Libya-Owned Bank Got 73 Loans From Fed Window After Lehman
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Arab Banking Corp., the lender part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.
The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion -- while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday. In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank’s so-called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion.