Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar

Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar (born about 1944) headed the treasury division at the London headquarters of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), reporting directly to its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and its chief executive, Swaleh Naqvi. On September 27, 1993, he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to sixteen counts of false accounting, and the next day he was sentenced to six years on each count, to run concurrently. His was the first criminal conviction anywhere arising from BCCI's collapse.¹

Treasury Division

Prosecutors said Akbar, then 49 and one level below the bank's top rank, had been "at the heart of the deception and dishonesty," falsely inflating BCCI's profits and assets to keep an insolvent bank afloat, in a fraud put at 750 million dollars (500 million pounds). "If the collapse of BCCI could be described as catastrophic, then the scale of the fraud designed to conceal the true state of the bank's affairs was of epic proportions," the prosecutor, Timothy Langdale, told the court. "If the treasury division could be described as the engine room of the bank, then Akbar, without doubt, was the chief engineer." Prosecutors also said he had misused or appropriated 61 million dollars from BCCI to set up a company of which he was a director.¹

Sentence

The court credited him with the year and eight months he had already spent in prison, and prosecutors said the sentence had been reduced from a possible ten or eleven years on each count because he had pleaded guilty and was giving evidence to BCCI's investigators. An official of the Serious Fraud Office said no further criminal prosecution was planned, but that the bank's liquidators might try to recover the money he was alleged to have taken. At the time Abedi was reported to be seriously ill in Pakistan, beyond the reach of British courts, and Naqvi was facing charges in Abu Dhabi. Three further BCCI trials were then scheduled in Britain, including that of a former account officer, Imran Iman.¹ When an Abu Dhabi court sentenced BCCI's former executives in June 1994, Akbar was described as already serving his British term.²

Treasury and Capcom

According to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, Akbar was recruited from the National Bank of Oman in 1981 by Swaleh Naqvi, described as his mentor, to run BCCI's treasury from London, and by 1984 was managing more than 5.5 billion dollars despite "no apparent experience in the commodities, foreign exchange or securities markets." Masihur Rahman, BCCI's chief financial officer, testified that Akbar "was taking positions on silver and 20 year bonds" at a premium. He concealed mounting losses in off-book "Number Two" accounts which, in the words of the Price Waterhouse report of June 22, 1991, were "outside the scope of external audit... in the name of private clients but for [BCCI]," funded in part from "a pool of funds in the private named accounts of A. R. Khalil which were used freely by Z. Akbar to fund adjustments." By 1985 the treasury losses were approaching one billion dollars.³⁴

On April 26, 1984, Akbar registered a company, Hourcharm Ltd., at his home address in London; it was renamed Capital Commodity Dealers Ltd. in May and Capcom Financial Services in July, and began trading on September 17, 1984, with capital raised in stages to 25 million pounds and a credit line from BCCI. Its American arm, Capcom Futures of Chicago, was fronted by four Americans without commodities experience, among them its chairman, Larry Romrell. When Price Waterhouse found the treasury losses in 1986 it attributed them to "incompetence"; its 1991 report found that "with the benefit of hindsight, it appears more sinister in that it now seems to have been a deliberate way to fictitiously inflate income." Akbar was removed from the treasury, and in 1988 told two BCCI officials that he had been a "scapegoat" used by management to deceive the auditors, and that BCCI had been inflating its assets "from the mid-1970's."³⁴

On September 19, 1988, as president of Capcom, Akbar met in London with "Robert Musella," the undercover Customs agent Robert Mazur of Operation C-Chase, and told him he did not want to know the nature of his clients' business; Mazur testified that Akbar described "mirror-image trading," buying contracts for one account while selling the same number from another controlled by the same person, and said such transactions "would take forever for anyone to ever find."⁴⁵