Structural sources of international crime: Policy lessons from the BCCI Affair

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was established in 1972 to provide help for poor people and poor countries. However, its scandalous closure, as the centre of a huge fraud, indicated that the main beneficiaries of the services of BCCI were the Colombian drug barons, the CIA, and several prominent Third World dictators. The BCCI collapse provides an opportunity to look into these global networks of criminality. It demonstrates that the lines between legitimate and illegitimate enterprises can be very thin; that illicit enterprises can themselves collaborate; and that the bank was itself involved in covert operations and the foreign policies of several states. The BCCI scandal presents a number of lessons in regulatory failure.