How Kerry showed steel in BCCI hunt

THE MAN who would be President may be being feted by US Democrats as a decorated Vietnam veteran who flipped his military record to become one of Richard Nixon's fiercest anti-war critics 30 years ago, but Anglo-Asian businessmen and British local authorities have a few billion different reasons to thank John Kerry.

The Bostonian, Yale-educated senator, as head of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, led the American end of the investigation into where the skeletons were buried at the crooked Bank of Credit & Commerce International, closed down in the summer of 1991.

While the Bingham Report, written by Lord Justice Bingham in 1992, was gently rapping the Bank of England over the BCCI affair, Kerry led a full-frontal assault.

The Kerry Report, published shortly before Bingham, stoked the BCCI liquidators Deloitte & Touche into worldwide probes which thus far have recovered around 75% of monies, running into billions of pounds, lost in the collapse. It also provided the impetus for the liquidators to chase BCCI's supervisor, the Bank of England.

That is now being played out in Court 73 of the High Court in London in a case in which the BoE is being sued for up to £1bn. If successful, that will top up the recoveries for depositors in a bank which at its height had 45 branches across Britain.

Where Bingham obfuscated, Kerry said the BoE's work on BCCI was 'wholly inadequate', criticising it for persistent cover-up and an obsession with secrecy. He fuelled conspiracy theorists by reporting that the first people in to BCCI offices were MI5 officers who sealed and removed documents. It was Kerry, now 12 years ago, who first accused the BoE of avoiding primary responsibility for supervising BCCI. That accusation is the central tenet of Deloitte & Touche's case.

AS A senator, John Kerry has a record of budget-cutting, has consistently attacked George Bush over the soaring US deficit and has pledged to slash it if elected President. However, he also promises to keep many of Bush's controversial tax cuts in place for the middle class, only abolishing those that benefit the wealthy - broadly, those earning more than $200,000 a year. At the same time, he wants to boost spending on new healthcare programmes and maintain a fairly high level of defence spending.