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Bank of England officials "shut their eyes and turned away" instead of clamping down on fraudulent activity at BCCI, the High Court has been told.
Liquidators of the collapsed bank are suing the UK's central bank for about £1bn for "knowingly or recklessly" failing in its supervisory role.

They are acting on behalf of 6,500 UK-based depositors, who lost money when the rogue bank was shut down in 1991.

The Bank of England says it plans to defend itself "vigorously".


Gordon Pollock QC, for the liquidators, said the Bank "deliberately ran away from seeking to find out sufficient information about BCCI because it didn't want to be drawn into the role of supervisor".

Mr Abedi, the bank's founder, could get you girls, boys or seats at the opera, said the complainants' lawyer



In court: the BCCI case
He said the Bank of England "was once - and I emphasise once - one of the most revered and respected public institutions in this country".

And he accused the Bank of "positively misleading" the Bingham inquiry which was set up after BCCI collapsed and reported in 1992.

Mr Pollock said that the Bank of England knew that it, rather than the "chocolate box Ruritania" of Luxembourg, should be the lead regulator of BCCI.

But he said that Bank officials put their own interests above those of the depositors.

Mr Pollock will be spending the next 12 weeks outlining the case against the Bank of England, drawing on some 40,000 internal documents the plaintiffs have forced the Bank to release.

The case took 10 years to reach the courts.

It is the first such action the central bank has faced in its 300-year history.

Waste of money?

MP Keith Vaz, who has campaigned on behalf of BCCI creditors and employees, says the case is a waste of money - cash which he believes should go to the creditors.

If the BoE lost the case, the taxpayer would pay, he said. If the liquidators lost, the creditors would pay.

The trial is expected to last about 18 months, and legal costs could exceed £55m ($100m).

So far the liquidators have managed to recover 75% of the money lost by BCCI creditors, among them many small Asian businesses.

Proving 'misfeasance'

BCCI TIMELINE
1972: Luxembourg-based BCCI opens branch in London
1985: Price Waterhouse investigates BCCI losses
1987 Luxembourg asks for help to regulate BCCI
1988: Tampa branch of BCCI closed after money-laundering charges
1990: Price Waterhouse says BCCI needs £1.8bn rescue
1991: BCCI closed down by international regulators
1992: Bingham report criticises Bank of England's role
1993: Liquidators issue writ against Bank of England
1997: Labour moves banking supervision to FSA
2004: Court case begins
The Bank of England has been criticised in the past for its poor oversight of the banking sector.

In 1997, after Labour came to power, the watchdog role was moved from the bank to the new Financial Services Authority.

However, the Bank is legally protected from negligence claims.

The liquidators are therefore pursuing the stronger claim of "misfeasance", which implies that Bank officials were not just reckless but acted dishonestly. Lawyers describe misfeasance as the "wrongful exercise of lawful authority".

Tangled web

BCCI was founded in 1972 by Pakistani businessman Aga Hasan Abedi.

It operated in 60 countries and its regulation was split between the Bank of England, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, which led to difficulties when it was being wound up.

During the 1980s, evidence emerged of BCCI's links with terrorist organisations, arms shipments to Arab states and South American drug cartels.

According to Deloitte, the Bank of England wrongfully granted BCCI a licence, and did not act quickly enough to withdraw it.

The case, which could turn out to be one of the most expensive in legal history, has broad implications for the future of financial supervision in the UK, say legal experts

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Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank

More than 20 years after the death of the banker Roberto Calvi was dismissed as suicide, four people, including a jailed Mafia boss, went on trial yesterday in Rome, charged with his murder.
The case of the man known as "God's banker" remains one the most extraordinary of recent decades - a whodunnit involving the Vatican, Cosa Nostra, rogue freemasons, financiers and politicians.

Only one of the four defendants, Flavio Carboni, was in court to hear the charges. The Sardinian businessman told reporters: "I know as much about Calvi's murder as I do about the killing of Jesus Christ."

Two other people who were with the doomed banker on his final journey, Mr Carboni's then girlfriend, Manuela Kleinszig, and a Rome underworld boss, Ernesto Diotallevi, are also charged with murder.

The convicted Mafia boss, Pippo Calo, followed proceedings over a video link to his prison. According to documents leaked last year, the prosecution will seek to prove that he ordered Calvi murdered, for bungling the laundering of Cosa Nostra's funds and to stop him blackmailing powerful former associates in the Vatican and Italian society.

Two British women are expected to give evidence. One, Odette Jones (nee Morris), 43, from west London, was arrested last year on suspicion of perjury and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Ms Morris, who is understood to be a relative of Mr Carboni, was questioned about the claim that she provided him with a false alibi. The other was the girlfriend of an Italian antiques dealer who died three months after Calvi. He is thought to have been murdered for threatening to name the banker's killers.

Mr Calvi was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, which was about to collapse with debts of £800m when he died. Some of the losses were the result of reckless offshore investments in association with the Vatican's bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion.

At the same time, Mr Calvi drew assistance from the maverick P2 masonic lodge. He was found hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London in June 1982. Bricks were found stuffed into his pockets and down the front of his trousers - an apparently symbolic detail that prompted speculation of a masonic link.

Eleven boxes and seven folders stuffed with new evidence were submitted to the court shortly before the start of the trial. A source close to the prosecution said it showed Mr Calvi's involvement in the laundering of treasury bonds stolen by the Mafia in Turin in 1982. The bonds had been passed to Banco Ambrosiano's chairman by Mr Carboni.

The source added that Silvano Vittor, a Trieste-based smuggler who helped organise Mr Calvi's flight to London in the days leading up to Banco Ambrosiano's collapse, had admitted lying to investigators in the past. Mr Vittor now said it was Mr Carboni's decision the group should travel to London rather than Zurich, where Mr Calvi wanted to go.

Mr Vittor was said to have told prosecutors that on the evening Mr Calvi disappeared, the banker left the Chelsea flat in which he was staying along with Mr Carboni. Mr Carboni has denied seeing him that night.

Yesterday's opening session heard testimony from forensic specialists who have been looking for DNA samples on a rubber finger-protector that was found in Mr Carboni's luggage in 1982. Prosecutors believe the sheath was used by Mr Calvi to protect a wound on his index finger and commissioned the scientists to attempt to match it with DNA samples from his body.



Police investigating murder of 'God's Banker'

JEREMY CHARLES IN ROME


DETECTIVES investigating the murder of "God’s Banker", Roberto Calvi, have discovered more than $70 million (£37 million) hidden in a Bahamian bank, it was revealed yesterday.

The financier was discovered dead under a London bridge in 1982. At first his death was recorded as a suicide but after more than 20 years of investigations the case has been reopened and is being treated as murder.

The discov ery of the £37 million was made by officers based in Rome and London, and Scotland Yard has been asked to contact authorities in the Bahamian capital of Nassau to provide full details.

The money is believed to be connected to the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano of which Calvi was president. It is thought to be the proceeds of Mafia drugs deals which Calvi was frantically attempting to launder but which went wrong, resulting in his killing.

Rome investigating magistrate Luca Tescaroli said: "We are convinced the money is connected to the fall of Banco Ambrosiano. The bulk of it arrived in Nassau from Florida and we are tracing its route.

"Other connected accounts elsewhere have also been frozen and we have asked colleagues in London to contact the authorities in Nassau to investigate further."

The latest development comes just ten days after a second British woman, London antiques dealer, Caroline Whitby-James, was questioned at her home in Florence by detectives in connection with Calvi’s death. Late last year Odette Morris, also from London, was also questioned by police investigating Calvi’s death.

Calvi was known as God's Banker because of his Vatican connections. He was 62 years old when he was found hanging from a length of orange rope from scaffolding under London’s Blackfriars Bridge, with bricks stuffed in his pockets and down the front of his trousers.

‘Investigators believe a motive for Calvi’s murder was his knowledge of corruption in Italian politics and the Vatican’




At first this was enough to convince police he had committed suicide but a later examination of his hands and shoes revealed no traces of zinc from the new scaffolding poles.

This crucial turning point meant that it would have been impossible for Calvi to climb up and hang himself and prompted the opening of a murder inquiry.

Investigators in Italy and Britain believe that another motive for his murder was his knowledge of widespread corruption both in Italian politics and the Vatican, and a briefcase of his said to contain "political dynamite" has never been found.

Calvi had been convicted of illegally taking foreign currency out of Italy and had been given a four-year prison sentence, which he was appealing against at the time of his death.

Detectives believe the Mafia panicked, thinking Calvi would turn police informer rather than go to jail.

The story will take a new twist next month when four people go on trial in Rome accused of his murder. They are three Italian men Flavio Carboni, Pippo Calo and Ernesto Diotallevi and an Austrian woman, Manuela Kleinzig.