Keith Vaz served as Member of Parliament for Leicester East from 1987 to 2019, becoming the UK Parliament's longest-serving British Asian MP. Throughout the years that followed BCCI's closure, he was the parliamentarian who did the most to keep the case of its former employees, depositors and creditors before Parliament and the public.
Taking Up a Cause Others Would Not Touch
Vaz was still a young MP, not long into his own parliamentary career, when the closure of BCCI on 5 July 1991 threw thousands of employees and depositors - many from Asian communities in Britain - into sudden financial hardship. With his own South Asian background, he was widely seen as a representative voice for that community, and it was to him that former BCCI staff and creditors' committees turned.
He took up their cause at the worst possible moment to be associated with BCCI. Coverage of the closure was dominated by allegations of fraud and, in a phrase that would define BCCI in the public mind for years afterward, an institution-wide "criminal culture" - a characterisation used publicly by the then Governor of the Bank of England, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, in 1991. Other MPs approached by BCCI's former staff and creditors declined to get involved, a reluctance understandable enough given how toxic the association had become. Vaz did not share it.
Standing With the Creditors
Vaz's engagement went beyond Westminster and beyond Britain. He and his companions had earlier travelled to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, alongside coordinators of the Committee Representing Employees and Creditors of BCCI - the body that later became the BCCI Campaign Committee representing Employees only - where they presented a letter to the Ruler of Abu Dhabi at the palace on behalf of former BCCI employees and creditors. It was a direct appeal, carried in person, to the one party with the standing to shape the outcome of BCCI's restructuring and liquidation. The underlying documents from that visit have not yet been located, but the visit itself is recorded on this site's profile of Agha Hasan Abedi.
Standing With the Employees
BCCI's staff did not accept the closure quietly. Hundreds of the 1,200 employees who lost their jobs in the shutdown marched outside the Bank of England to protest the decision in the days after 5 July 1991, and depositors and former staff continued to demonstrate at bank premises in the years that followed - in one instance in 1993, Vaz himself was among a small group of demonstrators who entered a bank building in an attempt to secure a meeting. His willingness to be present at these protests, rather than simply raise the matter from the safety of Westminster, was itself a mark of the commitment he brought to the case.
The Visit to Agha Hasan Abedi
On 20 November 1991, Vaz travelled to Karachi, Pakistan, to meet BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, at Abedi's home. By that point Abedi's health had already declined sharply: he had suffered a heart attack in 1988, undergone a heart transplant, and left the running of BCCI in 1990 as a result. It was a visit few other British politicians would have thought to make, to a man whose name had become, in the space of a few months, synonymous with one of the largest banking scandals in history - and it stands as one of the clearer illustrations of Vaz's willingness to engage with BCCI's story as a human one, not only a regulatory or political one.
Parliamentary Pressure and the Bingham Inquiry
Vaz's questions and interventions in the Commons added to the pressure for a full inquiry into the circumstances of BCCI's closure and, in particular, into the conduct of the Bank of England. That wider scrutiny fed into the inquiry ultimately conducted by Lord Justice Bingham and the publication of the Bingham Report in 1992.
His questioning did not stop there. He continued to press the Government on the mounting costs of the liquidation itself, and on the extent to which those costs - largely professional fees - were eating into the funds that should otherwise have gone to creditors.
A Long Campaign, Not a Single Intervention
In later years, Vaz supported representations made to the UK Government by the coordinators of the former employees' BCCI Campaign Committee, calling for the prolonged liquidation to be brought to a close as professional fees continued to accumulate at creditors' expense. What began as a response to a constituency crisis in 1991 became a campaign he sustained for the better part of two decades - long after it would have been politically convenient to let the matter drop.
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