15717BlackBerry 10 Critical to Research in Motion
Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.
The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.
Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users’ personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees’ phones while leaving the newly jobless workers’ personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.
Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.
Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, called the new phones “beautiful” and described the operating system as “a giant leap forward” from RIM’s current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM’s glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.
But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM’s fallen fortunes.
(Source: The New York Times)
Earthquake Early Warning System may be coming to California
State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima (Los Angeles County) said his bill, SB135, is based on recent advances in preparing the $80 million California warning system to operate and on evidence that other early warning systems are proving effective in Japan, Mexico and other earthquake-prone nations.
Padilla, an MIT-trained engineer from the San Fernando Valley and a former space systems software specialist, speaking at a news conference at the California Institute of Technology, said it could provide “critical seconds for teachers to get their pupils to duck and cover, for drivers to pull to the side of the road, for trains to stop, and for utilities to power down.”
Richard M. Allen, director of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, and his colleagues at Caltech and the US Geological Survey, developed ShakeAlert as part of the California Integrated Seismic Network.
(Source: sfgate.com)
The way we are governed is inexplicable – until you understand the upbringing of the elite.
When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal
By George Monbiot
Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.
So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.
I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.
A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.
By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.
But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.
My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.
The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.
References:
1. Hannah Arendt, 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 6. Originally published by Schocken Books, Berlin.
2. Mike Lofgren, 27th August 2012. Revolt of the Rich. The American Conservative. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/
(Source: Guardian)
Bias against Low-Cadre Employees
Policies formulated by Pakistani policymakers reflect a clear bias against lower staff.
Government employees of low cadre at the receiving end whilst upper cadres enjoy much higher salaries, benefits and perks. No wonder there is corruption in all Government departments. When you are unable to honourably fulfill your basic needs, you are prone to look for alternates.
A good overview of Pakistani Bureaucracy
Talash - January 27th, 2013
Pakistani Scientist Rayid Ghani: Obama’s Secret Re-Election Weapon
With a sluggish economy, unemployment teetering at around the eight per cent mark, and growing anti-Obama sentiment in some parts of the country, a second term seemed an uphill task for Obama and it was going to take an extraordinary campaign to make it happen.
Things were different in 2008. Back then he had the fortune of an electorate grown weary of the Bush presidency looking for change and with no real record to defend. His mercurial rise and the zeitgeist of the country at the time seemed to have coincided at the right time.
This time it was going to be harder, with a first term that had left some of his more ardent supporters with a tinge of disappointment given the promise of his first campaign, and the Republicans growing even more strident in their opposition. America hadn’t been so politically polarized in a long time.
But in a presidential campaign, the incumbent enjoys a few advantages and one of them is a strong organisational setup.
From the get-go David Axelrod, the brain behind the Obama campaign, recognised the role that data and information could play in the election. The process had been initiated in 2008 but databases were scattered and it wasn’t until the 2010 midterm elections that the Democratic Party, despite heavy losses, was able to streamline the data to accurately forecast results in a meaningful way.
Enter Rayid Ghani.
At first impression Ghani comes across as an affable person, who speaks in short, clipped sentences that don’t give away any more than he intends to. Right away you get the feeling that he knows what he’s talking about. But his unassuming manner belies the fact that he is one of the leading experts in the growing field of analytics and data mining.
An alum of Karachi Grammar School, he moved to the Unites States for college where he attended a small liberal arts school in Tennessee called Sewanee: University of the South.
There he studied computer science and mathematics, but as with many undergraduate experiences, he used his time there to find his true calling.
“What I really did there was explore and figure out what I wanted to do, which ended up being a research career in some form of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Ghani said. “I was motivated by two goals: One was to study and understand how we (humans) learn and two: I wanted to solve large practical problems by making computers smarter though the use of data.”
That eventually led him to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for graduate school where he studied Machine Learning and Data Mining.
It was during this period that he started working at Accenture Technology labs as chief scientist, before joining Obama For America.
At Accenture, Ghani mined mountains of private data of given corporations to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior.
“We were a small group of people who were kind of looking at the next generation of tools that would be beneficial for businesses,” he said. “We were trying to find new approaches to analysing data and see how we could apply it to businesses.”
In today’s data-centric world, the one-size-fits-all model is no longer an efficient use of a company’s resources. More and more, corporations are looking for increasingly targeted approaches to attract consumers.
Similar to how Facebook uses information from user profiles to target its advertising, Ghani helped businesses find patterns in consumer behavior so that his clients could develop different strategies that suit individual preferences. It’s what’s known as customer-relationship management or CRM in the corporate sector.
(Source: dawn.com)
India’s New Focus on Rape Shows Only the Surface of Women’s Perils
But discrimination against women is so endemic and wide-ranging in India that deaths from domestic violence account for only a fraction of the overall risk of unnecessary death. “Other aspects come into play, like female infanticide, mistreatment of young girls in terms of access to resources, maternal deaths, unequal access to health care and so forth,” said Ms. Anderson, the economics professor. “Indian women face more dangers.”
(Source: The New York Times)
Indian guru sparks outrage by placing blame on Delhi gang-rape victim
“This tragedy would not have happened if she had chanted God’s name and fallen at the feet of the attackers. The error was not committed by just one side,” he said in video footage which has been widely circulated on the internet.
The 71-year-old’s remarks — the latest in a series of gaffes by public figures blaming women for the country’s rape epidemic — drew a chorus of condemnation.
(Source: thenational.ae)
Women suffer from Gandhi’s legacy
Gandhi believed Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings. He argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour. He moderated his views towards the end of his life. But the damage was done, and the legacy lingers in every present-day Indian press report of a rape victim who commits suicide out of “shame”. Gandhi also waged a war against contraceptives, labelling Indian women who used them as whores.
Like all men who wage a doomed war with their own sexual desires, Gandhi’s behaviour around females would eventually become very, very odd. He took to sleeping with naked young women, including his own great-niece, in order to “test” his commitment to celibacy. The habit caused shock and outrage among his supporters. God knows how his wife felt.
(Source: Guardian)
A Conversation With Polio Expert Naveen Thacker
It was difficult to convince people to take repeated polio doses and there were some pockets of resistance, particularly in western U.P., in minority communities. This resistance mainly stemmed from false rumors about the polio vaccine.
This was overcome by involving religious leaders, local medical practitioners and huge celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, who together highlighted the necessity for polio eradication. Where the mass marketing campaign did not reach, the door-to-door campaign by 2.3 million volunteers across the country meant that we reached children in the hardest-to-reach rural communities.
(Source: The New York Times)
Prohibition of Dunaywe Talks in Masjid
Mecca Masjed, Hyderabad, India
(Source: blog.nooresunnat.com)
HSBC vs. BCCI – Hypocrisy at its best
Excerpts from the upcoming book ‘What comes round goes around – The True Financial Crisis’ by Mubashir Malik
Abedi befriended the world’s elite, namely the rising oil tycoons of the Middle East, and with their investment capital he created BCCI in 1972, incorporated in Luxembourg with Head offices in Abu Dhabi. However barely two decades after its inception it was accused of various fraud & bankruptcy allegations, eventually being forcefully shut down by the Bank of England & authorities in 1991.
Within 10 years of birth, the growth of this Arab owned, Pakistani managed bank was phenomenal. It became the fastest growing bank, with a network of 400 branches in over 72 countries. At its peak in the late 80’s, BCCI became the 7th largest private bank in the world in terms of assets alone. This was an enormous feat by any standards, especially by a bank that was originally set up as an institution to help bridge the gap between the Third world and the West.
Naturally, the prying eyes of the world were on BCCI. Undeniably, there were factions of the western banking elite, traditionally controlled by Wall street or regulators like the Bank of England that saw BCCI through the doctrine of suspicion. The bank’s new plush London headquarters at 100 Leadenhall Street, in the heart of the City’s financial district, became notorious amongst the traditional high street banks as they wanted to get a piece of the success cake. To be brutally honest, I’m not at all surprised. BCCI became a victim of its own success. A former BCCI executive is quoted as saying “While other banks were sleeping & crawling, BCCI was awake and sprinting”.
Here was a bank that came literally from nowhere, had installed conspicuous branches dotted around the most sought after prime locations in central London, attracting high net worth individuals as depositors and was growing at a rate faster than it takes Dominic Strauss Kahn to unzip his trousers.
It is said that if you walked into any BCCI branch, it would feel and look as though you have walked into the lobby of a luxurious yet classy 5* hotel. The only ATM machines outside world famous Harrods store in Knightsbridge were those of BCCI. They had almost 4 branches alone on the small stretch of road that is called ‘Park Lane’ in London’s exclusive Mayfair district.
Abedi had transformed the meaning of consumer & personal banking in the real practical sense. Normally in high street banks, customers were used to tedious long queues, derelict shop fronts, dull interiors and gloomy carpets & lighting. In BCCI, a normal walk-in customer was treated to leather sofas, marble décor, impeccably dressed personal bankers greeting you at the door and helping you in the queue in advance to save time (a service only recently adopted by the high street banks), hot/cold drinks for free served by dedicated catering staff. In addition there were always a string of chauffeur driven Mercedes limousines parked outside main BCCI branches to transport key clients & Executives.
This was a whole new personal banking revolution and Agha Hassan Abedi was the pioneer.
So what went wrong and how did it all go pear-shaped for this promising ambitious 3rd world bank that thousands of people entrusted with their hard earned money? Well for the Full Monty, you will have to read my book due for release next Summer. However for the eager, zealous & impatient readers I shall give you the quintessence in a nutshell.
Agha Hassan Abedi knew that his bank was the next big thing and on target to possibly being the largest bank in the world. He was forging relationships with political heavyweights and rubbing shoulders with the likes of former US president Jimmy Carter and the Pope . The more notorious clientele included Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Bin Laden family and more notably the CIA.
Abedi’s enemies & competitors also knew this. However in order to really get to where he wanted to be and fulfill his vision, he needed a presence in the USA. The banking federal laws within the USA are such that it was very difficult for BCCI to make a considerable impact as a foreign bank. Even in the UK, BCCI was never given full banking status, but only as a ‘licensed deposit taker’. Therefore to create a foothold in America, BCCI became a majority shareholder and took control of First American bank (one of America’s largest banking networks) through some influential front men and investors. On paper the deal was legitimate and signed by wealthy Saudi & American investors, however the federal authorities who were already suspicious and looking for dirt on BCCI, soon realized that the bank was pulling all the strings at First American. Even though BCCI was accused of other activities like money laundering, accounts manipulation and insolvency. The main catalyst and the cherry on the cake was the acquisition of an American bank which eventually sparked BCCI’s debacle & downfall. It was unthinkable for the Americans to digest that a once unknown bank from the Middle East was replacing and overtaking the banking world, leaving the likes of Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and others behind.
The guillotine came down on BCCI in July 1991. The bank’s assets were frozen and the thousands of depositors of BCCI were in a frenzy as they feared losing their life savings amidst reports of the bank’s poor liquidity & insolvency. The Bank of England accused BCCI of being bankrupt and an apparent ‘hole’ uncovered with losses of up to £1billion apparently. The majority shareholder at the time Sheikh Zayed bin Nahayan Al Nahyan, Ruler of Abu Dhabi, warned the authorities not to close the bank and that he will personally guarantee the reported ‘losses’ and implement a cash injection of £1billion. He went on further to the extent that he will order an entire shake up and re-structuring of the bank worldwide with new staff & management. The Bank of England had already started a similar re-structuring of the bank prior to its closure but still decided to close it down instead. The conclusion being that when the head of the UAE Royal family (majority shareholder) gives you a guarantee of funds, accepting responsibility, co-operating with the restructure and re-assures the world of the financial stability of the bank with his personal backing – and then the bank STILL ends up being forced shut by the Western authorities, then we really have to question whether something else was at play here.
Now the first thing coming to all of your minds is that this a typical tale of East blaming the West, blaming the misdoings of a few corrupt Pakistani bankers on Western jealousy, Conspiracy theories galore and racism. However we only need to read the front headline newspapers of the past week to figure that one out. It doesn’t take Einstein to see the double standards and hypocrisy in the aftermath of the world economic meltdown hat started in 2008 with the Lehman Brothers failure.
Now let’s grab a hot cup of Horlicks, some MnM’s or some ‘lassi’ if you are inclined to fall asleep afterwards and go through this list of financial institutions with scandals:
Barclays Bank PLC
Barclays Bank was recently fined £290million because of its involvement in the LIBOR scandal. What does that mean? I Hear you all cry.
It’s the London interbank offer rate, an interest-rate benchmark for many other rates, from commercial loans to mortgages. Libor is also an important index for derivatives, which are complex agreements whose value derives from a benchmark.
Libor is the most widely used interest rate in the world. Estimates of how much is tied to Libor vary from $350 trillion to $800 trillion. To give you a rough estimate, $350 trillion would pay for all USA government spending for the next century. Some banks including Barclays artificially inflated or deflated their rates, depending on what would benefit them most. Some may have deflated their rates to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they actually were.
During the financial crisis of 2008, the rate was more of an estimate, since banks weren’t lending to anyone. Between January 2005 and June 2009, Barclays derivatives traders made a total of 257 requests to fix Libor and Euribor rates, according to a report by the FSA.
In June 2012, Barclays admitted to misconduct and the UK’s FSA imposed a £59.5m penalty. The US Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) imposed fines worth £102m and £128m respectively, forcing Barclays to pay a total of around £290m.
Two days later, chief executive Bob Diamond said he would attend a Commons Treasury Select Committee and that the bank would co-operate with authorities. However, he insisted he would not resign.
The same day, Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King called for a “cultural change, but ruled out a Leveson-style inquiry into the banks. Sounds very flaky to me. Had this been BCCI. It would’ve been a different story. Still reading? Good.
JP Morgan & Chase
JP Morgan has had to pay fines on 3 occasions in four years to settle regulatory allegations that it mishandled customer accounts
In 2009 JPMorgan’s futures broker paid $300,000 to settle CFTC allegations it co-mingled accounts and created a $750m shortfall in customer funds. The shortfall was cleared up the next day, but the CFTC faulted the bank for its delay in notifying the regulator.
The FSA fined JP Morgan Securities £33.32m ($48.2m) in 2010 for failing to protect its clients’ money by lumping it in with its own over a period of almost seven years.
Under the FSA’s rules, firms are required to keep customers’ funds in separate accounts to protect it in case the financial firm becomes insolvent. More recently, the CFTC alleged the bank mishandled Lehman Brothers’ customer funds for almost two years before the broker filed for bankruptcy court protection in September 2008. The bank allegedly counted customer money when calculating how much credit it would extend to Lehman. So again the bank settled with the CFTC for $20million with regards to Lehman. The commission also alleged JPMorgan did not return the customer funds until it was ordered to do so almost two weeks after the bankruptcy.
Last but not least one of JP Morgan Cazenove’s most senior bankers Ian Hannam resigned after the FSA announced it was fining him £450,000 for market abuse. Shocked? Continue reading.
Goldman Sachs
Endless scandals! Just to name a few : 1) $60 million settlement for Massachusetts subprime mortgages, 2)involvement in European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009. 3) Involvement in AIG bailout scandal plus many more. 4) Insider trading.
Morgan Stanley
1) $125 million in order to settle its portion of a $1.4 billion settlement relating to intentionally misleading research motivated by a desire to win investment banking business with the companies covered.
2) Morgan Stanley settled a sex discrimination suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $54 million on July 12, 2004. In 2007, the firm agreed to pay $46 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by eight female brokers.
3) The New York Stock Exchange imposed a $19 million fine on January 12, 2005 for alleged regulatory and supervisory lapses.
Sexual discrimination cases and employee dissatisfaction was unheard of at BCCI where everybody treated themselves as part of the ‘BCC family’.
Standard Chartered
The New York banking regulator accused Standard Chartered of scheming with Iran to launder as much as $250bn (£161bn). Iran is listed under US sanctions and there are strict controls in place for dealing with them. However Standard Chartered broke all the rules. According to the New York court document, Standard Chartered “schemed with the government of Iran and hid from regulators roughly 60,000 secret transactions, involving at least $250bn, and reaping SCB hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. SCB’s actions left the US financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins and corrupt regimes, and deprived law enforcement investigators of crucial information used to track all manner of criminal activity”. They became experts at ‘wire-stripping’, something that was never done at BCCI. Wire-stripping is when a bank alters bank codes to hide the origin of a transaction. This is usually done by changing the code that identifies the beneficiary’s bank.
Under normal circumstances, Standard Chartered would’ve had its New York license revoked, potentially disastrous to the bank’s existence. However instead the punishment is limited to fines :The Federal Reserve said the bank will pay $100m to resolve claims that it provided “inadequate” responses to bank examiners and insufficient oversight of compliance to US sanctions, bank secrecy laws, and anti-money-laundering rules. Separately, the bank will forfeit $227m under deferred prosecution agreements with the US Justice Department and the New York District Attorney. The settlements are on top of the $340m paid to New York’s Department of Financial Services in August.
HSBC
Finally we head to the holy grail of scandals of recent times.
The HSBC fine for money laundering charges this week reached a record $1.92 billion(£1.2bn) as Europe’s biggest bank settled charges in an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department.
By accepting fault and paying the settlement, HSBC avoided criminal charges. The bank agreed to deferred prosecution with the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Justice Department.
A report by the Times newspaper said a money-laundering indictment or a guilty plea to money-laundering charges, would “essentially be a death sentence” for HSBC and cost its license to operate in the United States. The astonishing aspect is that HSBC’s dealings with Mexico were considered to be a “low risk” for money laundering, despite the fact that HSBC’s Mexico operation is said to have transferred some $7 billion from Mexico to the United States, much of it thought to have been money from drug cartels. HSBC also continued to do business with various banks in the Middle East that were said to be funding Al Qaeda groups.
Furthermore one begs to ask the question if HSBC’s $1.9bn (£1.2bn) fine is really worth all the fuss its creating? Well, it’s a world record for the offence of money laundering and breaking sanctions. However, the sum represents only about four weeks’ earnings given the bank’s pre-tax profits of $21.9bn last year. Therefore it probably hurts HSBC’s reputation but not its pockets or bonuses.
Therefore what makes me smile with unease is the way the news of the world-record fine on HSBC gets swept under the carpet sooner than it took me to forget my first girlfriend in boarding school. The bank scandal was headline news last week and by the weekend, we see the news disappear in the newspapers and TV broadcasts.
The BCCI scandal on the other hand, took more than two decades to unravel, the accountants and liquidators looting the funds over the years with over 90% of its creditors being reimbursed. Where did all this money come from if the bank was insolvent?
The global drug money laundering market at the time when BCCI was shut in 1991 was US$200 billion and BCCI was accused of only US$14million. A mere $14m is small fish to fry in front of $200billion! Now the money laundering laws are much more stringent than two decades ago. In the light of the HSBC and Standard Chartered scandals, do you think now money laundering does not exist? Not only does it exist but, the size of the market has increased many folds. Despite more strict and stringent laws the fraudulent market is growing.
We also need to focus on the enormous philanthropic efforts of BCCI and Agha Hassan Abedi on a global scale that people worldwide are still benefitting from today.
How many people know that the world renowned, best private hospital in the UK – Cromwell Hospital was established by BCCI? The BCCI foundation, now known as the’ Infaq foundation’ helps millions of people even today with its funds. BCCI also established top class educational facilities like NUST and FAST in Pakistan. Not forgetting how it changed the lives of 14,000 employees and their families and gave them a dream & ambition to think ‘Big’. The difference between the fates of BCCI and HSBC following accusations of similar ground but the latter being more serious can be seen by all.
Furthermore it was BCCI that funded and set up the Princes Youth Business trust (now known as the Prince’s trust) that gave awards under the patronage of Prince Charles to young entrepreneurs who needed start-up loans for their small businesses. These were all funded by BCCI. The Prince of Wales himself was a great affiliate of the Bank.
The world needs to wake up and acknowledge the great tragedy and miscarriage of justice that was carried out over 20 years ago.
The world opinion on BCCI is of the’ bank of crooks & criminals International’. That was US Senator John Kerry’s opinion anyway. I must stress though that the level of regard I have for his opinion is the same regard Barack Obama has for my personal choice of porridge oats cereal for breakfast. Therefore the less said the better.
The question needs to be asked : Why are UK taxpayers bailing out banks such as RBS, Barclays, Lloyds TSB and HSBC due their own fraudulent activities? Whereas BCCI was shut down even though it was financially sound & backed by the UAE Government and didn’t ask for a single penny from the taxpayer!
The university textbooks, Google and Wikipedia need to be re-written to know that BCCI is no longer the ’largest financial fraud in history’.
- Excerpts from the upcoming book ‘What comes round goes around – The True Financial Crisis’ by Mubashir Malik. Sources : Financial Times, BBC World news, The Economist.
Mubashir Malik currently works in Public & Media relations at a Joint Venture of the world’s largest oil producer Saudi Aramco
(Source: mubashirmalik.wordpress.com)
Alain de Botton discusses his book Status Anxiety which examines our fears over what others think about us and about how we are judged to be either a success or failure.
