Kabul Bank previously had been shielded by the political clout of its shareholders who, in addition to Mahmoud Karzai [President Hamid Karzai's brother, who partly owns Kabul Bank], include Haseen Fahim, the brother of Vice President Mohammed Fahim.
If this hostile takeover wasn't questionable enough, the article goes on to report:
Kabul Bank's biggest creditor, bank insiders said, is Haseen Fahim, a minority shareholder, who borrowed tens of millions of dollars to fund various business ventures, which in turn won contracts at U.S. bases and sites in Afghanistan operated by the CIA.
So, in an effort to stamp out corruption, which U.S. officials have prodded Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai to do, he orders his Central Bank to take managing control of the country's largest private bank, which, I might add, "also contributed to President Karzai's reelection campaign last year."
At the risk of oversimplifying, the above-cited transaction sounds like a stark lesson in crony capitalism: an allegedly capitalist economy based on close relationships between politically connected business figures and the state. This U.S.-led nation-building charade in Afghanistan sounds eerily reminiscent of the state-controlled corruption surrounding Afghanistan's mineral mining laws: