"On April 9, 1992, a military tribunal in Jordan delivered a two-hundred-and-twenty-three-page verdict, which concluded that Ahmed Chalabi [founder and chief of Petra Bank] was guilty of thirty-one charges, including embezzlement, theft, forgery, currency speculation, making false statements, and making bad loans to himself, to his friends, and to his family's other financial enterprises, in Lebanon and Switzerland. The Jordanian docket shows that [after fleeing to Iraq] Chalabi was sentenced to serve twenty-two years of hard labor, and to pay back two hundred and thirty million dollars in embezzled funds...
"In Jordan, banking officials scoff at Chalabi's claims of innocence. Petra had opened a subsidiary in Washington, D.C., in 1983, and after the bank's collapse, according to a top Jordanian finance official, investigators combed America for forty-five days, trying to locate the bank's hidden assets. Almost all the assets listed on the books, the official said, were worthless, except for an auxiliary office that was listed as a repository for valuable bank records. The investigators soon discovered that the 'office' was a country estate with a swimming pool, in Middleburg, Virginia. It belonged to the Chalabi family, which was charging the bank a monthly rent."
[According to Imad Khadduri, a former schoolmate of Ahmed Chalabi's at a Jesuit academy in Baghdad, Chalabi's grandfather (a powerful Iraqi who held posts in nine Iraqi Cabinets) once kept his own personal prison, in which he incarcerated serfs who failed to pay taxes or produce wheat.]
Sources
Jane Mayer, New Yorker, June 7, 2004
