Afghanistan?s Kabul Bank is so mired in scandal that it stands as the country?s most significant and far-reaching symbol of corruption.
Sherkhan Farnood has made a career of building fortunes in an unlikely fashion.
When civil war raged in his home of Afghanistan, the hard-drinking, Kunduz-born businessman moved to Russia, where he started a lucrative hawala, an informal system that allows cash to change hands in one country and be credited in another. Later, as Afghanistan's only world-class poker player, he boasted nine first-place finishes and total winnings of $767,687.
In his latest incarnation, as chairman of Afghanistan's Kabul Bank, he outdid himself, presiding over an institution so mired in scandal that today it stands as the country's most significant and far-reaching symbol of corruption, implicating everyone from powerful businessmen, to prominent politicians to nasty warlords.
In the latest twist, Afghan officials issued an arrest warrant for Abdul Qadeer Fitrat, the former governor of Afghanistan's central bank who fled to the United States last week after claiming to catch wind of a government plot to kill him. Payback, he believes, for his naming of those who benefited from Kabul Bank's illegal practices - among them relatives of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and members of his government.
"I have credible evidence to suggest that my life was completely in danger, and the government was part of this plan," Mr. Fitrat told Al Jazeera in Washington on Tuesday.
In a week where Afghan forces failed to fend off a stunning attack on one of Kabul's most prominent hotels, Mr. Fitrat's comments heighten concerns over the Karzai government precisely at the moment it is poised to assume greater responsibility for Afghanistan's fate.
As Western forces brace to draw down, Afghanistan appears to be a free-for-all - a place where Taliban gunman can attack the capital with impunity and where its largest private financial institution can make an estimated $900-million of depositors' money virtually disappear.
Executives from the bank, including Mr. Farnood and its chief executive, Khalil Ferozi, are under house arrest in Kabul, accused of orchestrating a reckless spree of spending and illegal lending that amounted to a giant Ponzi scheme.
But it is the bank's alleged ties to the government of Mr. Karzai - his ministers, his family and his friends - that could prove the most consequential.
There are allegations that the Kabul Bank was used as the Karzai government's personal piggy bank, providing funds to bribe lawmakers to secure votes in Parliament. Other charges suggest the bank paid off various Afghan officials, including elected politicians, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars to turn a blind eye to its questionable practices.
While corruption is hardly news in Afghanistan (the country that has been ranked by Transparency International as the 176th most corrupt country out of 178 countries), Haroon Mir, a respected Afghan analyst, says the bank scandal has calcified a feeling among his countrymen that nothing will change.
"The Afghans now have this sentiment that when you are involved in politics you have access to everything, and if you want to become involved in business you have to have a political supporter," he said.
"We are moving towards a Russian-style economy instead of a more liberal U.S.-style one. We are moving towards monopolies and that's really bad in the long term," he added.
Before its troubles began to surface, Kabul Bank had long been held out as an example of what was going right in Afghanistan, a successful financial institution that stood as a beacon of stability in the chaos that followed the ousting of the Taliban.
Founded in 2004, Kabul Bank had a network of 143 branches across 19 provinces. It was the place where foreigners could go to exchange cash at a fair rate, or receive international money transfers.
Under Mr. Farnood's tenure, the institution morphed into Afghanistan's biggest private bank, handling payroll for more than 300,000 Afghan government workers, soldiers and police.
Mr. Farnood managed to lure ordinary Afghans to the bank with a popular lottery, offering depositors free Kabul apartments and cash gifts topping a total of $1-million.
But at it turns out, the chairman was taking even greater gambles with the bank's holdings, buying luxury Dubai villas for Afghanistan's ruling elite and doling out interest-free, insider loans.
The first sign of trouble came in the context of the global financial crisis, when Dubai's real estate bubble burst and the bank began to fail. Mr. Farnood had spent tens of millions of dollars to purchase more than a dozen luxury villas in the emirate using depositors' cash.
American and Afghan investigators had already begun probing the bank, and had calculated it was headed for collapse. Complicating matters, it turned out the majority of the loans appear to have gone to the bank's 16 powerful and well-connected shareholders: $22-million to Mahmoud Karzai, the President's brother and $78-million to Haseen Fahim, the brother of one of Mr. Karzai's vice-presidents. Both men deny the charges.
The Afghans, also sensing something was amiss, began making mass withdrawals, amounting to a run on Kabul Bank last September.
Under pressure from the United States, the Central Bank of Afghanistan ultimately stepped in as the local authority ostensibly charged with insuring that Afghan banks follow financial regulations.
Last year, it spent $820-million of its reserves to bail out Kabul Bank, no small sum in a country that has an official GDP of just $12-billion.
The Afghan government replaced the bank's senior management, claims to have sifted out bad loans, and conjured a repayment plan to address the bank's debt through a tax hike.
The International Monetary Fund argues those measures are not enough, and has vowed to withhold aid pending assurances that the problems have been resolved.
This month, a World Bank-managed trust fund withheld $70-million in incentive money from the Afghan government. Without that money, the Afghan government will be forced to dip into its cash reserves to help pay civil servant salaries, a move that observers say could undermine the government's ability to become self-sustaining down the road, as foreign aid dries up.
Meanwhile, Afghan officials say only $62-million of the $900-million in outstanding loans have so far been recovered.
No one has been charged in the scandal other than Mr. Fitrat, who will be prosecuted for his alleged role in the failure of the nation's largest private lender, according to the Afghan Attorney-General's office.
However, because Mr. Fitrat has permanent resident status in the United States, which has no extradition treaty with Afghanistan, it is unlikely his case will ever go to trial.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, a presidential commission last month cleared some of Kabul Bank's most powerful borrowers of any wrongdoing.