City Life

City Life: Kabul

Eric Ellis

15 December 2007

Banking Afghan-style

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.

Eric Ellis is south-east Asia correspondent of Fortune magazine.