ATLANTA - Former banker Roy Carlson has found that there is life after BCCI.
Mr. Carlson, who lives in Atlanta, was never indicted or even subpoenaed for his relationship with scandal-plagued Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He had, in fact, retired from banking several years before BCCI hit the front pages.
But the scandal dogged Mr. Carlson through the early 1990s. Federal investigators frequently visited to ask about his role in helping found BCCI in the mid-1970s and then running one of its subsidiary banks in the mid-1980s.
Now Mr. Carlson, at age 72, is endeavoring to close his career on a more positive note. In May, he accepted a job as CEO of a company called Creditors Consortium. His task: to help U.S. companies collect on their Iranian debts.
It won't be easy. The Iranian government, struggling with slumping oil revenues, lacks the foreign exchange to pay companies for debts incurred earlier in the decade. In addition, the Clinton administration, responding to Iranian-backed terrorist activities, has issued an executive order freezing trade between the two countries.
Mr. Carlson, who is working out of a spare office in Atlanta provided by a friend, hasn't even identified all the companies that Creditors Consortium seeks to represent. The Treasury Department has estimated U.S. companies are owed about $500 million by Iran.
"There are a lot of question marks still along the way," Mr. Carlson said .
But he seemed happy to be back at work after seven years of semiretirement, during which he taught international finance and banking courses at the Georgia Institute of Technology and tended to some private business projects.
Mr. Carlson said he was contacted in April by Dennis Horn, a partner in the Washington law firm of Holland & Knight, which represents the principals behind Creditors Consortium. Mr. Carlson declined to identify these individuals except to say they are based in Europe and have been involved in Iranian collection efforts on behalf of companies in other countries.
Mr. Carlson and Mr. Horn had worked together on some private real estate deals, and Mr. Horn knew of Mr. Carlson's international banking expertise.
"He's just a very honorable person who's likely to do a good job here," Mr. Horn said. "I have the most complete faith in his business integrity."
Mr. Carlson began his banking career in 1948 as an international trainee at Chase National Bank in New York. He joined Bank of America in 1955 as an assistant cashier and later worked 17 years in BofA's world banking division, a stint that included two years in Tehran and one year as vice president in charge of the Middle East in Beirut, Lebanon.
It was through his Middle Eastern contacts that Mr. Carlson met Pakistani entrepreneur Agha Hasan Abedi, who was looking for capital to establish the bank that later became BCCI.
On Mr. Carlson's recommendation, BofA invested $2.5 million in 1972 for a 25% stake in BCCI. BankAmerica Corp. sold the stake several years later, before BCCI became notorious for money laundering and other shady dealings that brought about its eventual collapse and seizure in 1991.
From 1975 to 1979, when the revolution inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran, Mr. Carlson was managing director of a private Iranian company, the Melli Industrial Group. Rahim Irvani, Melli Group's owner, was a close friend of Mr. Abedi.
Mr. Carlson resumed his banking career in 1980, when Saudi investor Ghaith Pharaon invited him to run his National Bank of Georgia as chairman, president, and CEO. Mr. Pharaon, who later turned out to be a front man for BCCI, had just bought NBG from Georgia wheeler-dealer Bert Lance, President Carter's former budget director.
Mr. Carlson retired from NBG in 1988, just after Mr. Pharaon sold the Atlanta-based bank to First American Bankshares, Washington, another BCCI subsidiary. Mr. Carlson negotiated the sale of NBG directly with First American principal Robert Altman, who later stood trial and was acquitted for his role in the BCCI affair.
BCCI is a subject Mr. Carlson likes to avoid nowadays. "I still feel I don't know the whole story about what happened," he said.
Mr. Carlson pointed out that Mr. Abedi, who suffered a stroke shortly after the scandal broke, has never given his side of the story. "The inability to interview him and get his side of all these allegations has been the key to not piecing everything together," Mr. Carlson said.
He said he would rather discuss his new venture, which he compares to debt collection efforts he undertook as a banker. "The problem here is a little bit different than a collection effort that's purely domestic- based," he said.
"In a domestic-based collection effort, you're just trying to get money out of the debtors directly on behalf of the creditors. In this instance, my understanding is that most of the debtors have already made payment, but they paid in their local currencies to their central bank.
"The Central Bank of Iran has held up the remittance of the equivalent in foreign exchange because of a foreign exchange shortage. So it's not the debtors that have to be contacted but the people responsible for supplying them with dollars."
Mr. Carlson said he expects ultimately to negotiate with the Iranian authorities. But for the moment, the action is in Washington, where Mr. Horn has been trying to persuade the Treasury Department to let Creditors Consortium pursue debt claims incurred before the President's executive order took effect.
Mr. Horn said the Treasury has recently published regulations that - "if broadly interpreted" - might permit Creditors Consortium to carry out its mission. "Treasury seems agreeable in principle to letting us do that, so that's progress," he said.
A Treasury official said the agency has issued general guidelines for the Iranian debt situation, but that these matters would be settled "on a case-by-case basis."
How long is all this likely to take? Mr. Carlson responded with a story.
When he was working in Tehran, a representative of a large U.S. auto maker came to see him about a problem his company was having.
"He said, 'I'm not going to leave here until I have this thing settled,' " Mr. Carlson recalled.
"I said, 'Well there's somebody I'd like to introduce you to.'
"He said, 'Who's that?'
"And I said, 'A rental agent who rents houses.'"
