Did bin Laden short-sell shares?
By Alok Agarwal | 22 Sep 2001
Mumbai: Did Osama bin Laden and his clan short-sell shares of airline and insurance companies before launching the attacks on the World trade Center towers and the Pentagon?
According to news reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating into the possibility of this having happened. Their suspicion is based on the fact that a number of transactions, all benami, in airline and insurance company stocks increased substantially just a few days before the attack took place on 11 September. For example, a number of transactions in the United Airline stock rose almost 90 per cent in the week before the attack took place.
Some of these stocks identified by the FBI include United Airlines, Northwest Airlines, American Airlines, DSP Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. It is noteworthy that offices of DSP Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley were located in one of the WTC towers, which collapsed post-attack, inflicting heavy damage to the financial standing of these companies.
In one of the news capsules of Zee News, Carrol Kennedy of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange revealed that in the 24 hours before and after the attack, market capitalisation of American Airlines fell to $24,000 from $1,80,000.
Similarly, market capitalisation of all other airline companies as well as insurance companies too dropped vertically in the aftermath of the strikes. It is worth noting that these two sectors have taken the biggest hit in terms of operations, revenues and profits. Carrol Kennedy said it was possible to unearth the gainers from these transactions, as the profits from the same have yet not been lifted from the market.
