Posts Tagged ‘Mahmoud Karzai’
Documents provide fresh detail on Kabul Bank scandal
Documents obtained by The Sunday Times cast new light on how one of London’s most respected accountancy firms was hoodwinked
The largest private bank in Afghanistan, hailed as a success story by the West, was deliberately designed to help its politically well connected shareholders and executives plunder about £622m.
Documents obtained by The Sunday Times cast new light on how a complex fraud set up by Afghan executives allegedly hoodwinked one of London’s most respected accountancy firms, Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), which in February last year found no wrongdoing at Kabul Bank.
Months later it emerged that executives and shareholders had spent years looting the bank’s coffers. The scandal forced the Afghan government to raid its reserves for £528m to bail out the stricken bank.
As a result, Britain and other countries suspended millions of dollars in aid to Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. President Hamid Karzai blamed western advisers for failing to spot the looming disaster.
Referring to PWC’s February audit, the American government said at the time: “This ‘clean audit’ opinion from a professional accounting and auditing firm with worldwide operations demonstrates the difficulty of identifying fraud at Kabul Bank.”
However, the documents show that the bank’s structure was created for the prime purpose of committing fraud on a massive scale. Investigators have identified 114 fictitious companies set up by the bank, according to the minutes of a recent meeting between Afghan officials, leading donor countries and employees of Kroll, an investigations agency that began a £6.2m audit of the bank earlier this year.
Loans were then made to these fake businesses with the cash dished out among the main shareholders and the bank’s senior executives. The bank also paid off 10 accounting firms (but not PWC) to create a mass of documents that supported the existence of these fake companies.
Between them the bank’s executives and shareholders spent about £93m on luxury villas in Kabul and Dubai and a doomed property venture in the United Arab Emirates.
Among those under investigation in the scandal are Mahmoud Karzai, the president’s brother, and Mohammed Qasim Fahim, a warlord and brother of the country’s first vice-president.
Relatives of Fahim also bought shares and obtained loans worth millions from the bank. Mahmoud Karzai, who had a 7% shareholding in the bank, and the Fahim family deny any wrongdoing.
The shareholders and executives spent a further £37m of the bank’s money on travel and luxurious hotel rooms as they jetted around the world spending depositors’ money.
“Shareholders and management were motivated by loans they could receive rather than by the performance of the bank,” the minutes quote a Kroll official as saying. “Layers of governance in regard to compliance, internal audits and the audit committee were non-existent.”
There are also allegations that bank officials bribed Afghan cabinet ministers to ignore the bank’s fraudulent dealings and gave millions of dollars to President Karzai’s 2009 election campaign, which was itself tainted by accusations of widespread voter fraud.
Questions remain over how PWC failed to spot the massive fraud. The company declined to comment.
“The independent audit that was carried out on Kabul Bank by PWC will be scrutinised, as their audit cleared the bank of all illicit dealing when actually this was not the case at all,” the minutes state.
A Kroll official present at the meeting said the agency would be “looking into this very closely”.
So far just £46m — 8% of the missing funds — has been recovered. Shareholders have apparently signed agreements to repay a total of £203m. A further £249m is still in dispute, raising the possibility that the Afghan government will never get the bulk of its money back. Read the rest of this entry »
Mahmoud Karzai: ‘We are under siege’
Gunmen wearing suicide vests shot dead a presidential advisor and an Afghan politician at a house in Kabul last night.
The two gunmen stormed into the house of the former governor of Uruzgan, Jan Mohammed Khan, at 8pm on Sunday night as both men were sitting down to dinner.
The attackers shot and killed the governor’s bodyguards at the gate before storming into the house and executing Mohammed Khan and the MP, Mohammed Watanwal as they sat talking together on the floor of one of the rooms, according to a detective who arrived at the scene shortly after the killings.
Police then surrounded the house in Kabul’s peaceful Kart-e-Char district, triggering a gun battle that raged into the early hours of Monday morning.
Policemen shot and killed one attacker before the other blew himself up. Three policemen were also killed in the fire-fight.
President Hamid Karzai relied on Mohammed Khan, who was a close friend of his, for advice.
His death comes less than a week after Ahmad Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, in Kandahar City.
A civilian wounded in the suicide bombing at Kandahar's Red Mosque, where a funeral ceremony for AWK was being held
“We are under siege,” said Mahmoud Karzai, the president’s brother, speaking shortly after escaping a suicide bombing at a mosque in Kandahar last week.
The bomb, which the attacker placed in his turban to avoid security, exploded six metres from Mahmoud and three of his brothers at the funeral ceremony of their half-brother, Ahmad Wali, who was killed on Tuesday by a close friend.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing of Mohammed Khan and the MP Watanwal, accusing the former of passing information about insurgent locations to Nato troops.
Mohammed Khan was a former mujahideen and militia commander in the southern province of Uruzgan. He was a close friend of the president’s father. Khan, with the help of American Special Forces, was also instrumental in helping President Karzai return to Afghanistan after 9/11.
For more information on Khan’s past and his ties to the Karzai family read this blog on the Afghan Analysts Network website.
Death threats over inquiry into $1bn bank scandal
Afghanistan’s finance minister has received death threats over his handling of a banking crisis that has mired Kabul’s political elite in accusations of corruption and fraud.
Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal told American and European ambassadors in a meeting earlier this year that the threats on his life had forced him to move members of his family abroad.
Zakhilwal is currently under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund to find a way out of a scandal that implicates Kabul’s ruling class in a case of fraud totalling almost $1 billion.
This week, the finance minister ordered a forensic audit of Kabul Bank, which handled the salaries of 300,000 soldiers, policemen and civil servants.
The investigation threatens to reveal in detail how the bank’s senior executives and shareholders, who include the brothers of both the president and vice-president, used Afghanistan’s largest private bank like a personal slush fund.
Afghan and Western officials describe how Afghanistan’s largest private bank, which nearly collapsed in September after allegations of insider lending were made public, was run as a “ponzi scheme”.
They say documents reveal how its politically connected shareholders and directors took money from the bank to buy a string of luxury villas in Dubai and two shopping centres in Kabul. Read the rest of this entry »
