The "Nugen Hand Bank" or "Nugen/Hand Bank" or "Nugen-Hand Bank" was an Australian Bank founded in Sydney in the late 1970's. The Bank was chartered on the writing of a fraudulent check by one of its founders, Michael Hand, an ex-CIA pilot who had flown with Air America. The Sydney Opera House on Sydney Harbour Sydney (pronounced ) is the most populous city in Australia with a metropolitan area population of over 4. ... Air America pilot cap Air America was an American airline secretly controlled by the CIA that supplied and supported covert operations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. ...

The Bank was involved in such activities as; drug trafficking, international arms dealing, links to organized crime, laundering money for President Suharto of Indonesia. It is also the bank that was found to have assisted the former Shah of Iran to move money out of the country before his coup. Haji Mohammad Soeharto (born June 8, 1921), more commonly referred to as simply Soeharto (Suharto in the English-speaking world), is a former Indonesian military and political leader. ... Shah is a Persian term for a monarch (king or emperor) that has been adopted in many other languages. ...

Among its controlling officers were U.S. generals, admirals and CIA operatives. One of the bank's lawyers was former CIA Director William Colby. By the 1980's, the bank had branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and the U.S. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank went belly up with over $50 million in debt. One of these deaths was of Frank Nugen, one of the founders of the bank who was found dead in his car, the victim of what police labeled a suicide.