NEW YORK - A spokesman of the Pakistan Embassy in Washington Friday denounced as “misconceived and scandalous” an article in Foreign Policy that attempted to link Pakistan to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal.
“The Op-ed piece also smacks of a complete lack of knowledge and understanding of the facts surrounding the rise and fall of BCCI,” Nadeem Hotiana, the embassy Press attache, wrote in response to the article by Michael Kugelman, a senior programme associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington-based think-tank. The article is entitled: ‘Remembering Pakistan’s Biggest and Baddest Fraud Scandal.’ “Regrettably, the title of the article is misconceived and scandalous as it attempts to establish unsubstantiated links between Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scam and Pakistan,” Hotiana said in a letter to the magazine. “We simply fail to understand why the blame for the scam by a Bank, incorporated in Luxembourg with Headquarters in London, is placed at Pakistan’s door, where only a few of worldwide 400 branches of the erstwhile bank existed. “Moreover, the author has not explained how one individual, Agha Hassan Abedi, was responsible for every malfeasance of the bank, which being incorporated was a separate entity in the eye of the law. Very conveniently, the article has not mentioned that Abedi was also a British national.”