Nazir Chinoy

Nazir Chinoy was the regional general manager in Paris of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and earlier a branch chief of BCCI in Pakistan from 1978 to 1982. He was among the BCCI officers drawn into Operation C-Chase and a defendant in the resulting case in Tampa, and in interviews with Senate staff from March 9 to 16, 1992, and testimony on March 18, 1992, he became a principal source for the Kerry-Brown Senate Report.¹²³

Pakistan

Chinoy gave the Senate its most detailed account of BCCI's protocol department, run by Sani Ahmed. On his arrival at BCCI Pakistan in 1978, he said, it employed about 120 people, whose job was "to establish and further the rapport with the sheiks of and ruling families of Dubai and Abu Dhabi," from a separate building in Karachi opposite Agha Hasan Abedi's house. "Sani would tell me that I need one million rupees today and we would give him the moneys and the branch would pay the money. What it was paid for we would have no idea," he said, and: "Sani was the trusted man for things no one else was supposed to know. We were the technocrats. Sani Ahmed would handle the things we wouldn't, like get girls." He also described the relationship between Abedi and President Zia ul-Haq.²

Paris

Of BCCI's business in France, Chinoy told investigators: "All the money we got [at BCCI-France] in some way we were breaking the law... The law breaking was pretty systematic." Of Africa he said: "Commission means kick-back... It is known as a commission but it is actually a kickback. It is the only way to do business."⁴ In early 1986 he met Adnan Khashoggi in BCCI's Paris office after noticing a sudden rise in business at the bank's Monte Carlo branch, which answered to Paris, and learned that its manager, Manir Karim, had been giving Khashoggi short-term credit for the sale of American arms to Iran through Israel: "I met Khashoggi in a small room at the bank. He told me he had a deal, he was to be a supplier, buy American arms through Israel and supply them to the Iranians." Khashoggi, he said, told him he was working directly for the United States government and the CIA. Chinoy described the fees as "juicy," but ordered the business stopped because it had not been approved in writing by BCCI London; he later learned that two or three more transactions totaling 15 to 17 million dollars had been completed, and documents indicated that London had gone around him. He said that Manucher Ghorbanifar also banked at Monte Carlo, and that in 1988 a London office asked him about an account in the name "Devon Island."³

Chinoy learned of BCCI's hidden role in the sale of the National Bank of Georgia when Abedi, visiting Paris with Swaleh Naqvi in December 1986 or January 1987, left a briefcase in a taxi; recovering it, "I saw written National Bank of Georgia written on the briefcase." In 1988 he was instructed by London to lend Ghaith R. Pharaon about 25 million dollars to buy debentures of CenTrust Savings Bank; no credit report was prepared, and "we did a CYA letter instead to cover ourselves." He later saw a document requesting credit committee approval for the loan, ostensibly from Paris, which he believed Naqvi had fabricated after the fact. He said Mohammed Hammoud had "a very special relationship" with the bank, and that when he asked Hammoud to repay a loan of about 100,000 dollars he was rebuked by his superiors in London.⁵⁶

C-Chase

On May 20, 1988, the undercover Customs agent Robert Mazur opened accounts at BCCI Paris and told Chinoy privately that his clients were "drug dealers in Colombia"; Chinoy assigned the accounts to officers including Sibte Hassan. Amjad Awan had referred Mazur to "Chinoy and Howard in Paris and Baakza in London."¹ The Senate report found that Awan, Akbar Bilgrami, Chinoy "and likely several other of the Tampa defendants" could have given information leading to a far broader indictment of BCCI.⁷