Who Is Roger Tamraz?
Timmerman, Kenneth R. & RingAdams, James
This White House coffee-drinker has a very interesting past that includes close links to BCCI and Libya. By James Ring Adams & Kenneth B. Timmerman T he case of Roger Tamraz has pushed Bill...
...He is also frequently referred to as a "fugitive banker...
...he soon wound up working on the project...
...He offered to pick up the pieces of the bank and pay depositors 90 cents on the dollar...
...The British had apparently been tipped off by the American State Department, and Gokal remains in British custody...
...But the administration has been slow to enforce the law against Tripoli, and in October, Qaddafi even endorsed Clinton for president...
...But the shareholder destined for the most notoriety was a classmate from Harvard Business School named Ghaith Pharaon...
...One unsuccessful bidder for those shares was Mochtar Riady, owner of Indonesia's Lippo Group, who later found another entry into American politics...
...But it's the best health-care system in the world—not arguably the best, but the best...
...Brock (Continued from page 45) Howard kept the cash and gave the checks to Carone...
...But his still unidentified backers soon learned how much this offer would really cost, and the deal collapsed...
...Tamraz had plenty of business to talk over with the administration...
...According to backers of the measure, however, the original administration version applied only to Iran...
...Fred Barnes, "What Health-Care Crisis...
...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...
...Lippo was the leading contender to take over BCC (Hong Kong) Ltd., until the losses turned out to be much higher than expected...
...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 assembly plant in Conway, Arkansas...
...Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Central Asian oil has been the focus of much geopolitical wrangling...
...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...
...No, our healthcare system isn't perfect...
...The head of the firm, Charles Manatt, was a former Democratic National Committee head...
...In July 1994, a key 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...
...Sue King spoke against the payment at the meeting...
...One suspects that the case of Roger Tamraz may soon become central to the investigations of troubled Democratic fundraising...
...The contacts he made on the banks of the Charles 32 May 1997 • The American Spectator helped shape his role as an agent for the Arab elites...
...as he would in later deals, Pharaon was acting as a front man for BCCI...
...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...
...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...
...Ward Industries landed a big contract to provide buses for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and received a $3 million loan from the BCCI...
...The European financial press identifies Tamraz as an organizer of the Paris-based Banque Arab et Internationale d'Investissements (BALI), originally jointly owned by two consortia of sixteen Arab banks and twenty-one non-Arab ones...
...Two years later, some $200 million in debt, he sold 70 percent to the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank, rejecting a bid from Kuwait...
...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...
...After Tamraz opened his purse, White House doors opened to him...
...Though he denies the motives that King imputes to him, Carone confirms that he believes NRA should cover the legal bills of Howard, whom many in the Knox camp—perhaps unaware of the dubious history of the recall effort—view as a hero for taking on Roberti and refusing to disclose his contributors to the state...
...Robert Morgenthau...
...NOT IN THE BACKGROUND FOR LONG After the Detroit bail-out, Tamraz appears to have kept Pharaon at arms length...
...I asked him if he knowingly broke the law in California and he said yes...
...A former BCCI official named S.Z.A...
...The pro-American Shah of Iran needed money for his own ambitions, and started to jack up the price of his oil...
...Health care may (or may not) be too costly...
...Somehow, I doubt it...
...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...
...Others, including Carone himself, confirm that Payne was a volunteer fundraiser for the group...
...Privately, other investigators say Naqvi was rewarded for not talking...
...Some NRA board members, including Sue King, allege that, among other motives in seeking control of NRA's finances, Carone wants the lobby to foot the bill for Howard's legal expenses in challenging the FPPC fine and even pay the $800,000 due if an appeal in California Superior Court fails...
...His most publicized current project is construction of (Continued on page 8o) 35 Or perhaps the great student of American assimilation has himself become assimilated to a liberal culture that sharply disapproves of sustained political combat in a decidedly "incorrect" cause...
...Both Adham and bin Mahfouz later arranged plea bargains with Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, the most aggressive of the BCCI's investigators...
...Both Carone and Howard say that all of the money raised—one partial disclosure the group filed with the FPPC reported $141,000 in contributions—was properly spent on the recall...
...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...
...His highly interesting group of co-owners included John Connally, who was then beginning to consider a presidential run against Jimmy Carter...
...But is it really inevitable that American blacks will increasingly come to reject the straightforward Americanism of a Benjamin 0. Davis or a Colin Powell in favor of Kwanzaa, Ebonics, and the alleged cultural glories of Nubia and Kush...
...Even if that means we have to garnish wages and attach property...
...Everyone gets health care in this country—the poor, the uninsured, everyone...
...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...
...His name doesn't show up in any of the Saudi's more notorious deals, or in the heyday of 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 $loo million...
...Major oil companies had meanwhile underestimated consumer demand...
...Barred from a full-scale U.S...
...His complaints about the uncooperative Justice Department under Bush Attorney General Richard Thornburgh may have been a major factor in Thomburgh's failure to win Pennsylvania's special Senate election in 1991, an upset widely misread as a demand for healthcare reform...
...A renegade relative, Osama bin Ladin, was ostracized by the family after throwing in his lot with religious extremists...
...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 attended British grammar schools, across the street from which British officers played cricket and rode polo ponies at the fashionable Gazira Sporting Club...
...Fernandez, Dreher, Payne, and other activists in Roberti's district all say that, once the Carone group spent funds to collect signatures to get the recall effort on the ballot—which Carone says cost about $6o,000— they saw few signs of typical campaign activities such as advertising or the distribution of leaflets...
...An overhaul of the sort Hillary Clinton envisions is not only unnecessary, it's certain to reduce, not expand, the amount of health care Americans receive (price controls always lead to less of the controlled commodity...
...Capcom had extremely close ties to the Chicago firm Refco, from which Hillary Clinton made her killing in cattle futures...
...UNSAVORY FRIENDS Tamraz had another possible agenda, soothing the tense relations between the United States and his friends Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi...
...The First Arabian bailout freed him to expand holdings elsewhere...
...Tamraz makes an interesting parallel with Mochtar Riady of Lippo Group...
...Howard, who is not currently employed, has claimed he is "destitute...
...As Petrodollars flooded the Middle East, middlemen like Tamraz fell into the fabulous business of reinvesting the wealth in the West...
...If millions of seriously ill Americans were being denied medical care, that would be a crisis...
...Called al-Turki because he was raised in Istanbul, Adham was the brother of the late King Faisal's favorite wife, Queen Iffat...
...but so long as there is at least a glimmer of a chance that they are wrong, we are morally obliged to fight on...
...Proud of his name recognition, however, Tamraz brought the Tamoil label to the U.S...
...Only later did it emerge that Pharaon was not using his own money in the Georgia deal...
...On the eve of the Detroit deal, Pharaon had emerged as a major shareholder in Armand Hammer's maverick Occidental Petroleum Company...
...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...
...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...
...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 way hospitals and doctors are financed is sometimes bizarre...
...One of the cases that Naqvi could have helped reached into the White House...
...Spokesmen for this culture tend to focus on the schools and universities, where multiculturalism is deeply entrenched, and to ignore, as Glazer does, institutions like the U.S...
...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...
...Tamraz is dodging an outstanding Interpol warrant from Syrian-controlled Lebanon—which he dismisses as retaliation for his dealings with Israel...
...And this is where Roger Tamraz becomes such an important player...
...He spent his childhood in Cairo's exclusive Zamalek district...
...After nearly a year of soundings, Tamraz told the Detroiters he represented his Harvard classmate Ghaith Pharaon...
...We should have never elected someone to the board who has engaged in election misbehavior...
...Like the BCCI, the holding company was based in Luxembourg, which had limited resources for regulation...
...Treasury's list of blocked foreign assets under the name Gatoil Suisse, SA...
...In the current uproar over Tamraz, his links to Pharaon and BCCI have largely been forgotten...
...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 that's not happening...
...Congress added Libya...
...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...
...Pharaon brought the BCCI to the U.S...
...The BAII provided cover for BCCI...
...When she told Knox and Carone of Colman's BOY CLINTON FOUR YEARS AGO There is no health-care crisis...
...TAS, MAY 1993 The American Spectator • May 1997 81...
...His main profit center came to be his illegal fronting for BCCI purchases...
...So far, press attention on the Chinese infiltration of Clinton's fundraising apparatus has ignored another primary source of foreign influence-buying—Arab money...
...another partner was Clinton fundraiser and trade representative Mickey Kantor...
...If he raised money in the gun clubs, those people ought to wonder what he did with it...
...See "Terrorism in Our Face," TAS, April 1997...
...Though this go-round 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...
...Two years later Pharaon plunged into the savings and loan racket by purchasing a quarter of the shares of Miami's Centrust Savings Bank...
...Steckel had been executive vice president of First Arabian and a Harvard Business School classmate of Pharaon and Tamraz...
...I had to pay one of my neighbors $1,500 for flyers because when the bill came due," says Dreher, "Rick all of a sudden didn't have the money to pay for it...
...For the wheeling-dealing Tamraz, however, it was business as usual...
...the ensuing shortfall was widely misread as the start of a global exhaustion of fossil-fuel reserves: the "energy crisis" was in full swing...
...Its major shareholders included Kamal Adham...
...Army, where it is not...
...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...
...Partisans of this approach also like to portray themselves as hard-nosed realists who are merely acquiescing to the inevitable, and here again, Glazer runs true to form...
...By James Ring Adams & Kenneth B. Timmerman T he 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...
...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...
...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...
...It's a myth...
...Pharaon invested in Independence and Centrust in spite of his own financial problems...
...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...
...Tamraz emerged as a political contributor in the fall of 1995 when he donated $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee...
...Ward went to Saudi Arabia to drum up more business, and took along as his consultant none other than Donald Fowler...
...He threw them in the trash...
...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...
...At Adams/Timmerman (Continued from page 35) a pipeline to bring untapped Caspian Sea oil reserves to the West...
...During his reign, King Faisal used Adham as something of a one-man intelligence agency...
...Carone says he never handled any of the money...
...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...
...Local businessmen were trying to put the troubled bank back on its feet when they received a feeler from a Texas lawyer...
...He denies there's a connection to Libya, and on the surface the U.S...
...The BALI had close links with BCCI, even hiring a BCCI director as its chief executive...
...THE PHARAOH CONNECTION Far from turning Pharaon against banks, the experience in Detroit seemed to whet his appetite...
...Shortly before announcing the project, Tamraz spelled it out to a National Security Council specialist on June 2. The meeting went badly...
...An FPPC spokesman says the agency still cannot confirm how much money was raised by the committee, nor can it verify how the money was spent...
...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...
...At any rate, the answer to the appeasers and defeatists is always the same: They may be right about the future —who can tell...
...Now, we know, Fowler brought Tamraz to the White House...
...She recently complained in correspondence of Colman's "abusive behavior [and] threats to staff...
...He was pouring his apparent wealth into American hotels, chemical and oil companies, and banks...
...By 1974, Pharaon claimed an annual income of $300 million, fueled by middleman commissions from Western companies looking for Saudi business...
...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...
...It helped fund the takeover of First American...
...When Muammar Qaddafi, then a young army officer, overthrew King Idris IV, he promptly nationalized the oil industry...
...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...
...But one of Tamraz's reported interests played a crucial role at a second degree of separation...
...Then we really will have a health-care crisis...
...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...
...he was dealing with influential Democrats, his oldest allies in the U. S. have been the Texas oil Republicans, including the late John Connally...
...A spokesman for the FPPC has promised to "wage a full court press to collect...
...By 1973, Tamraz was ready to leave Kidder to found his own investment bank, the First Arabian Corporation...
...In September 1977 he became part-owner of the Main Bank of Houston, a smaller institution with its own problems...
...Akbar left the bank in 1986 with about $27 million in hush money to head a commodity trading firm called Capcom...
...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...
...Its shortcomings can be remedied by tinkering, or at least by less-than-comprehensive changes...
...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...
...Pharaon continued to have an interest in the bank and a partnership with Tamraz...
...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...
...Pharaon set up shop in Savannah, Georgia, making it the headquarters of his American subsidiary, Interedec Inc...
...But he didn't keep the envelopes or the notes that were enclosed...
...Tamraz brought Pharaon to Detroit...
...in 1995, incorporating an American version in Delaware...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...See "The Ties That Blind," TAS, August 1994...
...with help from the real CIA, Adham did the job surprisingly well...
...His father's court connections helped him launch his holding company, Saudi Research and Development Corporation (REDEC) in 1966...
...First American Bankshares, Inc...
...They say they were forced to raise money on their own to air television commercials and print bumper stickers...
...In 1967, Tamraz joined the Wall Street firm of Kidder Peabody, and he didn't take long to make his mark...
...Another problem is that the bulk of Tamraz's financing is pledged by the People's Republic of China...
...In the mid-eighties, the putative energy crisis had turned into an oil glut...
...By the end of 1996, his state and national Democratic contributions totaled $177,000...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The BCCI brought a loan to Ward Industries, which brought Donald Fowler along for the ride...
...It wasn't the first time Fowler had crossed paths with Arab money...
...Tamraz re-entered BCCI's orbit after it was seized in 1991...
...The American Spectator • May 1997 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...
...Like Carone, Colman became interested in gun politics in the late 198o's over the assault weapons issue and ran for the NRA board in 1994 as a Knox candidate...
...He attended four of Clinton's coffee tastings, making him one of the most frequent outside guests...
...The Caspian pipeline and Libyan sanctions make a pretty full agenda by themselves, but there is still another area where Tamraz might have wanted to exert influence...
...And we should have never hired a director to do work for the NRA...
...KENNETH R. TIMMERMAN publishes Iran Brief, a monthly newsletter...
...But recycling that money wasn't quite the clean or efficient process that starry-eyed Western bankers thought it would be...
...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...
...A sale of bonds to BCCI kept Centrust afloat until 1990...
...Just two weeks into his tenure at Kidder, he proposed a rescue plan for the Intra Bank of Beirut that had recently failed...
...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...
...Pharaon had gone to high schools in Paris and Beirut and then studied petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines...
...Howard says Payne is a liar who bears a grudge against him: "Henever raised any money for us and never gave me any money...
...But when his connections couldn't help the bank after a year of shrinking business, Pharaon turned to Tamraz for help...
...Pharaon went public as new owner of Bank of the Commonwealth in February 1975...
...What makes We Are All Multiculturalists Now so pernicious is that it seeks to induce opponents of multiculturalism to lay down their arms and acquiesce in a state of affairs that, as Salins persuasively argues, can only bring ruin to America...
...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...
...He was welcomed warmly by the auto industry, which had been pursuing its own deals in the Arab world...
...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...
...The ultimate rescue, negotiated with majority shareholder Sheikh Zayed ofAbu Dhabi, paid about q.o cents on the dollar...
...Internal BCCI docu80 May 1997 • The American Spectator ments 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...
...Another major shareholder was the wealthy (but non-royal) Sheikh Salem bin Ladin, a scion of the kingdom's largest construction contractor...
...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...
...Tamraz's First Arabian stepped in to buy out Pharaon's shares and pump another $io million into Bank of the Commonwealth...
...In August 1996, Clinton signed a bill imposing unilateral sanctions on companies doing business with Iran and Libya...
...But curious things have happened under Clinton, too...
...hasn't let up on Qaddafi...
...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...
...So there were no records of who was giving what...
...At an NRA board meeting in February, a resolution sponsored by the Knox forces authorized the payment of $30,000 in "consulting fees" to Howard in connection with the Carone audit, but board sources say the understanding is that the money is to be funneled to his legal defense...
...Knox confirms the incident, saying that helping Howard is the "principled" thing for the NRA to do...
...the group then installed Matthew Steckel as Commonwealth chairman...
...But the company still appears on the U.S...
...Emergency rooms are often swamped...
...The deal was handled by Jackson Stephens of Little Rock's Stephens Inc...
...In 1983, Tamraz bought a northern Italian chain of gas stations and a refinery from Chicago-based Amoco, calling it Tamoil...
...I asked him [Howard] if he broke the law in California and he said yes...
...Along with other Saudis, Pharaon began to take large losses—and in December 1985, his REDEC declared a moratorium on its debt...
...Even more of a political neophyte than Carone, Colman soon started throwing his weight around, according to NRA President Hammer...
...There isn't enough primary care—regular doctor's visits—for many Americans...
...later he switched to business at Stanford and Harvard...
...NRA officials say that Knox asked Metaksa to issue a $3o,000 check from ILA's coffers for Howard's legal defense, and she refused without board approval...
...In addition to this disaster, bin Mahfouz and Pharaon were later entangled in the largest single bank scandal in history...
...Accord34 May 1997 • The American Spectator ing 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...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
