December 12 2007
By Eric Ellis
PERHAPS the best way to view Corporate Afghanistan — there’s a term you don’t often hear — is to regard it as a never-ending spigot draining sovereign wealth funds into the world’s biggest tax haven. That’s the good part. The bad bit is that you might get killed enjoying it. The West tips about $5 billion of aid a year into Kabul — while Roshan, the Aga Khan-owned mobile phone operator, collects more revenue than the Afghan taxman. Very fast money is being made here, particularly by those working for multilateral agencies or a myriad of NGOs. They’re the ones who pay $10,000-a-month rents for half-built houses in Kabul’s (relatively) upmarket Wazir Akbar Khan district, once home to Osama and friends. With their jaded worldliness and guerrilla-chic outfits, they count their cash with consciences salved that they are also making the world a safer place — and don’t mind telling you so over the splendid Friday brunch at Kabul’s five-star Serena Hotel, also newly built by the Aga Khan, Afghanistan’s biggest private foreign investor.
Foreigners’ cash tends to be deposited at Standard Chartered Bank, with its ATM machine excitingly located along a street sometimes known as Sniper Alley. Serious Afghan money also tries to deposit itself with StanChart. The manager told me he once hosted a burly posse of potential customers who arrived with as many suitcases of $100 notes as they had Kalashnikovs. Leading them was a notorious Uzbek warlord who clearly had yet to grasp the intricacies of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act concerning transparency as to the provenance of his funds. My banker friend directed him towards a more appropriate establishment downtown — Kabulbank, which has become the country’s biggest bank in the two years since it opened. It touts itself as specialising in Islamic banking, in which the payment of interest is prohibited in sharia law. That’s understandable, this being the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. But Afghans have been flocking to a product called Bakht, meaning ‘fortune’.
As the bank’s ads have it, Bakht is ‘The Easiest Way To Earn A Million’. Since Kabulbank started touting Bakht, its customer base has quadrupled. Every $100, or 5,000 afghanis, that goes into a Bakht account gets the depositor a ticket in a lucky draw held every month in a lively night at a Kabul wedding hall. Winning tickets are pulled from a tub and the lucky ones handed a cheque for a million ‘afs’, some $20,000.
I wanted to talk to Kabulbank owner-chairman Sherkhan Farnood about it all — but he was out of town, apparently in Las Vegas at a poker tournament. Still, in the absence of an interview, I found on the Pokerdatabase website a wealth of info on Sherkhan, who has ‘found his way to many final tables. He did a double in Australia last year, a double in Paris in September and a double in Walsall in November 2003. He likes to drink [Johnnie Walker] Blue Label.’
That should please the Taleban.