Wednesday
Jul 22, 1998
03:45 PM PDT
Introduction |Mid-East Rights | Legislative Activism | Direct Action & Civil Disobedience | Media Campaign
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July/Aug. 1998 (1419 A.H.) - Issue #2
Five Christians arrested in Saudi Arabia, Reuters, July 2, 1998
VATICAN CITY, July 2 (Reuters) - Five people have been arrested in Moslem Saudi
Arabia for possessing Bibles and preaching Christian scriptures, an independent Vatican
news agency said on Thursday.
The four Philippine nationals and one Dutchman were arrested on June 22, the agency,
Fides, said in a statement, citing episcopal sources in Manila, and testimony from another
Philippine citizen in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
"In Riyadh, police continue to search the homes of Filipinos identified as Christian,
in a situation of absolute repression of religious liberty," the agency added.
Christian places of worship are banned outright in conservative Moslem Saudi
Arabia, where the Vatican has said there are some 500,000 Christians, most of them
foreigners.
Pope John Paul has forcefully demanded equal rights for Christians in Moslem countries.
The prince who blew a billion, The Sunday Times, July 5, 1998
In the playground of the rich, Prince Mohamad bin Fahd bin Abdulaziz al Saud boasts more toys than anyone else.
Last week the prince, second son of the king of Saudi Arabia, was in Cannes, the jet set's traditional sandpit on the French Riviera. He could have stayed at one of his two palatial homes in the hills; he might have headed for a luxury yacht in the marina.
Instead, the most favoured son of one of the world's wealthiest, most secretive dynasties appears to have decided to stay at the magnificent Hotel Majestic. Staff there say he routinely runs up a bill of £2m when he takes up summer residence.
Such luxury, and other details of the prince's finances, may yet turn into an uncomfortably public affair. In London, a former friend and business associate is preparing to expose the source of the prince's riches and his lavish expenditure. Said Ayas, a multi-millionaire Syrian and former business manager of the prince, is engaged in a legal action that could reveal much about the prince's lifestyle.
The contents of the court case remain a closely guarded secret. But a Sunday Times investigation has shed light on the extraordinary world of the prince. It includes a network of offshore companies and bank accounts which were allegedly set up to channel huge commissions from deals with British defence companies. Some business associates also claim that the prince has spent more than £1 billion on high living since 1985 and that it has taken its toll.
As Hodda Abdelrahman, who spent 20 years as lady-in-waiting to the prince's wife, said last week, Mohamad is a "mad spender".
LIKE his father, King Fahd, Mohamad loves the Mediterranean port of Cannes. Far from the constraints of Saudi society, he is able to indulge his love of gambling, fast cars and women.
Even amid such opulence, the prince seems in another league. He arrives in one of the royal family's fleet of Boeing airliners, accompanied by scores of maids and nannies, plus cousins, nieces and numerous bodyguards (even though the prince, according to Abdelrahman, still carries a small pistol for personal protection).
Among his retinue are his other regular companions: a group of 25 Bedouins. Hand-picked, the desert tribesmen are dressed in western suits whenever they accompany the prince abroad, but are barely literate. Their role is to play poker with Mohamad and keep him entertained.
Nestling on the hillside known as Super Cannes above the town is one of his many homes, the Jardin de Nouf. A palace with about 40 bedrooms and with 15 permanent staff, it is encircled by a network of sophisticated closed-circuit television cameras.
The prince also owns a ranch on the outskirts of Cannes. Former friends claim he once had an entire orchard uprooted and transplanted there so that his mother could have plentiful supplies of fresh fruit when she came to stay.
Concerned for the wellbeing of his vast collection of cars - including Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Jeeps and customised Mercedes - Mohamad spent £3m building an underground car park. There, up to 100 cars are kept in pristine condition, though he rarely drives them.
Friends say he also has as many as 5,000 watches and is especially fond of Swatch, the Swiss manufacturer. He is said to have spent nearly £800,000 on one Swiss watch alone.
Abdelrahman, who was once shown the watch collection, said: "There were drawers and drawers of watches, thousands of them. I don't think there is a watch in a Swiss shop he doesn't own."
Another former associate of the prince, Mark Vere Nicholl, who helped build up his British interests, said: "In my experience all wealthy Arabs love to collect timepieces. They collect them to give away as presents. It's like saying to friend, 'Have a gin and tonic'."
In Paris, the prince prefers to shop for other gifts. At his favourite jeweller, Chatila & Sons, friends say, he has spent up to £7m a year. In casinos around the world he has been equally lavish. Business associates say he has gambled away several hundred million pounds. In Las Vegas, he stays at Caesars Palace, where they value his custom so much they dedicate a member of staff to look after his every need. "He always lost," said Abdelrahman.
According to local shipbrokers in Cannes, several years ago Mohamad decided the public marina was not all he desired: he wished for a little more privacy and his own jetty. For the privilege he appears to have paid more than £1m to the local harbour authorities.
The jetty is home to two of Mohamad's more obvious possessions. One is the Montkaj, a 220ft yacht built to order five years ago at an estimated cost of more than £35m. It boasts a master suite on two levels and a vast array of electronic gadgetry. The other is the Noorah of Riyadh, a more modest vessel worth £20m. The prince presented it to his eldest son last year as a 16th birthday present.
Last week Michel, who described himself as the Noorah's chief engineer, said: "We are only used for a month a year. The rest of the time we just keep the boat shipshape."
Among the guests who used to be regular visitors to these floating palaces were two friends: Ayas and Jonathan Aitken, the now disgraced former Tory minister.
"Aitken used to come very often with Said Ayas," one of the crew said last week. "The prince would often have meetings with them right here on the Noorah. They were always very charming."
But the connections between the prince, Ayas and Aitken are no longer what they were.
AITKEN is facing criminal charges for perjury after losing a libel battle over a Ritz hotel bill said to have been paid by Said Ayas on the prince's behalf in 1993, while Aitken was a minister.
The libel fiasco ended what, for Aitken, had been 20 years of an extremely profitable relationship with the prince. Aitken had met Ayas in the 1970s, after Ayas's mother had introduced him to Lolicia Olivera, who later became his wife.
Aitken saw Ayas as the door to the prince and the wealth he represented. The prince saw the Eton-educated MP as his entrée to the upper levels of the British Establishment.
From the 1970s onwards, according to the Committee against Corruption in Saudi Arabia, an American-based dissident group, Mohamad had established a reputation as the "commission king". As governor of the nation's eastern province he rules an area which boasts 25% of the world's oil reserves. The committee claims that, with the approval of King Fahd, he used the oil boom to pursue business deals from which he could take substantial cuts.
One of the first came in 1977 with a £1.7 billion project to upgrade the kingdom's run-down telephone network. It was followed by a contract with Bechtel, a giant American construction company. A third substantial commission came from a project with Ciba Geigy, the pharmaceutical company.
The prince was also said to have been a beneficiary of a defence contract involving Litton Industries, an American company, where huge sums are said by former business associates to have been channelled into a UBS bank account in Geneva.
During the 1980s Aitken was employed for five years by the prince as managing director of Al-Bilad UK, the prince's British-based commissions company.
Inquiries by The Sunday Times reveal that the prince's advisers are said to have set up a network of offshore companies and bank accounts into which he planned to receive huge commissions from British and other defence contracts when Aitken was minister for defence procurement.
Sources with knowledge of the prince's business affairs say a company called Marks One was set up by Leonard Lugsdin, a Canadian lawyer, to channel defence commissions. Details of the prince's alleged links to Marks One are expected to be revealed in the forthcoming legal battle in the High Court.
Marks One allegedly signed multi-million-pound commission agreements with Westland, GEC-Marconi and VSEL. The proposed deals involved a range of military hardware which followed the $20 billion Al-Yamamah deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Agreements over the proposed sale to Saudi Arabia of submarines, frigates, helicopters, howitzers and precision-guided bombs, were allegedly signed between 1993 and 1995.
As minister for defence procurement for two years during this period, Aitken was personally involved in trying to lobby for the British arms deals. He also promoted the sale of four second-hand type-2400 Upholder class submarines, worth £1 billion. The total package could have been worth at least £2 billion. Commissions on such agreements can vary between 10% and 25%, according to Saudi dissident sources.
Spokesmen for the three companies said last week that they had been in talks to sell the arms to Saudi Arabia but that no weapons had been exported. Defence experts confirmed that most of the deals had fallen into abeyance.
Aitken's role in trying to arrange government-sponsored deals in which Mohamad, his one-time paymaster, was set to benefit might appear to be a potential conflict of interest. But he strongly denies any impropriety in his relationship with the prince.
"I know nothing about Marks One or any such arrangement," Aitken said last week.
"I was always extremely careful as a defence minister to act on civil service advice from the Defence Export Services organisation to make myself scrupulously apart from - and without knowledge of - all commission arrangements between Saudi Arabia and British companies."
Lord Chalfont, chairman of VSEL between 1987 and 1995 and chairman of the all-party defence group in the House of Lords, said any agency agreement signed by VSEL - or any defence company - during the time should have been known to the Minstry of Defence.
Chalfont, a personal friend of Aitken at the time, said: "You had to get government approval for these type of agreements, whenever they existed."
MORE details may emerge when the once free-spending prince brings his case against Aitken's friend Ayas to court.
Last year, shortly after the Aitken libel trial collapsed, the prince's lawyers in London issued legal proceedings against Ayas and his associates over the alleged disappearance of £231m from the prince's accounts at the Midland Bank in London and accounts in Geneva, Munich and Cannes.
Ayas vigorously denies the claims. Both Ayas and Adam Greaves, his lawyer, said last week they could not discuss details of the case, which they say is likely to go to the High Court in 2000.
But the prospect of an insider's view is fascinating. By some accounts the prince is now said to have debts of up to £400m. By others he is still one of the richest men in the world: some claim King Fahd, after he had a stroke in 1995, transferred £6 billion to accounts in Switzerland designated for Mohamad.
Whatever the truth, the idea that his jet-setting lifestyle and details of his finances might be aired in court must be worrying to the publicity-shy prince as he tries to settle into his first summer weekend on the French Riviera. Others have every reason to be worried, too.
Insight: Chris Hastings, David Leppard, Jonathon Carr-Brown and Wayne Bodkin, Cannes
Properties of a potentate: what he owns and where
In Saudi Arabia the prince has palaces in Riyadh and Jeddah and owns a complex of 50 villas built in the desert by the sea near Dhahran. He is thought to have spent close to £400m building the complex and grassing over the desert
 | In Bahrain, the neighbouring Gulf state, he has three homes, one of which is said to be worth £65m In Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, he has a mansion worth £16m, and in New York he has a flat in the Dag Hammarskjold building, an exclusive apartment block |
| In London, he inherited Bolney Gate, Knightsbridge, worth £2m; he is rumoured to have given it to one of his brothers |
| In Santa Barbara, California, he owns four villas on Hope Ranch that have a total of four swimming pools and 25 bedrooms |
| In Virginia he owned an estate which he is believed to have given to his uncle, Prince Bander |
| In an exclusive part of Geneva he owns a 14- bedroom house estimated to be worth £20m |
| In Cannes, he has a ranch with three villas in the grounds; and a modern
25-bedroom 'castle' called the Jardin de Nouf along the millionaires' Boulevard des
Horizon. In the gardens are eight satellite dishes each 18ft wide. The prince, a former
minister of communications, is thought to use them for his international business. The
royal family owns other properties in the area
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Saudis say French tank too costly, Reuters, July 7, 1998
PARIS, July 7 (Reuters) - French Defence Minister Alain Richard said on Tuesday
Saudi Arabia found French Leclerc tanks, which Paris wants to sell to the oil-rich state,
were too dear.
Richard visited Saudi Arabia on Sunday and told a news conference on Tuesday that he had
discussed the possible sale of 350 tanks during his brief trip visit.
"We have a price problem (with Saudi Arabia) and we have to try to limit the
price," he said.
Richard said his contacts with the Saudis were "positive ... because the Saudis want
modern tanks and the Leclerc is a weapon that interests them".
He said the Saudis' purchasing power was lower than before and any sale might be staggered
over some time with a first decision in principle being taken next year.
Richard met King Fahd and Defence Minister Prince Sultan during his weekend flying visit.
Asked afterwards by reporters about new arms deals between Saudi Arabia and France, Prince
Sultan said:
"These cannot be concluded in one or two meetings. But they are continuing in the
interest of the two countries and in the interest of the two countries' armed forces. We
are very hopeful
of cooperation in this field in the near future."
An industry trade union in France had said the proposed contract was stalled over how much
Paris was willing to invest in the kingdom in return.
One of France's major military contracts last year included the sale of a third air
defence frigate to Saudi Arabia, worth about $1.5 billion.
France's defence electronics firm Thomson-CSF was the prime contractor.
Analysts say sagging oil revenues due to a drop in world crude prices could force Saudi
Arabia, one of the world's biggest arms importers, to postpone new weapons deals.
SPA quoted Prince Sultan as saying: "There are no complications in the military
cooperation between Saudi Arabia and France."
Saudi Arabia rationalising spending-Prince Sultan, Reuters, July 7, 1998
DUBAI, July 7 (Reuters) - Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz
said on Tuesday the kingdom was "rationalising" spending in all fields,
including in new arms purchases.
"The policy being implemented now, under the direction of the custodian of the two
holy mosques (King Fahd) and his highness the crown prince (Abdullah), is to rationalise
in all matters...," Prince Sultan said in remarks broadcast by Saudi television.
Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil producer, has been hard hit by the fall in oil
revenues caused by low world prices. A prominent Saudi economist recently said the kingdom
was trying to reduce state spending to the bare minimum.
Prince Sultan said there was nothing that prevented military agreement in progress
"whether in terms of buying arms or exercises or (building) facilities".
"But rationalising in these matters is needed for the benefit of the citizens and the
country," he said.
The comments came two days after French Defence Minister Alain Richard visited Saudi
Arabia for talks on military cooperation between the two countries.
Richard said in Paris on Tuesday he had discussed the possible sale of 350 Leclerc tanks
with Saudi officials, but predicted that no decision would be taken before next year
because the kingdom's purchasing power was lower than before.
France had played down reports that Richard was trying to secure the deal for tanks and
other military hardware worth more than $4 billion.
Analysts say sagging oil revenues caused by the drop in world crude prices could force
Saudi Arabia, one of the world's biggest arms importers, to postpone new weapons deals.
Saudis near end of seven-year wait to surf the Net, AFP, July 15, 1998
DUBAI, July 15 (AFP) - Saudi Arabia will become the last Gulf Arab state to allow its citizens access to the Internet if plans to extend the service are finally approved after a seven-year wait.
Saudis could be surfing the world wide web by early next year, but questions remain over how the Internet will fit in with the strict Islamic laws of the kingdom.
Although the kingdom, which is home to Islam's holiest sites, is generally loathe to allow in Western culture -- cinemas are still banned -- it has realized it can not turn back the global tide of information.
But even so it has taken seven years for the country's cautious decision-makers to extend Internet access from universities and government departments to the wider public.
"Internet access for the general public will be allowed in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam around January. It will then be extended, in stages, to the rest of the kingdom," the head of a group studying Internet access at Riyadh's chamber of commerce and industry told AFP.
"Before that, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) will finalise the technology needed to bar access to information which is contrary to our Islamic values and dangerous to our security," Walid Abal Khail said.
KACST will act as a hub for Internet access in the kingdom, with its internet service unit (ISU) effectively acting as the moral gateway for local servers inside Saudi Arabia.
Internet distribution will be through private Saudi companies and more than 160 have so far applied for a licence. Those awarded licences will be announced in early August, the official news agency SPA said.
In April, Kuwait's ZakSat said it signed a deal with the Saudi telecoms company Silkinet to provide regional satellite Internet services to the kingdom once access is authorised.
Silkinet is an offshore division of Silki Lasilki, owned by Saudi tycoon Prince Al-Walid ibn Talal ibn Abdel Aziz. Silki Lasilki has in turn signed a deal to buy half of the Internet-based information services firm Arabia.On.Line.
Khail said the long delay in opening up Internet access was caused by the "worries of the authorities" that they might not have taken the necessary precautions before unleashing the Internet on the Saudi population.
"The Internet is a source of information but it must be filtered first," he said.
Internet services are already available in the five other Gulf Arab states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But most of the services run through a single proxy server which allows governments to block access to certain sites considered either morally damaging or a threat to national security.
There are already about 30,000 Internet subscribers in Saudi Arabia who access the service via providers outside the kingdom, especially Bahrain, but at the cost of a long-distance call each time.
ISU estimates that more than 120,000 people will initially subscribe to the Saudi kingdom's Internet service and that this number could double within two years. More than half a million Saudi homes have personal computers.
Yemen accuses Saudi Arabia of seizing its land, Reuters, July 16, 1998
ADEN, July 16 (Reuters) - Yemen accused Saudi Arabia on Thursday of attacking its territory and seizing its land and said Sanaa sought a just solution to their border dispute.
"Saudi Arabia continues to carry out perpetual aggressive acts and to seize Yemeni land in the framework of a policy of imposing a 'fait accompli' and exerting pressure on Yemen," a Yemeni official said in a statement.
The statement said Yemen continued to show its "good intentions and sincere desire to finding a brotherly and just solution to the border issue with Saudi Arabia".
The borders between Saudi Arabia -- the Arabian Peninsula's economic and political heavyweight -- and impoverished Yemen have been the focus of long- running dispute. The two countries' security forces clashed several times in the border area before they signed a memorandum of understanding in 1995.
A high-level Yemeni delegation, including Yemen's interior minister, visited Saudi Arabia at the end of June for talks which diplomats said included discussions of the border.
The statement also claimed that Saudi Arabia had lodged a protest with the United Nations and the secretariat of the Arab League stating Riyadh's objection to a border agreement between Oman and Yemen.
It said Yemen expressed its "astonishment and regret" at the behaviour of Saudi Arabia in registering this protest. It did not say when Saudi Arabia lodged the protest. Oman and Yemen signed a border accord demarcating their mutual boundary in 1992, ending a 25-year dispute. A year later, they opened their first border crossing.