Adnan Khashoggi

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Adnan Khashoggi (Arabic: عدنان خاشقجي‎) (born 25 July 1935 in Mecca) is a billionaire Turkish-Saudi Arabian arms-dealer and businessman. He is also noted for his engagements with high society in both the Occidental and Arabic-speaking worlds, and for his involvement in the Iran-Contra and Lockheed bribery scandals, and numerous other affairs.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Divorce from Soraya 2 References 3 External links

[edit] History

Khashoggi is the son of Muhammad Khashoggi, a medical doctor and Spanish, Basque, and Turkish by descent; who was King Abdel Aziz Al Saud's personal physician. The family name means spoonmaker (Kaşıkçı) in Turkish. After the family moved from the Iberian Peninsula and settled there. Adnan Khashoggi's sister Samira Khashoggi Fayed was the mother of Dodi Fayed.

Khashoggi was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, California State University, Chico, Ohio State University, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. It is said that Khashoggi quit his studies in order to seek his fortune in business.

Khashoggi headed a company called Triad Holding Company, which among other things built the Triad Centre in Salt Lake City, Utah, which later went bankrupt. He was famed as an arms dealer, brokering deals between US firms and the Saudi government, most actively in the 1960s and 1970s. In the documentary The Mayfair Set, Saudi author Said Aburish states that one of Adnan's first weapons deals was providing David Stirling with weapons for a covert mission in Yemen during the Aden Emergency in 1963. Among his overseas clients were defense contractors Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Raytheon, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and Northrop Corporation (which have now merged into Northrop Grumman). A shrewd businessman, he covered his financial tracks by establishing front companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA officers James H. Critchfield and Kim Roosevelt and US businessman Bebe Rebozo, a close associate of former US President Richard Nixon. He was also involved in diamond mining in the Central African Empire, working closely with the dictator Bokassa. He was considered the richest man in the world in the 1980s. His sister married Mohammed Al-Fayed father of Dodi Fayed. His Yacht the Nabila was the largest in the world at the time and was used in James Bond's Never Say Never Again.

In the 1960s he married 20 year old Englishwoman Sandra Daly who took the name Soraya[1].

He was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair as a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange along with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and, in a complex series of events, was found to have borrowed money for these arms purchases from the now-bankrupt financial institution the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) with Saudi and US backing. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland, accused of concealing funds, held for three months and then extradited to the United States where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. In 1990, a United States federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, widow of the exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, of racketeering and fraud.^[1] He has also worked for Col. Ghaddafi of Libya in 1992 as a mediator.

Khashoggi, along with Ramy El-Batrawi, was the principal financier behind GenesisIntermedia, Inc. (formerly NASDAQ: GENI), a publicly traded Internet company based in Southern California. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Khashoggi's U.S.-based checking accounts were frozen and Khashoggi was unable to make a margin call with Native Nations Securities, whose CEO and largest shareholder, at the time, was Valerie Red Horse, former office manager of junk bond king Michael Milken. In turn, Native Nations and Red Horse were unable to meet their obligations on the margin loan to MJK Clearing, Inc.^[2][3] Trading in the stock of GenesisIntermedia was halted in September 2001. Khashoggi's unwillingness to pay his margin loan to Native Nations Securities, and Native Nations (and Red Horse's) inability to pay its debts to MJK Clearing, began a series of bankruptcies that ended in the largest payout in Securities Investor Protection Corporation history.^[4][5] Native Nations Securities and MJK Clearing both eventually filed for bankruptcy.^[6]

American University used to have a prominent building named the Khashoggi Center but after he defaulted on his donation pledge, the school removed his name from the building.

Khashoggi continues to live a quiet life in the Principality of Monaco, even after a British court ordered him to pay a creditor the amount of £7 million. His services as a facilitator have been a recurring feature throughout US administrations since Nixon; most recently, he met with Richard Perle shortly before the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003.

[edit] Divorce from Soraya

In divorcing his wife, Soraya, in 1980, Khashoggi agreed to one of the largest divorce settlements on record. Estimates go as high as £548.4m,^[7] but reports vary wildly and part of the value of the settlement was said to have been tied to oil prices.

In 1999 it was confirmed by DNA testing that his daughter Petrina Khashoggi, was in fact biologically not his, but the product of Soraya's affair UK Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken[2]. Aitken was soon afterwards jailed[3] for perjury and perverting the course of justice after investigation of his his role in accepting gifts from Lebanese arms dealer, Mohammed Said Ayas.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Ramy El-Batrawi
• Rajiv Gandhi Murder Controversy
• TIME Magazine Cover: Adnan Khashoggi Jan. 19, 1987
• Notes on The Richest Man In The World by Ronald Kessler ISBN 0-446-51339-3
• Profile at NNDB
• Death of a Princess
• Chapter Servants of the Crown from Saïd K. Aburish's The House of Saud ISBN 0-7475-7874-5
• Did Adnan Khashoggi Throw the Election to Dubya?
• More "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi"
• TSX member Deutsche Bank in major penny stock scandal article by Brent Mudry
• Banking units embroiled in lawsuit copy of a Globe and Mail article by Karen Howlett
• Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi? The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, March 2003.