Attock Oil

The Attock Oil Company Limited is an oil company incorporated in England on December 1, 1913, which operates in Pakistan as the branch of a foreign company. The Kerry-Brown Senate report called it "BCCI's oil company" and listed it among the affiliates of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) whose shares were held by nominees with money advanced by BCCI's Cayman Islands affiliate, ICIC.¹²³

Company

The company made its first discovery at Khaur, in the Attock District, in 1915, and opened the Potwar Basin, which by the company's account remained the only oil-producing basin in Pakistan until the early 1970s. In 1978 it transferred its exploration and production business to its subsidiary Pakistan Oilfields Limited and its refining business to Attock Refinery Limited.¹

BCCI Nominees

ICIC (Overseas) Limited, incorporated on April 6, 1976, to trade BCCI shares and provide private banking to BCCI shareholders, "also advanced funds to nominees to allow them to purchase interests in the three other BCCI affiliates," according to the Senate report, which named them as Attock Oil, Credit and Commerce Insurance and the Saudi Development Company.²

At the Federal Reserve hearing of April 23, 1981, on the acquisition of Financial General Bankshares by Credit and Commerce American Holdings (CCAH), Sheikh Kamal Adham testified that he had not met his fellow investor Faisal Saud al-Fulaij for ten years and that their joint involvement was coincidence. The Senate report found the statement false: "In fact, both had been involved with other transactions involving BCCI, including acting as nominees for BCCI in connection with recent stock transactions involving BCCI's oil company, Attock Oil."³

On August 2, 1987, the BCCI officer H. M. Kazmi wrote to Adham confirming that he was not liable for any loans recorded in his name on the books of ICIC, "including Adham's loans secured by his shares of CCAH for the First American Bank and Attock Oil." The letter appears in the report among examples, drawn from Price Waterhouse's June 17, 1991 report on the ICIC group, of ICIC handling BCCI's relations with its nominees.²

Ghaith R. Pharaon also held a nominee interest. From 1985 BCCI made payments to Pharaon structured as loans against the expected proceeds of the sale of his half of the National Bank of Georgia; in December 1986, in the words of the Federal Reserve's charges, "BCCI caused CCAH to agree to purchase the shares of NBG [Financial] from Pharaon for $220 million," and the funds that passed from BCCI through First American to the Georgia bank paid off the loans. "Ironically, since the 'loans' were used by BCCI to wipe out Pharaon's shares of BCCI itself and Pharaon's interests as a nominee in other BCCI-related institutions such as Attock Oil, the entire transaction was largely a wash," the Senate report concluded, eliminating Pharaon's nominee interests in the National Bank of Georgia, BCCI and BCCI-related entities.⁴

Attock Oil is a separate company from Attock Cement, a Pakistani cement company in which the Pakistani BCCI Foundation made a 3 million dollar "investment," and which the Senate report described as "ostensibly owned by BCCI front-man Ghaith Pharaon, but in fact a front for BCCI itself."⁵