Word: ghaith
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...holding company, which is headed by former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and his law partner Robert Altman. Clifford and Altman, who served as attorneys for B.C.C.I. throughout the 1980s, have denied knowing it owned First American. The other two secretly owned banks were the National Bank of Georgia, which Ghaith Pharaon, a Saudi tycoon and B.C.C.I. front man, acquired from Carter Administration official Bert Lance, and Miami's CenTrust Savings. Pharaon used B.C.C.I. funds to become a partner of financier David Paul, who built CenTrust into a giant house of cards before it collapsed last year at a cost...
Farther south, the government of Argentina last week gave B.C.C.I. 48 hours / to pack up and leave the country. Authorities were particularly worried by the appearance of links between President Carlos Saul Menem and Saudi billionaire Ghaith Pharaon, a B.C.C.I. front man who is building a Hyatt Hotel in Buenos Aires and is a friend of Javier Gonzalez Fraga, the former president of Argentina's central bank. "We already know that the next scandal is going to tie President Menem with Ghaith Pharaon," an official said...
...regulators discovered recently that such loans had enabled B.C.C.I. to buy clandestine control in three American banks: First American Bankshares in Washington, National Bank of Georgia (later purchased by First American) and Independence Bank of Encino, Calif. The latter two were bought officially by Abedi's front man, Ghaith Pharaon, the putative Saudi tycoon who received an ) estimated $500 million in B.C.C.I. loans in the 1970s and '80s. Those loans were secured only by shares of stock in the companies Pharaon purchased, which meant that they were never to be repaid...
Abedi began playing his Lance card immediately, introducing Lance to his close business associate Ghaith Pharaon in Washington in late 1977. Pharaon, then 36, was a Harvard-educated Saudi who had parlayed royal-family connections into a Jidda construction fortune. He and a group of Arab investors from the gulf had earlier that year acted as fronts for Abedi's purchase of Pakistan's largest oil company. Now Abedi told Lance that Pharaon was, fortuitously it seemed, looking for an American bank to buy. Lance had resigned in September as Carter's budget director under charges of impropriety...
When regulators began circling closer in 1987, Paul acquired new partners in the form of Ghaith Pharaon and his invisible sponsor, B.C.C.I. With Pharaon came the presence of apparently deep Saudi pockets, which was precisely the assurance Paul and Pharaon gave when they met in 1987 and 1988 with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's then chairman, M. Danny Wall, to argue that the bank would be able to meet its commitments...