After Ukraine, Follow the Money

August 11, 2023

To better understand events in Ukraine, it’s worth a trip down memory lane. We begin with a personal experience from the early 1990s, in the distant and (then) primitive land of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).?Today, most of us know the UAE as the epicenter of tall buildings, an overcharged city of Dubai, and plenty of lavish spending.? Even Police drive flashy cars. When I first visited more than three decades ago, camels walking the streets and a periodic sandstorm posed the most exotic takeaways from the country.?

It was a more innocent time in the money business too, and here our story carries us two hours Southwest to Dubai’s sister city of Abu Dhabi where, under the radar, the country's serious money resides.??

I had flown from Chicago to the UAE to meet with one of the largest Sovereign Funds in the world.?Deep under the sands in the emirate of Abu Dhabi lies most of UAE’s oil reserves.??Naturally, in the business of investing, Abu Dhabi is a major stop in the region for managers like me.?Its investment fund carries the acronym ADIA (Abu Dhabi Investment Authority), and even back then it was a whopper, to the tune of about $700 billion USD.

As I approached the entrance of the multi-story headquarters of ADIA, I noticed something strange in the next building, over the doorway of a tall white marble high rise along the city’s fashionable Cor-niche District.??This almost identical building adjoined ADIA, and workmen were high on cranes removing rusted metal letters from above the entrance.?The letters wrote out the acronym BCCI.

I thought nothing of it until exiting the building after my meeting, and discovering the letters had disappeared, leaving a rusted negative image of BCCI against the white facade.?

Things got stranger when I went to my hotel to check in.??The Meridian was walking distance from ADIA, and I lugged my baggage in the sweltering summer heat, lusting for the air conditioning that awaited me inside.??A receptionist informed me a delegation of Americans had arrived in town quite unexpectedly, and were checking out in the early evening, much later than my pre-arranged arrival time.?

She asked me if I might delay my check-in until they had departed.?I smiled, left my bags at the concierge, and told the receptionist I had work to do in town; I would wait until mid-evening to return and check in.?

As I floated around the lobby of the Meridian, I observed more than a few familiar faces with American origins, images I had caught regularly on the evening news back in the USA.? I didn’t put two and two together until much later, when I discovered these were US Congressmen, Senators, and connected to the bank behind those rusted letters I had seen earlier that afternoon.

Very soon thereafter I learned BCCI had closed, mysteriously and suddenly, defaulting on its obligations and going bankrupt. It turned out Sheikh Zyed bin Sultan Al Nayan of Abu Dhabi was fronting for this bank, and would take the heat for the failure.?

I recall news outlets portraying the BCCI debacle using the logic of an old man surrounded by an entourage of grifters, making some poor financial decisions. And, naturally, the world bought this lie, the media covered for everyone, and we moved on to other more pressing matters.

I was young and green behind the ears, and thought little of what I had witnessed that day until well after my return to Chicago, when the news of BCCI's demise started hitting the airwaves on the evening news.?Countless billions of dollars were missing from the bank, and everyone scrambled together a story to explain the unseemly end to a landmark bank. Rumors circulated about mysterious attorneys from Washington DC involved in the BCCI affair.?Doubtless, I had rubbed shoulders with a few of them in the lobby of the Meridian.?

Flash forward to 2017, and a happenstance conversation with a student and former US Navy officer, a military expert who trained in explosives and detonation on submarines, and who had served in Abu Dhabi about the same time I visited the city in the 1990s.?

We compared our calendars and, as he explained it, his 5th fleet was docked in Abu Dhabi during those same months in the early 1990s. ?He told me a story that helped cement what the BCCI incident was all about.? It was one of those Eureka moments--for both of us.

At some point during his stay aboard his ship, a US destroyer, docked well?offshore—so far from land and without the basics like fresh water and electricity, that his admiral complained about inaccessibility of the ship to take care of his men. At one point, my student approached his admiral on deck and found him scratching his head, looking over numbers with a pen and paper attached to his clip-board, doing some quick math in his head.?Turns out his ship was paying for docking fees each day, at a level that seemed insanely high--a figure of some $1 million per day to remain offshore in this god-forsaken location.?Could this be correct?

This single observation helped us both understand the role of banking at BCCI.??In fact, it was a simple scheme; the bank was fronted by the local respectable leader, a Sheikh who knew nothing about banking, but served as a great ruse for US and Western agencies who needed a banking facility to funnel money throughout the region, to and from various locations back to Washington and London, and to fill the coffers of benefactors.??Congressmen, defense contractors, the Military Industrial establishment, arms transfers, shipping interests and much, much more.??

Turns out the kingpin behind the BCCI syndicate was a consummate Washington insider, an attorney for the Democrat Party, who served on the cabinets of former Presidents, and even as a former Defense Secretary--a legend named Clark Clifford.?He died a wealthy old man within a few years of BCCI's closure.?The first paragraph of the following Wikipedia entry says it all.?

Abu Dhabi was a convenient, opaque hub for this kind of payment system.?And Sheikh Zayed was the perfect foil to pull it off.??The US was the paymaster, telling the Abu Dhabi government what to bill, to (over) charge US taxpayers, and the local government obliged, without paying much attention to details.?Money recycled back to Washington to pay the Masters. When you have $700 Billion to care for, sitting in the building next door, a million a day to dock a US Navy Destroyer isn't worth the energy to process the wire transfer.??

You need a compliant partner, an opaque location, and everyone with vested interests to keep the shtick going. The worse the location--in this case in the middle of an ungodly desert--the less likely anyone would be venturing abroad to check the books.

Transparency is the enemy of this system, and it’s becoming more difficult in our age of internet and alternative media to find a closed loop in this game. ?Such a scheme would find it burdensome to function today in the same location. Since then, the USA has clamped down on money laundering in the region, with laws, rules like FACTA, and the like....only to move on to greener pastures.

Enter Ukraine

When Donald Trump made that famous “perfect” phone call to Mr. Zelensky asking for him to check on the rampant corruption in Ukraine, Trump became an enemy of the State.?He smelled another BCCI in the making, this time based in Kiev, and he knew the corruption in Ukraine was out of control. This led to his impeachment, although the last chapter on this topic is yet to be written.

Since 2014 and the Maidan Revolution (and, here, a US coup usually helps to keep the parties in line), Kiev has become the newest clearing house—a new bank, some say-- for arms dealers, drug runners, child traffickers, military transfers and every sort of dirty deed sponsored by the Collective West.

For years, Kiev has been a perfect location. Out of the way, corrupt, and run by the Ukrainian military.? Naturally, everything has been facilitated, sanctioned and cleared by the Collective West--with small scraps of this illicit banking activity moving in and out of Ukraine, and now on the news each evening with the growing miniseries surrounding the Biden Family. ?Europe has turned a blind eye, NATO has paid little attention, and the entire game is driven by Washington.????????

The big question remains: Once this gig is up, where will the next banking hub take root, to continue the legacy of dirty business sponsored by our governments, Wall Street, and multi-national corporations?? How about Africa? Or, closer to home, Kosovo?

We will keep our eyes wide open.????