The Avalanche

The echo was heard every where. The bank clients, the shareholders, the banking and financial institutes continued to call and write asking and worrying about the effect.

A stream run on Bank Al Taqwa for withdrawing funds and closing mudaraba accounts and postponing and canceling deals continued.

New remittances dried up.

It is well known in the banking business that rumors or negative media reports against any bank what ever its size is, mean the start of the end of its life.

9 – A parallel disaster started in our investments in south East Asia were the economy and the financial market in all the countries of the area also crashed. Our investments in this area during that time were about 500 million $

The Bank never inflicted losses before and was distributing dividends and mudarabah profits between7 and 10% every year.

10-The withdrawals by the client end 1997 was 36 million $ and end 1998 was 100 millions $.The losses also were height.

The bank Islamic legal committee, the general assembly, and the management agreed to invoke the mudarabah contractual conditions

And to stop withdrawals until all the mudarabah remaining assets are liquidated in order to determine who lost what.

From the first day the bank started to operate we had the policy to make sure that all the bank clients new and signed that they new and accept that they were dealing with Bank Al Taqwa Bahamas, who is responsible for their mudarabah, and that Al Taqwa management Switzerland, is only doing the internal auditing not the banking activity.

When the losses were evident less than five clients out of the banks thousands clients refused to wait the liquidation of their mudarabah remaining assets to evade deducting the losses.

Two of them initiated claims against Al Taqwa Management Company in Switzerland to avoid the implementation of the mudarabah contractual condition with the bank. This was reported to the relevant authority which is the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. They investigated the case and appointed the company Price Water house Cooper to check all the activity, documents, contracts, and the accounts of Al Taqwa Management. At the end of the investigation The Swiss Federal Banking Commission gave us a clean bill and asked us only to change the company’s name, and due to that it became Nada Management.

One of those clients whose claim in Switzerland failed initiated another civil claim in the high court in the Bahamas against Bank Al Taqwa. The high court in the Bahamas rejected his claim and ruled in favor of Bank Al Taqwa.

There exist no banks in the world who never had disputes with some clients and that is the reason that every bank have a legal department .That was the only claim we faced in the court within 13 years of successful business. This client name was (Ghaleb Ben Laden)

It is well known that all Osama Ben Laden family have nothing to do with him, disowned him and none of them was considered terrorist. Their business still prospering. All of them are respectable educated civilized people. We had six clients of that family.

The reader is requested to remember this civil case to be able to assess the behavior of those who initiated the criminal investigation against us as suspects of financing terrorism basing them selves on this case.

This happened in spite of the fact that there is no connection between both cases.

And the two competent authorities, i.e., The Swiss Federal Banking Commission and The Bahamian high court decided in our favor and the files were closed more than one year before.

And on24 October 2001 the Swiss Federal Police wrote to The vice Federal prosecutor quote they could not find any specific connections between us and any terrorist organization to confirm the media reports and their search was with big and small countries.

All the documents regarding those events will be demonstrated in future posting or books which are in the pipeline.