Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (readict .txt) 📗

engineering from the pyramids of the Nile to the construction of the Suez Canal, nothing so huge or costly as Jubail has been attempted. “1

For Bechtel, which had not been a major presence in Saudi Arabia for nearly a decade, the project came at an especially welcome moment. After the embarrassment of the Arab Boycott, the near-collapse of the nuclear power industry and the recent loss of several maJor 208

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projects, most notable among them the Alaskan pipeline, the corrpany badly needed a winner just then, and in Jubail-which would bring in an estimated $200 million in profits every year for the next two decades-Bechtel clearly had found one. Moreover, there was othet good fortune in the offing, in the form of contracts to build another i Saudi Arabian industrial city (the $1 billion Yanbu), the $3.4 billion Riyadh International Airport and assorted other projects growing out bf the Saudi government’s decision to commit $145 billion to industrial and civic development between 1975 and 1980.

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But with the windfall would also come problems, both in :Saudi Arabia and in Bechtel’s own corporate headquarters. The first and most immediate of those problems was certain members of the Saudi royal household, whose greed was growing in direct proportion to the’ funds being paid Bechtel.

Meeting the demands of various Saudi princes was nothing O,ew to Bechtel, which, in the years it had been operating in the kingdom, had paid out millions in so-called “business commissions.” Legally,1 there was nothing in either Saudi or American law to prohibit this practice, as long as the commissions on a particular project did not ex<l:eed 5

percent. During the boom days of the 1970s, however, royal profiteering began to get out of hand. According to an investigation of! Saudi corruption by The New York Times, at least a dozen members !of the leading branches of the royal family were routinely demanding commissions in excess of the 5 percent legal limit. “Billions of dolla�s have been spent on corrupt payments over the last decade, often in vi�lation of Saudi and American laws,” the Times reported. “The payment of multimillion-dollar commissions to Saudi business agents, m�ny of whom offer only influence in exchange, is frequently a requirement for companies trying to enter the Saudi market. Businessmen say they consider these payments thinly veiled bribes.

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Whatever they were called-bribes, baksheesh or plain payoffsi-few Saudis were better at extorting them than Mohammad ibn-F�hd alSaud, the American-educated son of Crown Prince (and later king) Fahd. Operating through a company called AI Bilad (“the nation,” in Arabic), Prince Mohammad had received fat “commissions” {rom a number of foreign companies doing business in Saudi Arabia, including Hyundai Construction of South Korea, Philips Electronics of Holland and Ente Nazionale Indocarburi (ENI) of Italy. 3 I� one transaction, a $4 billion communications contract, Al Bilad reportedly demanded and received a commission of $500 million. “Mohammad 209

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

operated extremely aggressively and he was very greedy,” recalled one American businessman who dealt with him during the 1970s. “He threw his weight around and used henchmen to get his way. “4

Until the mid-1970s, however, Prince Mohammad had refrained from trying to put the bite on Bechtel, partly out of friendship-he’d discussed doing business several times with Steve senior and had been entertained in California by John O’ Connell-but mostly because of Bechtel’s business relationship with Suliman Olayan, one of the wealthiest and most powerful members of the Saudi merchant class, and himself a close business associate of Prince Khaled bin Abdullah bin Abdel-Rahman.

The equation altered after the assassination of King F aisal in 197 5.

Alarmed by Faisal’s murder (he had been murdered by a deranged nephew), Khaled moved to England the following year, taking with him Suliman Olayan’s entree to