Influence and Intrigue in BCCI Chief’s Illness : Bank fraud: Powerful people, including Carter, got top experts to rush to Abedi’s bedside after heart attack. He received a transplant in 24 hours.
The secretive man who built the Bank of Credit & Commerce International into a global giant by using powerful friends resorted to the same strategy of influence and intrigue when he became ill and desperately needed a new heart.
Agha Hasan Abedi was rushed to a BCCI hospital in the winter of 1988 after a massive heart attack at his home here--his identity a carefully guarded secret because associates feared that word of his illness could shake the bank and even the worldwide financial system.
Close friends, among them former President Jimmy Carter, summoned top cardiologists from around the world to participate in bedside consultations without being told the name of the patient. And, only 24 hours later, in a country where waits of years for medical treatment are a major controversy, Abedi received a new heart.
Details of the episode have been obtained by The Times as international investigators are uncovering a trail of financial fraud and influence-peddling by BCCI executives around the world. Regulators have already shut down BCCI in most countries, and criminal investigations are under way in five U.S. cities.
BCCI’s friends played vital roles in the bank’s creation and global expansion, and Abedi’s grave illness added life-or-death consequences to BCCI’s urgent appeal for assistance. The response of its influential friends sheds new light on the extent of BCCI’s international clout.
Crippled by scandal, the bank itself is in grave health today. And Abedi, still ailing and facing criminal charges in New York, is struggling to salvage his reputation and his health.
In February, 1988, BCCI was at its zenith, with 400 offices in 73 countries. Abedi, who had risen from obscurity in Pakistan to found the bank, was a confidant of world leaders and a godlike figure to his 14,000 employees.
From the days when he was staked by the ruler of the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Abu Dhabi, Abedi had amassed a client list that ranged from Third World governments and the CIA to a dozen Arab sheiks, terrorist Abu Nidal and leaders of Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel.
For Abedi personally, however, everything began to unravel one evening at his home in the London neighborhood of Harrow-on-the-Hill. After complaining of severe chest pains, the banker was rushed to Cromwell Hospital near Hyde Park.
Cromwell was the natural choice. Through a labyrinth of companies, the hospital was owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family and a foundation financed by BCCI, according to bank records.
Within medical circles, Cromwell was known as “BCCI’s hospital.” Signs at the modern, 360-bed facility are in both English and Arabic, and BCCI had a small branch office in its marble lobby.
At Cromwell, Abedi came under the care of Dr. Walter Somerville, a leading cardiologist, and Dr. Magdi Yacoub, Britain’s top heart surgeon. Within hours, this team was augmented by experts from around the world.
Dr. Charles Rackley, chief of cardiology at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., received a call from Somerville. The British physician asked that Rackley and his top neurologist come immediately to London to evaluate a patient.
“Who is this patient?” Rackley recalled asking.
“It is an individual of some economic influence whose illness, if widely publicized, might have an impact on the world banking system,” Somerville replied.
Although Rackley had never before been summoned to examine a mystery patient, he agreed to make the trip. That same evening, a limousine from BCCI’s Washington office picked up Rackley and a neurologist for the trip to Dulles International Airport and a first-class flight to London.
Whisked by another BCCI limo from Heathrow Airport to Cromwell Hospital, Rackley found that he was but one of 10 or 12 specialists assembled to evaluate the patient. Among them was Dr. Norman Shumway of Stanford University.
“I knew Norm didn’t like to fly, and I asked what he was doing there,” Rackley said in a recent interview.
“Jimmy Carter called me up to come,” Shumway replied, adding that Carter had to call twice to overcome his resistance to air travel.
Rackley discovered that Shumway, too, did not know the patient’s name.
In his first public comment on the BCCI scandal, Carter told an audience of students in Atlanta Thursday that he was unaware of BCCI’s criminal activities when he accepted donations from Abedi for health-care programs in the Third World.
“We will never, obviously, accept any (additional) funds from the bank,” Carter said, according to Associated Press.
Before his heart attack, Abedi was a frequent traveling companion of Carter in the Third World, where the former President’s prestige added luster to Abedi’s image. Through BCCI and various foundations, Abedi donated $8 million to a foundation started by Carter.
As the physicians gathered in the mystery patient’s room at Cromwell, they found that the slightly built 65-year-old man had suffered massive heart damage. There was also evidence of neurological injury.
They determined that his heart was too damaged for coronary bypass surgery and recommended an immediate transplant. Several of the doctors went to a nearby room and outlined the recommendation to an attractive young woman introduced as the patient’s wife.
The prospect of a transplant created a religious problem for Abedi, a Muslim. Organ transplants are viewed with uncertainty among followers of Islamic law, which regulates food and drink as well as other aspects of personal life.
“An issue like that, something you take into your body, is going to give rise to questions for the very religious Muslims,” said Frank Vogel, an Islamic expert at Harvard University.
However, doctors found that Islamic scholars had issued rules approving transplants. Within 24 hours, Abedi was undergoing heart transplant surgery.
Sources in the health-care industry here say the surgery was performed at Cromwell because of its urgency, although the hospital is not one of Britain’s five designated transplant facilities.
At the time of the surgery, there was a waiting list for heart transplants, according to Mark Purcell, a London spokesman for the regional health authority. The list is administered through the National Health Service. Normally, at least 20 people are waiting for hearts, although there are no figures for how many were on the list in February, 1988.
“A percentage die while waiting for transplants,” Purcell said.
As a private, paying patient, Abedi would have gone to the bottom of the waiting list. However, the rules permit immediate transplants if the physician determines that the patient is in imminent danger.
That decision was made by Magdi Yacoub, a surgeon who pioneered heart transplants in Britain and performed Abedi’s operation. Attempts to reach Yacoub were unsuccessful.
Charles Rackley returned to Washington without learning the identity of the patient he had examined. Finally, in late 1988 he received a large Christmas card signed: “Agha Hasan Abedi.” It thanked Rackley for the care he had provided in London.
By that time, Abedi still was recuperating and his bank was coming under intense scrutiny of banking regulators in the United States and Europe.
The cause of the bank’s problems was the federal indictment of BCCI and eight employees in Tampa, Fla., on charges of laundering drug money. A year later, BCCI pleaded guilty, but it remained under an investigative microscope here and in the United States.
Abedi’s illness removed him from the daily operations of the bank. But records and testimony at congressional hearings in Washington show that the apparatus of influential friends he had assembled tried to restrict the investigations and minimize damage to the bank.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has charged that BCCI’s lawyers, including former Defense Secretary Clark M. Clifford, stonewalled an inquiry by his staff, and several congressional committees are investigating allegations that the Justice Department and Federal Reserve System were slow to respond to evidence of fraud at BCCI.
So far, the power and influence that created the bank and saved Abedi’s life have not succeeded in rescuing the Bank of Credit & Commerce International.
