Masihur Rahman

Masihur Rahman was the former chief financial officer of BCCI.¹ He explained the financial legerdemain that resulted in the disappearance of billions of dollars.² Rahman later testified before a Senate subcommittee.³

Role at BCCI

Rahman was brought into United Bank by Agha Hasan Abedi and Swaleh Naqvi in 1966, and moved with them when Abedi created BCCI.⁴ He brought with him the original handwritten ledgers of the bank's first year of operation in Abu Dhabi.⁵

After BCCI pleaded guilty to money laundering in January 1990, Rahman was placed in charge of an internal audit committee to verify the Price Waterhouse figures.⁶ His findings showed that the bank's books were in a shambles, with hundreds of millions of dollars loaned or transferred without paperwork, and hundreds of millions more simply disappeared.⁷

Rahman was very nervous about discussing BCCI's affairs with the press due to threats to his family.⁸ He described a secret bank within the bank, International Credit and Investment Company Holdings (ICIC) in the Cayman Islands, into which billions of dollars in deposits were improperly diverted.⁹

Testimony

Rahman and Abdur Sakhia, BCCI's former general manager in New York, were the two BCCI officials who testified before Senator John Kerry's subcommittee in 1991; both had left the bank in 1990, when Abu Dhabi took active control and forced out members of the original Pakistani group who lacked close ties to the Al Nahyan family, and both had been threatened. His testimony is recorded in the subcommittee's hearing volume S. Hrg. 102-350.¹⁰ He described the bank's founding quarters in Abu Dhabi as "mess-type flats," its hierarchy as "Mr. Abedi at the very top, there was Mr. Naqvi who was like a chief operating officer... And then there was a big gap," and its internal secrecy: "I could see these Chinese walls were getting very, very watertight and we were always taught about humility and ego and anything that was slightly out of context was considered just an ego trip." Of Abedi he said: "I remember looking into his eyes and seeing God and the Devil balanced equally in them."¹¹

He told the subcommittee that the BCCI front man Mohammed Hammoud, whom he called "a medium sized businessman," used two companies, Mid-Gulf and Rubstone, to buy shares of Credit and Commerce American Holdings on the bank's behalf, and described the parallel Cayman group, ICIC, as an organization that would "hold shares of the bank for the founder group."¹²¹³ He said the treasury losses of Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar in 1985 were "equivalent to BCCI's entire capital."¹⁰