BLINGTASTIC LIFE OF TYCOON KNOWN AS MR CASHOGGI
Billionaire Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who has died aged 81, married the daughter of a Leicester waitress and they went on to live like kings with 17 homes and three private jets
HE WAS never the richest man in the world but he certainly behaved like he was. Adnan Khashoggi, who died this week aged 81, made an estimated £2.4billion in the 1970s and 1980s as the planet’s most prolific and ambitious arms dealer. He was outrageously flamboyant with his money, keeping 17 fully staffed homes around the world as well as three yachts, 100 limousines and three planes on permanent standby. At the height of his wealth he was reportedly spending £150,000 a day.
He was also a reckless gambler who ran up millions of pounds of credit at casinos, a confidant of presidents and friend of Hollywood stars. He married three times but was also the keeper of a harem of “pleasure wives”. Yet allied to this playboy lifestyle was a ruthless business sensibility and an approach to cutting deals that saw him accused of bribery, corruption, money laundering and fraud.
It was an unlikely life story for a man who was born in 1935 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, one of 14 sons of Muhammad Khashoggi, personal physician to King Abdelaziz Al Saud. The young Adnan was educated in Egypt and then at Stanford University in California, which he quit early to start his first business, brokering deals between US truck companies and members of the Saudi royal family.
Before long, however, Khashoggi moved into the more lucrative Saudi arms market, becoming the go-to middleman for companies such as Lockheed and Boeing in America and Marconi and Westland Helicopters in the UK. He charged 15 per cent commission on every deal – pulling in hundreds of millions a year, often funnelling the cash through front companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. With the wealth came an extravagant lifestyle that would put even the most vulgar of today’s millionaire reality TV stars to shame.
In 1960 he married Sandra Daly, a 20-year-old waitress’s daughter who had grown up in a council house in Leicester. They met in the most unlikely circumstances. Her mother had won a holiday for two in a competition and took her daughter to Paris. While staying at the George V hotel, the city’s finest, they met and befriended the Khashoggi family. Sandra started working for Adnan as a translator and gradually they fell in love.
ONCE married, she converted to Islam, changed her name to Soraya and went on to have a daughter and four sons. The couple – young, glamorous and fabulously rich – set about enjoying every luxury money could buy. Speaking in 2015, Soraya recalled: “I lost count of how many homes we had. We had properties in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dhahran and one in Beirut that had its own nightclub. We had apartments in London and New York (including several floors of the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue), a succession of chalets in Gstaad, homes in Somerset, Paris, Cannes, two ranches in east Africa, and a lavish property in Marbella with 5,000 acres. There we entertained people like Liz Taylor, Freddie Mercury, film star George Hamilton, Shirley Bassey and Joan and Jackie Collins.
“Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy would send models to show me the latest dress collection in the comfort of my own home, while Cartier and Asprey would happily display their goods in our hotel rooms. Once, in New York, Adnan borrowed so many jewels for me to wear at a ball that the jeweller sent armed bodyguards to follow me all evening.”
Their £75million yacht Nabila – named after their daughter – was the largest in the world at the time and was used in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again.
Khashoggi’s famous friends were not confined to film stars and rock royalty. In 1989, high-class call-girl Pamella Bordes claimed he had hired her to provide sexual favours for business clients and influential politicians. He also became friends with US President Richard Nixon, even attending his presidential inaugurations in 1969 and 1973. Such was their closeness that he acted as an intermediary between the White House and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia during the ArabIsraeli Yom Kippur War of 1973.
In the mid-80s he again worked for the White House, helping to broker a secret arms deal between the Reagan administration and Iran to secure the release of American hostages, as well as helping to fund the Contra rebellion in Nicaragua on behalf of the US.
In 1974 he and Soraya parted, eventually divorcing in 1982 when Soraya received an undisclosed out-of-court settlement estimated at £500million. While he went on to marry again – to Italian-born Laura Biancolini, who was just 18 when they met in 1980 and subsequently changed her name to Lamia – he would also boast of his taste for prostitutes and his 11 “pleasure wives”.
Soon after the split Soraya had another daughter, Petrina, whom it later emerged was the result of an affair with married Tory MP Jonathan Aitken. She also enjoyed relationships with another married MP, Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime premier, as well as Warren Beatty, Sammy Davis Jr, Roman Polanski and James Hunt… although by 1995 it was reported that her money had run out and she was living in a rented terraced house in Hungerford, Berkshire.
Khashoggi’s business methods began to attract attention. When it emerged that US aircraft manufacturer Lockheed had paid him £82million in commission between 1970 and 1975 alone, the scandal nearly led to the company’s downfall. If he was concerned by the setback, Khashoggi didn’t show it. For his 50th birthday party in 1985 he threw a lavish five-day party at his estate in Marbella, at which he was serenaded by Shirley Bassey, received a glowing eulogy from Sean Connery and danced with Brooke Shields.
However, further financial scandals followed. In 1987, the same year that President Reagan was forced to apologise for his role in the Iran-Contra deal, one of Khashoggi’s companies, the Triad America Corporation, filed for bankruptcy after it was unable to pay its creditors. The following year he was arrested in Switzerland and jailed for three months, accused of concealing funds. He was extradited to America to be charged with obstruction of justice and mail fraud and, although he was acquitted, he was back in front of the courts two years later. This time he was charged with racketeering and fraud after it was alleged he helped Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and wife Imelda plunder their country of £124million by fronting for them in illegal property deals. He was again acquitted.
Further accusations of misappropriation of funds, fraud and money laundering dogged him until as recently as 2011 but he continued to live lavishly. In 1991 he took an Iranian “second wife”, Shahpari Zanganeh, with whom he had another son and daughter, and lived out his final years in relative obscurity in Monaco. As for his super-yacht Nabila, Khashoggi sold it to the Sultan of Brunei, who in turn sold it to one Donald Trump.