Mr. Farkas, meanwhile, diverted more than $40 million from Taylor Bean and Colonial to "finance his lifestyle," prosecutors said.
As he sees it, the robust support he garnered from international banks was an endorsement of his plan to remake BTA in the image of HSBC, the hugely successful international bank that grew from its roots as a colonial bank financing trade between China and Britain.
The territories were huge, thinly peopled, and poorly endowed with resources that could finance colonial administration and make a profit for the colonizing power.
Sir J. J. Hospital, named after the philanthropist in British colonial times who financed its construction, is 163 years old.
During World War II he joined General Charles de Gaulle's Free French government, serving successively as commissioner of finance, colonies, and foreign affairs and becoming colonial minister in 1944.
The assumption of direct royal control by Louis XIV in 1663 and the colonial ambitions of his great finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, led to a recasting of French colonial policy and of the government of New France.
The role of bankers and the institutions they serve in financing Britain's colonial and capitalist system has not gone unnoticed.
This transfer was financed because, throughout the colonial period, India had a persistent trade surplus with Britain, and thus exported capital.
Mr. Smith said it was likely that Taylor, Bean & Whitaker agreed to the investment on the condition that Colonial would be healthy with the new financing; the Treasury Department has maintained the same standard with its own cash infusions.
As the former colonial power, Britain acknowledges a moral obligation to help finance land redistribution in a country where some 4,500 white farmers own the bulk of the fertile land while hundreds of thousands of black peasants farm meager plots.
Van Hall stabilized the public finances and, helped by profits from Dutch colonial ventures in the East Indies, achieved the country's first surplus in 70 years in 1847.
