Work in Progress
A Hypothesis
This page sets out a possibility that goes beyond the case-specific questions raised in Alternative Perspectives on the Closure of BCCI and Abedi's US Dream: that BCCI's closure may belong to a wider, recurring pattern in which Western and US policy has moved decisively against states, institutions or individuals identified - rightly or wrongly - with independent Muslim-world financial or military capability.
This is not offered as a settled conclusion, and it is not, so far as this site has been able to establish, a link that has been drawn elsewhere in quite this form. It is a hypothesis, set out separately so that it can be tested on its own terms against the historical record, and so that it is not confused with the proven regulatory and fraud findings against BCCI, which stand regardless of whether this further possibility holds any weight.
The BCCI Question, in Brief
The circumstances of BCCI's closure - the abrupt abandonment of an Abu Dhabi-backed restructuring programme, the Bank of England's reliance on a draft rather than final Section 41 report, and the extent to which BCCI's concealed control of First American Bankshares placed it inside sensitive American banking and political territory - are examined in detail elsewhere on this site and are not repeated here. See Alternative Perspectives on the Closure of BCCI for the closure timeline and the case for and against US pressure having shaped it, and Abedi's US Dream for how Abedi's ambitions in American banking, and BCCI's route into First American through nominee shareholders, brought the Bank into contact with the interests that this page goes on to consider.
What this page adds is the question of whether that episode fits a broader pattern visible in later cases.
Is There a Documented Pattern? What Others Have Said
The claim that BCCI's own fall was seen - at the time, by some - as an action against the perception of a Muslim-run institution is not this site's invention. On 6 August 1991, a month after closure, the Los Angeles Times published "America From Abroad: In Pakistan, BCCI's Failure Is Seen as a Washington Conspiracy," reporting that many Pakistanis regarded BCCI's failure as a Washington-driven move, with some alleging that "Zionist" interests lay behind a drive to undermine their nation's bank. Los Angeles Times A little over a week after closure, on 28 July 1991, Time magazine made a related observation in "Scandal? What Scandal?", noting that Muslims "harbor even more elaborate conspiracy theories" linking BCCI's closure to wider forces. Time Both pieces are cited here as evidence that the perception existed contemporaneously and was reported as such - not as endorsement of the theories they describe.
A separate, and more developed, body of writing makes a comparable argument about later cases. William R. Clark's Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar (New Society Publishers, 2005) argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was precipitated less by the stated case for war than by Iraq's 2000 move to price its oil in euros rather than dollars, and situates Iran's later disputes with Western powers in the same frame of dollar-based oil-trade enforcement. Goodreads Clark's research on this theme received Project Censored recognition in 2003 and again in 2005, the second time specifically for work on Iran's move toward a euro-denominated oil exchange. New Society Publishers
On Libya, the documented version of this argument centres on Colonel Gaddafi's 2009 proposal, made as chair of the African Union, for a gold-backed African dinar that would have shifted African oil revenue away from Western banks and the dollar - a plan several African states were reported to be considering before the 2011 NATO intervention (University of Sindh). That timing should be noted carefully: the sourced currency argument attaches to the 2011 intervention, not to Libya's 2003-2004 decision to abandon its weapons programme, which is a separate episode with its own, largely undisputed, disarmament rationale. Any version of this page's argument that includes Libya should rely on the 2011 case, not the earlier one.
A Further Point of Comparison: Acting While Talks Were Still Under Way
Beyond the general question of motive, a narrower and more specific pattern recurs across these cases: the decisive action, in each instance, came not after negotiation or verification had run its course, but while it was still in progress - and, in BCCI's case, on the strength of a document that was itself incomplete.
In BCCI's case, the Bank of England did not act on the finished Section 41 report. It acted on a draft, delivered out of hours on the holiday evening of Saturday 22 June 1991, and closed the Bank within days rather than waiting for Price Waterhouse's final version. The Bingham Report records that the Bank of England moved to close BCCI precisely because it feared that allowing the Abu Dhabi shareholders time to respond would cause unacceptable delay - hence the decision, recorded in Bingham's own words, to "act first and discuss afterwards" rather than let either the restructuring negotiations or the Section 41 investigation itself reach their own conclusion. Of the three cases compared here, BCCI is the one in which the underlying evidential document had not even been finalised by its own authors before it was acted upon.
In Iraq's case, UN weapons inspectors were still working inside the country, had been since November 2002, and had not found the weapons the invasion was later justified by, when the US-led invasion began on 19 March 2003. (Arms Control Association)
In Iran's case, the pattern sharpens further. The US struck Iranian nuclear facilities on 21 June 2025 in the middle of an active negotiation track with Tehran, one that continued in subsequent rounds afterward. The strikes were carried out not because US intelligence agencies had concluded Iran was building a weapon, but despite their conclusion that it was not: the Director of National Intelligence's own March 2025 assessment stated that Iran "is not building a nuclear weapon" and had not revived the weapons programme it suspended in 2003 - a conclusion US President Trump explicitly rejected before ordering the strikes. (Congressional Research Service) (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
Taken together, these three episodes share a common shape, whatever their other differences: each involved bypassing a process - restructuring talks, weapons inspections, or negotiation and the acting government's own intelligence findings - that had not yet concluded, and in two of the three cases had not yet found what the eventual action was said to be addressing. BCCI stands out within that comparison as the case where the decision-makers moved not merely ahead of a process, but ahead of their own commissioned evidence.
The Evidence Presented, and the Legal Advice Behind It
A related point, distinct from the timing question above but sitting alongside it, concerns how the case for action was put in the days immediately before it was taken.
In the Iraq case, the public and the Security Council were told the evidence was conclusive. On 5 February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Council that what he was presenting were "not assertions" but "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." UN News The UK's Chilcot Inquiry later found that this case had been presented with a greater degree of certainty than the underlying intelligence assessments actually supported, and no such weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.
A comparable pattern is documented in how the war's legal basis was settled in London. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, gave formal advice on 7 March 2003 which the Chilcot Inquiry itself described as containing "conflicting arguments," rather than a clear statement that military action would be lawful. International Bar Association Ten days later, on 17 March 2003 - two days before the invasion began - he set out a single, unqualified position in a written Parliamentary answer: that the war was lawful. BBC Both the presentation of the evidence and this shift in the legal advice were reported at the time and remain part of the public record.
Where the Comparison Is Not Yet Supported
No source found in preparing this page draws the specific line this page is exploring - from BCCI's 1991 closure, through Iraq and Libya, to Iran's more recent experience - as a single continuous pattern. The BCCI-era reporting and the later petrodollar-focused literature exist as two separate strands of commentary, each documented in its own period, and joining them into one thread is, at present, this site's own hypothesis rather than a documented external claim. That should be stated plainly rather than implied, and readers should be able to tell, from the page itself, which parts rest on cited sources and which rest on the site's own reasoning.
It is also worth being explicit about what the pattern, even if real, would not show: none of this demonstrates that BCCI was closed because of who its shareholders were, or that its case belongs in the same category as Iraq, Libya or Iran. Each episode has its own documented, and disputed, official rationale, and the comparison is offered as a pattern worth testing against the record - not as a substitute for examining each case on its facts.
Questions for Further Investigation
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Beyond the contemporaneous reporting of Muslim-world perceptions in 1991, is there documentary evidence - from the Bingham Report, Federal Reserve records, or Bank of England archives - that US concern over BCCI's shareholders, as distinct from the fraud findings, featured in the closure decision?
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Does the petrodollar literature on Iraq and Iran identify any comparable pre-existing case - BCCI or otherwise - as part of the same pattern, or has this connection not previously been made in that literature?
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In each of the three cases compared here, what specifically was lost by allowing the ongoing process - restructuring talks, inspections, or negotiation - to run to its conclusion, or the Section 41 report to be finalised, before acting?
- If the pattern is treated as a live hypothesis, what would count as evidence against it, and has that evidence been sought as rigorously as evidence in its favour?