Rumor Mill News Reading Room Forum

BINLADIN: A FAMILY BUSINESS

Posted By: Phoenix
Date: Wednesday, 19 September 2001, 4:27 p.m.

Binladin is Osama Bin Laden's family's business.

This is the same company that illegally operated through and probably funded George W's Houston company, Harken.

This was investigated by FinCEN,(Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), in '92.
This was detailed in my previous post:

GLOBAL TERRORIST HEADQUARTERS: OUR WHITE HOUSE?
http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/config.pl?read=11809

Looks like The Family sure does some interesting business.

September 19, 2001
Marketplace
Bin Laden Is 'Black Sheep'
Of a Blue-Chip Family
By DANIEL GOLDEN, JAMES BANDLER and STEVE LEVINE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Osama bin Laden's family has long disavowed him. He is the only bin Laden on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of foreign companies and individuals engaging in undesirable activities. And no evidence has surfaced linking any of his more than 50 siblings to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
1See full coverage of the attack.
But as President Bush denounces Mr. bin Laden in ever-stronger terms, the Saudi exile's notoriety is proving to be an embarrassment for his family's far-flung business empire and its trading partners in Europe and the U.S. Some of those partners are distancing themselves from or reviewing their relationships with the family business, the Saudi Binladin Group.
Based in Jeddah and favored by Saudi Arabia's royal family, Saudi Binladin Group derives an estimated $5 billion in annual revenue from a wide range of enterprises, including mosque construction, telecommunications and selling Snapple soft drinks in Saudi Arabia. Although the family's U.S. spokesman says Saudi Binladin Group is wholly owned by the extended bin Laden family, not including Osama, he said he could provide no information on exactly which members have an equity interest in the company.
British paging company Multitone Electronics PLC said it was shocked to learn that its reseller in Saudi Arabia, Baud Telecommunications Ltd., is owned by the Binladin Group. "You're joking," Chief Executive Michael Walker said. "Oh bloody! I didn't know. I thought it was just Baud Telecom."
Shortly afterward, Multitone, of Basingstoke, England, said it was suspending its business relationship with Baud until it was certain there was no connection between the Saudi company and terrorist activity. "There are probably hundreds of Binladins that are great guys," Mr. Walker says, adding that Multitone's dealings with Baud were small. "But I think what we'll do is investigate."
Dutch bank ABN Amro says it plans to discuss its links with the Binladin family, a longstanding client of Saudi Hollandi Bank, which is 40% owned by ABN Amro. "Simply having the name 'Binladin' is a reputation risk," bank spokesman Jochem van de Laarschot says, adding that the bank is confident that the client has no terrorist ties.
The degree of the rift between Mr. bin Laden and his family is also coming under scrutiny. Last week, the FBI arrested an unidentified man at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport who was described in news reports as an associate of one of Mr. bin Laden's brothers. Federal agents have also visited the Boston residences of several relatives.
In a statement issued Friday night, the head of the Binladin family, Abdullah Awad Obood bin Laden, Osama's uncle, reiterated that the family "has no connection with his works and activities" and expressed "the strongest denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women, and children, and which contradicts our Islamic faith."
Nevertheless, U.S. specialists believe there are personal contacts between Mr. bin Laden and some family members. "Some of the brothers keep in touch" with Mr. bin Laden, says Yossef Bodansky, staff director of a congressional task force on terrorism. "After all, they're family."
However, Mr. Bodansky says, siblings don't fund Mr. bin Laden, nor do they abet his alleged terrorist activities. The brothers "have no security- or loyalty-related problems" in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Bodansky says.
"The vast bulk of the family hate him with quite a passion right now," says Adil Najam, an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University. "But it's a very big clan, and there may well be some who have maintained some contact with him, either familial or ideological."
Mr. bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamaal Khalifa, funded the Islamic Army of Aden, which took credit for the bombing of the USS Cole, according to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counterterrorism for the Central Intelligence Agency. Khalid Al-Midhar, one of the hijackers on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, has ties to the Army of Aden, Mr. Cannistraro says.
The connections between the Binladin Group and American corporations are raising the hackles of conservative groups. Any companies doing business with the Binladin Group "are disloyal to the interests of the United States and should be held accountable," says Larry Klayman, chairman of Washington-based Judicial Watch.
A spokeswoman for Citigroup Inc. confirms the Saudi family is a client. "We provide typical banking services to the Saudi Binladin Group, which denounced and completely disowned Osama bin Laden," she says.
General Electric Co. says it holds a minority stake in Jeddah Electrical Distribution Assemblies Co., a power-equipment maker in Saudia Arabia that GE says is majority-owned by the Binladin family. GE also has supplied equipment to several Saudi power plants built by the Binladin Group. A spokesman says, "We are satisfied the Saudi Binladin Group is fully separated from Osama bin Laden."
The Binladin group also is a minority owner of the Saudi Arabian distributor of Snapple beverages. Cadbury Schweppes PLC, which owns Snapple, says it plans to end its relationship with the Binladin group soon, due to declining sales rather than negative publicity. A spokeswoman calls the separation "amicable."
The Binladin Group closed its U.S. business development office at the end of 1999. Philip Griffin, its former representative, says the decision wasn't related to image problems arising from the family surname.
Founded in 1931 by Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed, a Yemenite immigrant, the Saudi Binladin Group grew to become one of Saudi Arabia's largest construction firms, building and maintaining mosques, roads, hotels and airports. The company grew through the good graces of both the Saudi royal family, which bestowed lucrative government contracts, and also of foreign corporations, for whom it became the local partner of choice. The ties were cemented during the Gulf War and after, when the group built an airstrip and barracks for U.S. troops.
Osama bin Laden, now in his mid-40s, worked in the family business as a college student. Later, his opposition to the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War alienated the royal family and threatened the family business. The family disowned Mr. bin Laden, and he moved to Sudan and then Afghanistan. A family spokesman says Mr. bin Laden inherited between $50 million and $60 million from his father, who died in 1968, but has never held an equity stake in the group.
In recent years, Saudi Binladin Group has increasingly diversified its businesses and geography. Its Baud unit resells sophisticated telecommunications equipment purchased from Canada-based Nortel Networks Corp., PictureTel Corp. of Andover, Mass., Tellabs Inc. of Lisle, Ill., and other companies. One brother, Hasan M., was a director of Iridium LLC, a now-defunct satellite phone company backed by the family group and Motorola Inc., among others.
Motorola acknowledged that it sells equipment, including wireless networks and cellphones, to the Binladin family group. "The U.S. government has not limited" such sales, a spokeswoman notes. "Motorola has been carefully following all of the U.S. government prohibitions against dealing with known terrorists and takes this matter very seriously."
The family also sells granite to closely held Canaren Inc. of Canada and buys construction material from it. From 1994 to 1997, it was in a joint venture with H.C. Price Co. of Dallas in bidding on Middle Eastern pipeline contracts.
"I would be very surprised if the family had any support of Osama," says Robert Bell, an H.C. Price vice president who was general manager of the joint venture. "They were very professional. I never overheard any discussion about the U.S. except in very favorable terms."
Nortel confirms Saudi Binladin Group was a reseller of Nortel equipment and says it understands there is no link between the group and the activities of Osama bin Laden. "If we had any reason to believe this company had or could have any link to terrorist activities, we would cease doing business with them immediately," a Nortel spokeswoman says.
Picturetel's president, Lewis Jaffe, says it does less than $100,000 a year of business with Baud. A Tellabs spokeswoman says Baud Telecom is its Saudi distributor and it isn't aware of any ties to Osama bin Laden. A Canaren spokesman says the Binladin family is a "very huge family and very respected in the Middle East."
Kevin Taecker, a former Treasury Department official and banker in Saudia Arabia, recalls a meeting in 1999 with Yahya bin Laden, the head of the family construction business and a half-brother of Osama. "As I was getting up to leave, he blocked the door and wouldn't let me out. He took me by the hand and said, 'Listen, you're an American. On behalf of my family, I really want to apologize,' " the businessman recalled.
The family has donated to colleges, Islamic organizations and other nonprofit causes in both England and the U.S. Abdullah, one of Mr. bin Laden's brothers, received a master's degree in law from Harvard Law School in 1992.
Two years later, on a fundraising trip to the Middle East, the law school's dean made a pitch to another brother, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, chairman of the family group. Bakr and the group subsequently donated $1 million to the law school, half for a visiting scholars program and half for financial aid for law students from the Muslim world. The family also gave $1 million to Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1993.
Robert Clark, the law school dean, said the gift was intended "to promote mutual understanding between scholars trained in Islamic legal systems and those trained in Western legal systems. We need that more than ever."
Still, outside the Arab world, the Binladin name has become an increasing liability. Until a year and a half ago, the group had a prominent storefront on the main street of Astana in the new Kazakhstan, with a contract to create the city's master plan. Then, although the Kazak government believed the company's assurances that it was not linked to Mr. bin Laden, President Nursultan Nazarbayev dropped the company just in case someone got the wrong idea, a government official said.
In 1999, the group changed the name of its telecommunications division from Binladin to Baud. John Dickson, a Baud manager, says the switch reflects a desire to choose a more modern name. Baud means distance in Arabic, and in English it is a measurement of speed.
In the Arab world, Mr. Dickson says, the Binladin name is looked upon with "absolute reverence—like IBM." He adds that every family "has its black sheep. Only he went a little bit too far."
-- Matt Murray, John McKinnon and Maureen Tkacik contributed to this article.
Write to Daniel Golden at daniel.golden@wsj.com2, James Bandler at james.bandler@wsj.com3 and Steve LeVine at steve.levine@wsj.com4

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