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To My Banker
By Janet McGiffin / 15 May 2008
In early 2008, a 76-year-old Iraqi living in Cairo sent the following email to the Financial Ombudsman at complaint.info@financial-ombudsman.org.uk.
“Dear Sir, Can you help me locate an External Account which I opened at Midland Bank Ltd in Earls Court on 5 August 1967? I was in London attending an accountancy course paid for by my British employer, Basra Petroleum of Basra, Iraq. This bank account has lain untouched these 38 years because I am Iraqi and shortly after my return to Iraq in 1969, the government of Saddam Hussein,, newly in power, cut off all contact with the outside world. In 2003, the Sadaam Hussein regime ended but the ongoing conflict and the antipathy toward those with British associations has prevented me from tracing my foreign assets, much less accessing them. Last year, my family and I moved to Cairo, a city that is becoming more expensive by the week. We have sent letters, emails, and telephoned HSBC, the new owners of Midland Bank, but without success. We would appreciate your attention.”
Although this Iraqi account owner did not access his London account after 1967, there was some activity regarding his funds. On 6 September 1976, the Midland Bank manager at Earl’s Court sent a letter to the Iraqi account owner, requesting the name and address of his bankers in Iraq “for purpose of identification.” The letter arrived at the National Petroleum Company in Baghdad, the new name of Basra Petroleum after it was nationalized in 1975. But the Iraqi account owner didn’t reply because he was in prison for working with the British. And although he was released between subsequent imprisonments from 1970 to 2003, he would never have smuggled out a reply to his London bank manager because it would have jeopardized the life of his bank manager in Iraq.
When is an asset not an asset? When you are Iraqi and your assets are British.
After the email went out to the Financial Ombudsman, another email went out from the same 76-year-old Iraqi man. This one was sent to the British Library.
“Dear Madam or Sir: I am writing to inquire as to whether you might be interested in purchasing the following documents owned by my father, now deceased: two sets of manuscripts dated between 1909 and 1915 consisting of two agreements between the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Shaikh Khazal Khan Sardar ibn Arfa of Persia, and two agreements between the British government and the Shaikh. The first set is a land-use agreement and the second are assurances by the British government as to the safety of the Sheikh's person and property if anything happened to Persia. These latter are signed by P.Z. Cox, Major. The documents were buried for 35 years in a hole my wife dug under the dining room floor tiles.”
The first owner of these documents was a Persian advocate and father of the 76-year-old Iraqi who is sitting in his Cairo apartment writing emails. He was born in 1884 in Abushar, Persia. A talented and quick-witted young man, he got a law degree, perhaps from Cambridge according to family legend, although there is no record at Cambridge.
In 1909, when the story of this Persian-Iraqi family begins, British geologists from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) had arrived in southern Persia and had discovered a rich sheikhdom under the rule of Shaikh Khazal Khan. And under his lush date plantations lay oil. The oil lay across the river from Basra in Mesopotamia, “Iraq” being the name given by the British in 1920 to their mandate granted by the League of Nations.
The young Persian advocate returned to Persia after law school and helped negotiate the agreements laid out in these documents. A forward-thinking and meticulous man, he kept copies. In 1914, he joined the Indian Army as a legal advisor and entered Basra with the British army during the Battle of Basra. He become legal consultant to the British and after occupying various legal posts, was appointed Governor of Karbala in southern Iraq. He then became Chief Justice of the region. He left British employ two years before the British Mandate ended in 1932 and opened a private legal practice in Basra. He retired in 1956 and spent his days in his renowned library. In 1970, when the government of Iraq began arresting people who had worked with the British, his daughter-in-law buried these documents under the tiles of the dining room floor and pulled a heavy chest over them.
The advocate was arrested in 1972 at the age of 88. A week after his release from prison, he died, shortly before his oldest son who also died soon after release from prison. In 2006, the family was targeted by militias, not only for the family’s history with the British from the Anglo-Persian Oil company to Basra Petroleum, but also because of their Persian heritage. The advocate’s only remaining son, his daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter fled to Cairo.
A happy ending would be nice, a reward for this family’s generational association with the British which began with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909 and ended with the nationalization of British-owned Basra Petroleum on 1975 and the imprisonment of every male in the family. It would nice to say that the copies of these documents, concealed at great risk of discovery by servants and smuggled out at even greater risk, finally brought this family financial relief. However, responses in the dozens from British institutions such as the British Library, British Petroleum archives, and Bodleian Library at Oxford, as well as auction houses and antiquarian booksellers around the world have found no buyers. Polite emails reveal that copies already exist in their archives or the era is sufficiently documented for their purposes. A gentle response from a major British auction house stated that the documents were no longer of much financial value to collectors and that the signature of Winston Churchill on the Indian Army military award is likely a facsimile.
Responses from HSBC and the Financial Ombudsman are still pending.
