Who is Roger Tamraz?

[Larry-Jennie]

The American Spectator
May, 1997

WHO IS ROGER TAMRAZ?

This White House coffee-drinker
has a very interesting past that includes
close links to BCCI and Libya.

by James Ring Adams & Kenneth R. Timmerman

The case of Roger Tamraz has pushed Bill Clinton's fundraising follies
to a more sinister level, and ensnared a host of Clintonites along the
way. Don Fowler, chairman of the Democratic National Committee,
interfered with the National Security Council on Tamraz's behalf,
enlisting the CIA to help the party chase big bucks. And it was Anthony
Lake's obliviousness to this abuse of security staff that killed his own
nomination, in spite of the self-serving preachments about a
confirmation system "gone haywire." For the wheeling-dealing Tamraz,
however, it was business as usual.

A nattily dressed Park Avenue businessman with just a trace of a French
accent, the 57-year-old Tamraz has exploited politicians and
intelligence services for nearly a quarter of a century. His career
moves in circles that transcend national boundaries, ethnic conflicts, and
party lines -- and he divides his time between New York, Paris, and Detroit.
Though this go-round he was dealing with influential Democrats, his
oldest allies in the U. S. have been the Texas oil Republicans,
including the late John Connally.

He is also frequently referred to as a "fugitive banker"; Tamraz is
dodging an outstanding Interpol warrant from Syrian-controlled
Lebanon -- which he dismisses as retaliation for his dealings with
Israel.

But another set of ties goes deep into the notorious Bank of Credit and
Commerce International (BCCI) scandal which plagued George Bush
and may yet taint the Clintons. So far, press attention on the Chinese
infiltration of Clinton's fundraising apparatus has ignored another
primary source of foreign influence-buying -- Arab money. And this is
where Roger Tamraz becomes such an important player.

A CIVILIZED MAN
Tamraz is the son of a self-made millionaire, and was raised in Egypt to
be part of the cosmopolitan Middle Eastern elite. He spent his
childhood in Cairo's exclusive Zamalek district; he attended British
grammar schools, across the street from which British officers played
cricket and rode polo ponies at the fashionable Gazira Sporting Club.

After taking a degree from the American University in Cairo and
studying economics at Cambridge, Tamraz crossed the Atlantic in the
early sixties to take an MBA at the Harvard Business School. The
contacts he made on the banks of the Charles helped shape his role as an
agent for the Arab elites. In 1967, Tamraz joined the Wall Street firm
of Kidder Peabody, and he didn't take long to make his mark. Just two
weeks into his tenure at Kidder, he proposed a rescue plan for the Intra
Bank of Beirut that had recently failed; he soon wound up working on
the project.

In late summer 1969, a coup in Libya started a chain of events that
greatly increased the prospects for a Harvard MBA with a Middle
Eastern background. When Muammar Qaddafi, then a young army
officer, overthrew King Idris IV, he promptly nationalized the oil
industry. The pro-American Shah of Iran needed money for his own
ambitions, and started to jack up the price of his oil. Major oil
companies had meanwhile underestimated consumer demand; the
ensuing shortfall was widely misread as the start of a global exhaustion
of fossil-fuel reserves: the "energy crisis" was in full swing. As
Petrodollars flooded the Middle East, middlemen like Tamraz fell into
the fabulous business of reinvesting the wealth in the West. But
recycling that money wasn't quite the clean or efficient process that
starry-eyed Western bankers thought it would be.

By 1973, Tamraz was ready to leave Kidder to found his own
investment bank, the First Arabian Corporation. Now Tamraz was
acting as the highly visible front man for a shadowy but powerful group
of Saudi backers, the most intriguing of whom was Sheikh Kamal
Adham. Called al-Turki because he was raised in Istanbul, Adham was
the brother of the late King Faisal's favorite wife, Queen Iffat. During
his reign, King Faisal used Adham as something of a one-man
intelligence agency; with help from the real CIA, Adham did the job
surprisingly well.

Tamraz found an even more direct royal connection in Prince Abdullah
bin Musaid bin Abdul Rahman, whose father had helped rescue the
kingdom from bankruptcy in a late 1950's stint as finance minister.
Another major shareholder was the wealthy (but non-royal) Sheikh
Salem bin Ladin, a scion of the kingdom's largest construction
contractor. (A renegade relative, Osama bin Ladin, was ostracized by the
family after throwing in his lot with religious extremists. See
"Terrorism in Our Face," TAS, April 1997.) But the shareholder
destined for the most notoriety was a classmate from Harvard Business
School named Ghaith Pharaon.

TAKING DETROIT
Tamraz began to work the intersection of oil money and American
politics in late 1973, with the rescue of Detroit's Bank of the
Commonwealth. Local businessmen were trying to put the troubled
bank back on its feet when they received a feeler from a Texas lawyer.
The lawyer was Frank Van Court, from the Houston firm of Vinson,
Elkins, Searls, Connally & Smith, whose name partners included John
Connally, former governor of Texas and secretary of the treasury under
Richard Nixon. When Van Court came to Detroit he brought along
Tamraz, who told the bank owners that he was financial adviser to a
yet-unnamed Middle Eastern figure. After nearly a year of soundings,
Tamraz told the Detroiters he represented his Harvard classmate Ghaith
Pharaon.

Pharaon had gone to high schools in Paris and Beirut and then studied
petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines; later he
switched to business at Stanford and Harvard. His father's court
connections helped him launch his holding company, Saudi Research
and Development Corporation (REDEC) in 1966. By 1974, Pharaon
claimed an annual income of $300 million, fueled by middleman
commissions from Western companies looking for Saudi business. He
was pouring his apparent wealth into American hotels, chemical and oil
companies, and banks. On the eve of the Detroit deal, Pharaon had
emerged as a major shareholder in Armand Hammer's maverick
Occidental Petroleum Company.

Pharaon went public as new owner of Bank of the Commonwealth in
February 1975. He was welcomed warmly by the auto industry, which
had been pursuing its own deals in the Arab world. But when his
connections couldn't help the bank after a year of shrinking business,
Pharaon turned to Tamraz for help. Tamraz's First Arabian stepped in to
buy out Pharaon's shares and pump another $10 million into Bank of
the Commonwealth; the group then installed Matthew Steckel as
Commonwealth chairman. Steckel had been executive vice president of
First Arabian and a Harvard Business School classmate of Pharaon and
Tamraz. Pharaon continued to have an interest in the bank and a
partnership with Tamraz.

THE PHARANON CONNECTION
Far from turning Pharaon against banks, the experience in Detroit
seemed to whet his appetite. The First Arabian bailout freed him to
expand holdings elsewhere. In September 1977 he became part-owner
of the Main Bank of Houston, a smaller institution with its own
problems. His highly interesting group of co-owners included John
Connally, who was then beginning to consider a presidential run against
Jimmy Carter. The other major figure was the Saudi banker Khaled bin
Mahfouz, whose father had founded the largest privately owned bank in
the kingdom, the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia.
According to one history of the BCCI, Connally introduced Pharaon
and bin Mahfouz to Herbert and Bunker Hunt, heirs to the Hunt
billions, and the Saudis joined in the Hunts' ill-fated attempt to
corner the silver market, which made them all much less rich. In addition to
this disaster, bin Mahfouz and Pharaon were later entangled in the
largest single bank scandal in history.

Pharaon's troubles started in late 1977, when he bought the shares in
the National Bank of Georgia belonging to Jimmy Carter's political
confidant, T. Bertram Lance. (One unsuccessful bidder for those shares
was Mochtar Riady, owner of Indonesia's Lippo Group, who later found
another entry into American politics. The deal was handled by Jackson
Stephens of Little Rock's Stephens Inc.) Pharaon set up shop in
Savannah, Georgia, making it the headquarters of his American
subsidiary, Interedec Inc. He soon bought the nearby former estate of
Henry Ford II and threw lavish parties whose guest lists ranged from the
likes of Carter to Alexander Haig.

Only later did it emerge that Pharaon was not using his own money in
the Georgia deal; as he would in later deals, Pharaon was acting as a
front man for BCCI. Since it had begun operations in 1972, BCCI lost
money steadily, seeking high profits by providing services to drug
lords, arms dealers, spies, and terrorists -- and covering its deficits by
fraud.

By the time it was closed down in 1991, the bank was hiding a shortfall
of nearly $12 billion, making it easily the largest single bank fraud in
history. BCCI concealed the fraud by dazzling Westerners with lists of
wealthy Saudi shareholders, prominent among them Tamraz's partner
Kamal Adham and the Main Bank investor Khaled bin Mahfouz. Both
Adham and bin Mahfouz later arranged plea bargains with Manhattan
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, the most aggressive of the
BCCI's investigators.

Barred from a full-scale U.S. presence by suspicious regulators, BCCI
was trying a back-door entry into the American system throughout the
eighties by illegally taking hidden ownership of several different
banks.

>From 1977 to 1982, Pharaon bought shares in the National Bank of
Georgia and then turned them over to a BCCI-controlled bank chain
based in Washington, D.C. -- First American Bankshares, Inc.

In 1985 Pharaon was also involved in buying the Independence Bank of
Encino, California, which BCCI's number two man later testified was
meant to be the base for an eventual BCCI relocation to the U.S. Two
years later Pharaon plunged into the savings and loan racket by
purchasing a quarter of the shares of Miami's Centrust Savings Bank. A
sale of bonds to BCCI kept Centrust afloat until 1990; when regulators
took over the Miami thrift, they discovered some $2 billion in losses,
making it one of the largest casualties of the S&L debacle.

Pharaon invested in Independence and Centrust in spite of his own
financial problems. In the mid-eighties, the putative energy crisis had
turned into an oil glut. Along with other Saudis, Pharaon began to take
large losses -- and in December 1985, his REDEC declared a
moratorium on its debt. His main profit center came to be his illegal
fronting for BCCI purchases. (An administrative law judge for the
Federal Reserve last year estimated that Pharaon made a profit of $91
million in selling Bert Lance's old bank to BCCI.)

Pharaon is now a fugitive from federal and New York State bank fraud
charges, and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors earlier this year
fined him $37 million for lying about the takeover of the Independence
Bank.

NOT IN THE BACKGROUND FOR LONG
After the Detroit bail-out, Tamraz appears to have kept Pharaon at arms
length. His name doesn't show up in any of the Saudi's more notorious
deals, or in the heyday of the BCCI. But one of Tamraz's reported
interests played a crucial role at a second degree of separation. The
European financial press identifies Tamraz as an organizer of the
Paris-based Banque Arab et Internationale d'Investissements (BAII),
originally jointly owned by two consortia of sixteen Arab banks and
twenty-one non-Arab ones. (Like the BCCI, the holding company was
based in Luxembourg, which had limited resources for regulation.) The
BAII had close links with BCCI, even hiring a BCCI director as its chief
executive.

The BAII provided cover for BCCI. It helped fund the takeover of First
American. According to the Federal Reserve, it provided a letter of
credit for Pharaon's purchase of Independence Bank, without
mentioning that the financing was backed up by the BCCI. The BAII had
bad loan problems of its own, and in the summer of 1990 it was taken
over by the Banque Nationale de Paris, the French central bank, at a
loss of $100 million.

Tamraz re-entered BCCI's orbit after it was seized in 1991. He offered
to pick up the pieces of the bank and pay depositors 90 cents on the
dollar. But his still unidentified backers soon learned how much this
offer would really cost, and the deal collapsed. (The ultimate rescue,
negotiated with majority shareholder Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, paid
about 40 cents on the dollar.)

Tamraz makes an interesting parallel with Mochtar Riady of Lippo
Group. Perhaps the most spectacular of the BCCI's failures came in
Hong Kong, where it sparked a bank run and wiped out a good part of
the fortune of the famous Burmese opium warlord Khun Sa. Lippo was
the leading contender to take over BCC (Hong Kong) Ltd., until the
losses turned out to be much higher than expected.

In the current uproar over Tamraz, his links to Pharaon and BCCI have
largely been forgotten. Tamraz emerged as a political contributor in the
fall of 1995, when he donated $50,000 to the Democratic National
Committee. In the off-election year, his contacts at the DNC suggested
the best use of his cash would be the tight race for control of the
Virginia House of Delegates. On August 25, he gave $25,000 in his
own name to the Democratic Party of Virginia, and followed on
October 19 with $75,000 in the name of Tamoil, Inc. By the end of
1996, his state and national Democratic contributions totaled
$177,000. After Tamraz opened his purse, White House doors opened
to him. He attended four of Clinton's coffee tastings, making him one
of the most frequent outside guests.

Tamraz had plenty of business to talk over with the administration. His
most publicized current project is construction of a pipeline to bring
untapped Caspian Sea oil reserves to the West. Since the collapse of the
Soviet empire, Central Asian oil has been the focus of much
geopolitical wrangling. Caspian reserves could equal those of Kuwait
or even Saudi Arabia -- and four pipeline consortia are already
exploring routes through the tricky terrain of Russia or Iran. On June
6, 1995, Tamraz announced his own plan: his New York-based Oil
Capital Corporation wants to build a $2 billion pipeline spanning the
Caucasus and traversing Turkey. The Tamraz route would avoid Russia
and Iran and eliminate the shipping bottleneck of the Bosphorus, but it
requires the diplomatic feat of reconciling newly independent Armenia
and Azerbaijan, whose ethnic rivalries span millennia.

Another problem is that the bulk of Tamraz's financing is pledged by the
People's Republic of China. The China Petroleum Engineering and
Construction Company, owned by the China National Petroleum
Company, agreed to put up $1.5 billion, and provide engineering,
construction, and raw materials.

Shortly before announcing the project, Tamraz spelled it out to a
National Security Council specialist on June 2. The meeting went badly.
NSC official Sheila Heslin, who handles Central Asian and Caspian Sea
affairs, later told the Wall Street Journal that she felt his pipeline
proposal didn't have much chance and recommended against further
meetings with him.

UNSAVORY FRIENDS
Tamraz is still thought perhaps to have tried to intercede with the
American government on behalf of both Saddam Hussein and
Muammar Qaddafi. In 1983, Tamraz bought a northern Italian chain of
gas stations and a refinery from Chicago-based Amoco, calling it
Tamoil. Two years later, some $200 million in debt, he sold 70 percent
to the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank, rejecting a bid from Kuwait. After the
United Nations slapped a partial embargo on Libya over the terrorist
bombing of Pan Am flight 103, Libya turned over a controlling stake in
Tamoil to private Italian investors. But the company still appears on
the U.S. Treasury's list of blocked foreign assets under the name Gatoil
Suisse, SA.

Proud of his name recognition, however, Tamraz brought the Tamoil
label to the U.S. in 1995, incorporating an American version in
Delaware. He denies there's a connection to Libya, and on the surface
the U.S. hasn't let up on Qaddafi. In August 1996, Clinton signed a bill
imposing unilateral sanctions on companies doing business with those
countries. According to backers of the measure, however, the original
administration version applied only to Iran; Congress added Libya. But
the administration has been slow to enforce the law against Tripoli, and
in October, Qaddafi even endorsed Clinton for president.

The Caspian pipeline and Libyan sanctions make a pretty full agenda by
themselves, but there are still areas where Tamraz might have wanted to
exert influence. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations have shown
a marked reluctance to get to the bottom of the BCCI case, which is
why the lead in unraveling the fraud has fallen to Manhattan D.A.
Robert Morgenthau. His complaints about the non-cooperation of the
Justice Department under Bush Attorney General Richard Thornburgh
may have been a major factor in Thornburgh's failure to win the U. S.
Senate race in Pennsylvania in 1990, an upset widely misread as a
demand for health-care reform. But curious things have happened under
Clinton, too.

In July 1994, a crucial witness named Abbas Gokal decided to
cooperate with Morgenthau's investigators; while en route to New
York, police arrested him in Frankfurt in the name of Great Britain's
Serious Fraud Office. The British had apparently been tipped off by the
American State Department, and Gokal remains in British custody. That
same month, the Justice Department sponsored a plea bargain with the
BCCI's number two man, Swaleh Naqvi, provoking an unusual protest
to the sentencing judge from Morgenthau. "Naqvi has consistently
failed to proffer new information in a significant investigation or
prosecution of unindicted individuals or anyone else in the United
States," Morgenthau wrote. Privately, other investigators say Naqvi was
rewarded for not talking.

One of the cases that Naqvi could have helped reached into the White
House. A former BCCI official named S. K. A. Akbar left the bank in
1986 with about $27 million in hush money to found a commodity
trading firm called Capcom. (Its major shareholders included Kamal
Adham.) Capcom had extremely close ties to the Chicago firm Refco,
from which Hillary Clinton made her killing in cattle futures. (See "The
Ties That Blind," TAS, August 1994.)

Naqvi was represented by the well-known former prosecutors Joseph
DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who were then partners in the law
firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. The head of the firm, Charles Manatt,
was a former Democratic National Committee head; another partner
was Clinton fundraiser and trade representative Mickey Kantor. Internal
BCCI documents are said to show that the bank used the Manatt firm to
lobby the National Security Council in 1992 in an attempt to close
down Morgenthau's Manhattan investigation.

FAMILIAR FACES
As noted above, the fatal blow to Anthony Lake's nomination was the
discovery that Roger Tamraz had used the CIA to lobby the NSC. When
NSC specialist Sheila Heslin recommended a cold shoulder for Tamraz,
Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler produced a
favorable memo on Tamraz from a CIA specialist (who later went to
work for Tamraz) and paved his way to the White House.

It wasn't the first time Fowler had crossed paths with Arab money. In
1978, when Fowler was Democratic Chairman of South Carolina,
Jimmy Carter named the former South Carolina governor John West as
ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Prominent Southern Democrats soon
began to do big business in the Kingdom of Saud, and one of these was
Democratic National Committeeman Charles Ward, who owned a
school bus manufacturer in Conway, Arkansas. Ward Industries landed
a big contract to provide buses for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and
received a $3 million loan from the BCCI. Ward went to Saudi Arabia
to drum up more business, and took along as his consultant none other
than Donald Fowler.

Now, we know, Fowler brought Tamraz to the White House. Tamraz
brought Pharaon to Detroit. Pharaon brought the BCCI to the U.S.. The
BCCI brought a loan to Ward Industries, which brought Donald Fowler
along for the ride. One suspects that the case of Roger Tamraz may
soon become central to the investigations of troubled Democratic
fundraising.

James Ring Adams is an investigative writer for The American
Spectator and co-author of A Full Service Bank: How BCCI Stole
Billions Around the World (Pocket Books). Kenneth R. Timmerman
publishes Iran Brief, a monthly newsletter.

[AccessGuru]

Larry-Jennie Wrote:
>WHO IS ROGER TAMRAZ?
> This White House coffee-drinker
> has a very interesting past that includes
> close links to BCCI and Libya.

> by James Ring Adams & Kenneth R. Timmerman

Perhaps even more interesting would be who is Timmerman
and who does he work for? Is he in the direct or indirect
control of an intelligence service of a foreign power? His
constant attack on the legitimate Government of Iran and
the variety of subjects he chooses to write about are more
interesting than what he writes. Timmerman certainly has
an ax to grind and I can not help thinking that it is not an
American ax.

[felixth...@hotmail.com]

In article <19970426234...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
acces...@aol.com (AccessGuru) wrote:

>
> Larry-Jennie Wrote:
> >WHO IS ROGER TAMRAZ?
> > This White House coffee-drinker
> > has a very interesting past that includes
> > close links to BCCI and Libya.
>
> > by James Ring Adams & Kenneth R. Timmerman
>

> Perhaps even more interesting would be who is Timmerman
> and who does he work for? Is he in the direct or indirect
> control of an intelligence service of a foreign power? His
> constant attack on the legitimate Government of Iran and
> the variety of subjects he chooses to write about are more
> interesting than what he writes. Timmerman certainly has
> an ax to grind and I can not help thinking that it is not an
> American ax.

Actually, I've been trying to figure out where he went since he
disappeared off of SCI. Apparently, his "Foundation for Democracy in
Iran" has not had its "National Endowment for Democracy" grant re-newed.
Last I checked, he was writting in the American Spectator, a real
hard-right magazine. The guy is a cooky nut, and unfortunately, these
guys are running Washington.

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