Customer Reviews

Full Service Bank

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This is a good book on a great banking scandal. Possibly the greatest banking scandal in modern history. For a taste of the scope of the thing, it involved Clark Clifford, one of the great Washington fixers of all time, plus Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, and Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, the guy who brought you the UAE and a couple of billions dollars in lost money. There are law firms and accountants still working to retrieve some of this money today, more than ten years after the bank collapsed.

Most business and banking scandals are really just complicated variants of simple scheme or mistake. LTCM borrowed more than they could afford. ADM was involved in price fixing, and BCCI was basically a pyramid scheme.*/** Admittedly a huge and complex pyramid scheme, but a pyramid scheme all the same. I am constantly amazed that people think they can get away with this like this, but I guess one should never underestimate the greed and stupidity of the average person.

Tracking who did what to whom when is a complicated job in this scandal, and Adam and Frantz do a good job of keeping it all clear. This book doesn't have the great writing of an Kurt Eichenwald book, but it does keep all the facts straight.

* A pyramid scheme is where money from new suckers goes to pay the older suckers while the people who set up the scheme get mad rich.

*Enron is the exception here. You could say Enron was the result of shady accounting but that is really oversimplifying Enron's use of a pretty insane set of accounting tools and debt restructuring instruments.

When I first purchased "A Full Service Bank: How BCCI..." I was thinking that it is a long boring book, but when I started to read it I was amazed on what BCCI actually pulled off and how they did such things. The governments and banking systems in other countries also intrigued me. "A Full Service Bank" is an exciting book that keeps the reader engaged for a long amount of time and keeps them interested. When you are done reading this novel you should feel a sense of knowledge. I suggest "A full Service Bank" to anyone interested in the banking industry or interested in a great book about scandles andn banks.

All students of finance, auditing, and law enforcement should read about the BCCI saga.

How could a bank exist for 20 years with almost entirely criminal operations under the nose of many regulators and auditors?

"Full Service Bank" is not only well researched, but is also written as a fast-paced thriller, not a boring textbook, and therefore I consider it the best account that I have read of BCCI.

John Christmas, author of "Democracy Society"

Adams gives the reader an in-depth look at BCCI's rise and fall. He looks at the bank's often shady business practices, and examines why such a worldwide institution failed so spectacularly.

This book does a great job of presenting BCCI's rise and fall. There has obviously been painstaking research done to present an accurate portrait of the situation at BCCI. The institutional corruption and disregard for ethics or banking regulations is shown time and time again. There are stories here about bank managers instructing depositors in how to defraud the system, the acceptance of deposits from dictators and drug lords, and the attempt to circumvent US banking regulators to open branches on the East Coast. It is a compelling story from not only a business standpoint, but also from a historical one.

I did not read the bit about the FBI's sting of BCCI. The part of the book I did read was well researched, albeit dry in some parts.