Swaleh Naqvi

Swaleh Naqvi was the chief operating officer of BCCI, taking over after Agha Hasan Abedi's 1988 heart attack.¹

Role at BCCI

Naqvi was instrumental in the day-to-day operations and manipulations within BCCI. He personally maintained some six thousand secret accounts, which were at the core of the bank's deception.² He was responsible for orchestrating the sale of Clark Clifford and Robert Altman's stock in First American Bank to a BCCI front man.³

Naqvi, along with Abedi, was indicted by Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, in July 1991 for fraud, bribery, grand larceny, and money laundering.⁴ He was also indicted by the Department of Justice in November 1991 for his role in the bond manipulation at CenTrust Savings Bank and the secret ownership of Independence Bank of Encino.⁵

Connections and Influence

Naqvi had close ties with Abedi and was involved in many of the bank's illicit activities, including the use of nominees and offshore networks to conceal ownership and financial transactions.⁶ He was also involved in the meeting where Eugene Holley introduced Bert Lance to Abedi.⁷

Arrest and Extradition

Naqvi, a British subject who had served more than twenty years as Abedi's deputy, was arrested in Abu Dhabi in September 1991 and held there for nearly three years. On January 12, 1994, the Justice Department and the Abu Dhabi government agreed that American prosecutors would have access to BCCI witnesses and documents; under the arrangement, as United Press International reported it, the United States dropped a 1.5 billion dollar civil suit against Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, brought no criminal charges against him, and received 400 million dollars' worth of Abu Dhabi's shares in First American Bank. Naqvi was handed to American officials on May 7, 1994.⁸⁹

Plea and Sentence

On July 8, 1994, a federal judge in Washington accepted his guilty plea to fraud, racketeering and conspiracy charges, in which he admitted responsibility for 255 million dollars in losses in the United States; Morgenthau opposed the agreement as too lenient.¹⁰ On October 19, 1994, Judge Joyce Hens Green sentenced him to eleven years for a racketeering conspiracy to control American banks secretly, including First American, and ordered him to pay 255 million dollars; with credit for the time he had spent in custody in Abu Dhabi, he was to serve about eight.⁹¹¹

In June 1994 the Abu Dhabi court trying BCCI's former executives had sentenced him in absentia. United Press International first reported "four sentences totaling 11 years" on nine counts, and later reported the sentence as fourteen years, the figure also given by the American Banker, which called it the longest imposed. An appeals court in Abu Dhabi declined to hear his appeal unless he attended in person.⁸⁹¹² At Abbas Gokal's trial at the Old Bailey in 1997 he was named as an absent co-conspirator.¹³