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Billion dollar corruption within the U.S.-picked Afghan regime
(Examiner) – After reviewing Afghan custom records, the Wall Street Journal reported that during a three-year period more than $3.1 billion in U.S. dollars left Afghanistan through the airport destined for Middle Eastern countries like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. More than $3 billion has been shipped from a country the CIA Fact Book claims only collected $1 billion in taxes annually.
The financial scandal that broke Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank
(Guardian) – Nearly $1bn has disappeared from Kabul Bank in mysterious insider loans. The scandal has pushed Afghanistan’s tiny economy to the brink of ruin – and yet no one has been charged.
Dodgy dealings in Dubai
The most notorious of Kabul Bank’s “investments” are in Dubai, where Ferozi says $160m was spent on 35 luxury villas on the Palm Jumeirah, the artificial sand banks that jut out in “fronds” into the Arabian Sea. Many of the houses were registered in Farnood’s name and handed out to bank shareholders. I visited house No1 on Frond O – a huge five-bedroom “Riviera”-style mansion occupied by Ferozi.
It was in these houses that Afghan MPs were entertained with drink and “Russian girls”, according to one Afghan intelligence official, who says the bank deliberately sought to compromise the politically powerful. Ferozi frankly admits that millions of dollars were lost on these villas after Dubai’s real estate bubble burst in 2008.
Financial novices
Some say the collapse of Kabul Bank was only to be expected given the backgrounds of the men who ran it. Both Ferozi and Farnood spent time in Moscow in the 1980s, running businesses that occasionally ran afoul of the criminal underworld. Farnood used to run hawalas, the regulation-free money exchange systems found all over South Asia. Ferozi says he was a small-time trader exporting goods from Russia to Afghanistan. Nothing fancy: flour, cooking oil and water pumps. And yet he was put in charge of Afghanistan’s largest commercial bank, a decision approved by the Central Bank governor Abdul Qadeer Fitrat.
Despite being novices in the world of legitimate finance, they knew that a pyramid scheme, with so much money being taken out of the top, desperately needed to attract new people to deposit money at the bottom to preserve the bank’s liquidity.
IMF reject $820m bailout of Kabul Bank debt
(Guardian) – IMF rejection of proposals over Kabul Bank crisis, $820m bailout debts and suspension of aid leaves country in deepening crisis. The Afghan government will struggle to pay its bills “within a month” after the International Monetary Fund rejected proposals for resolving the Kabul Bank scandal, western officials have warned.
Although the war-torn country’s biggest bank nearly collapsed last September, the government of Hamid Karzai and the international community are still at loggerheads over plans to fund an $820m (£507m) bailout as well as how the disgraced former managers and shareholders who helped themselves to hundreds of millions of dollars should be prosecuted.
How Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in New York worsened Europe’s woe
Iraq’s missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history”
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time. Article: Los Angeles Times
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."