Abedi remain severely incapacitated due to a heart attack. Finally, some persons in a position to know portions of the truth, have denied having any memory of events in which they participated in the documents, which they reviewed."