After 1989: Jordanian Investigators Discover that Petra Bank’s Auxiliary US ‘Office’ Is a Chalabi-Owned Estate in Middleburg, Virginia

Jordanian investigators spend 45 days in the US looking for hidden assets belonging to a Washington, DC subsidiary of Petra Bank, a Chalabi-controlled enterprise that collapsed in 1989 (see August 2, 1989). Nearly all of the US assets listed in Petra Bank’s books turn out to be worthless, with the notable exception of an auxiliary office where valuable bank records are presumably kept. The “office” is a country estate with a swimming pool in upscale Middleburg, Virginia. It belongs to the Chalabi family, which had been charging the bank a monthly rent. “There was not one business record in the whole place,” an official will later recall. [New Yorker, 6/7/2004]