"Saudi arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi with embezzling as much as $2.2 billion from the BBC."
A CAUTIONARY TALE
IN JUNE 1996, THE Kingdom of Thailand accused Saxena, Krirk-kiat Jalichandra, then-president of the Bangkok Bank of Commerce (BBC), a clutch of their associates, a handful of Thai politicians and Saudi arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi with embezzling as much as $2.2 billion from the BBC. The ensuing scandal and the bank's collapse in 1996 was a failure comparable in scale to the Barings disaster at the hands of rogue Singapore trader Nick Leeson. The resulting crisis of confidence in the financial system forced out the chief of the central bank and brought down the government. Thailand argues forcefully in court that the damage to the baht helped precipitate the regional meltdown that continues today.
The collapse of a mid-size Thai bank is a cautionary tale in these revelatory times. The Bangkok Bank of Commerce was no different from other family-owned Asian banks that owed much of their business to friends in high places. And Saxena was much the same as thousands of others riding Thailand's rocket economy of the 1990s, an era of easy, painless money. Those who knew Saxena at the time, say he was not necessarily seeking power or social status but that he just loved the game. If even half the allegations against him are true, he played it with audacious abandon.
Saxena's schemes were global in scale. According to what Vancouver courts have been told, he worked for Khashoggi, uncle of Dodi al-Fayed who died with Princess Diana, as well as other members of the super-rich; he planned a mining empire in the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone; and, say witnesses, he boasted of employing thugs to enforce his will or reap his retribution. Saxena's deals were cut in posh hotels in Prague, Zurich, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Moscow and Bangkok. In wood-paneled London clubs, emissaries of Sierra Leone's ousted president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah negotiated away diamond, gold and other concessions to Saxena's agents in exchange for $6.7 million to buy arms.
Saxena's nerve center was managed by a Canadian chartered accountant named Les Hammond. A waxy-faced man with pale blue eyes and a touch of gray at the temples, the 52-year-old Vancouver native has admitted in court that he choreographed the creation of companies in corporate registries of convenience from Canada to the Cayman Islands. There were at least 13 companies in Canada, a handful in the Grand Cayman Islands, 19 in the British Virgin Islands, two in Belize, a scattering in Thailand as well as others in Australia, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Most of these firms were engaged in no real business and had no employees per se.
Even after Saxena was arrested in July 1996 in the ski resort of Whistler, with $100,000 in various currencies stashed in his briefcase, he treated his $840,000 bail as a business bond. He juggled a staggering portfolio of investments and was a supernova in Vancouver's social firmament. He was known for his constant pacing and his incessant use of cellular phones. He often carried one in each hand and two more in his pockets. There was rarely a moment when he wasn't talking to someone in Thailand, Britain, France or Switzerland.
Saxena's luminous Vancouver lifestyle winked out in January this year when he was re-arrested. On this occasion he was denied bail after the court found he had obtained a false Yugoslav passport and had tried to intimidate witnesses. Then his right-hand man, Hammond, was arrested for allegedly obstructing justice. Facing jail, he became a star witness for Thailand. Together, his testimony and the thousands of files seized by the RCMP, reveal the minutiae of Saxena's business dealings, a global shell-game, hypnotic in its financial complexity.
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