Terence O’Hara, Washington Post
March 21, 2005

The downfall of the Washington, DC-based Riggs bank was revealed earlier this month in one of several “admiring notes” the bank’s chairman, his wife and another Riggs official sent the former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet between 1996 and 2000.

Released by the US Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, one letter sent by Riggs chairman Joe L. Allbritton in November 1997 thanked Gen. Pinochet for a “thriving personal friendship” that would later become the focus of an international investigation into the bank’s dealings with a dubious roster of international clients it had aggressively sought to cultivate.

The letter in question congratulates Gen. Pinochet for rescuing Chile from the “threat of totalitarian government and an archaic economic system based on state-owned property and centralized planning,” and further states:

“We in the United States and the rest of the Western hemisphere owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude and I am confident your legacy will have been to provide a more prosperous and safer world for your children and grandchildren.”

Though Riggs has paid more than $50 million in fines and settlements to shareholders and prosecutors in the United States and Spain, including $8 million from the bank and $1 million from the Allbrittons into a fund to benefit Pinochet’s victims, no Riggs executive or board member, past or present, has offered any public statement of regret.

Contrary to nearly every other major scandal at a public company in recent years, Riggs has offered no public accounting of the events surrounding the company’s hiding of Pinochet’s money or of the broader failures of its international division that caused Riggs’s downfall. That is not likely to change. Riggs on May 13 will be merged into Pittsburgh’s PNC Financial Services Group Inc. Riggs’s board will disband, and a more than 160-year-old institution steeped in the early financial history of the United States will cease to exist.
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