Fahd bin Abdul Aziz
Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz
Naef Bin Abdul Aziz
Salman Bin Abdul Aziz
Ahmad Bin Abdul Aziz
CNN QUITTING ORBIT?, Interspace, August 6, 1998
Industry sources say CNN may leave the digital bouquet supplied by Rome-based Orbit Satellite Radio & TV Network. It is understood that a long-running dispute over payment may be behind the decision. Another source at a non-Time Warner network said it had also suffered a series of delays in receiving cash payments and the issue of banker's Letters of Credit from Orbit. CNN said it had no comment at this time. Eighteen months ago Orbit and Discovery Communications also terminated their contract with Discovery switching to Gulf DTH's Showtime Network. Orbit is backed by highly-reputable and wealthy Saudis of undoubted financial probity. However, it is also understood that it enjoys both the DTH and MMDS rights to the CNN signal for Saudi Arabia, and this may all be muscle flexing - and contract re- negotiation - with Sara Vision seeking access to MMDS. An Orbit spokesman said it had more than 1000 contracts with programme suppliers and occasionally a hiccup occurred.
Policeman, drug dealer killed in Saudi Arabia, Reuters, August 15, 1998
DUBAI, Aug 15 (Reuters) - A suspected drug dealer trying to avoid arrest rammed his car into a Saudi police patrol vehicle, killing himself and a policeman, a Saudi newspaper reported on Saturday. Another policeman was seriously injured in the incident in the western region of Saudi Arabia, the Arabic language Okaz daily said. Okaz said the police were responding to a complaint from a local man who told them the drug pusher assaulted and robbed him when he refused to buy drugs. The newspaper gave no date for the incident. Convicted drug smugglers in Saudi Arabia are usually executed by beheading.
Oil slump to cost OPEC $50 billion in 1998, Reuters - Andrew Mitchell, August 20, 1998
LONDON, Aug 20 (Reuters) - OPEC oil producers face a $50 billion plunge in export income this year as a global glut smothers their efforts to revive parlous crude prices.
Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries revenues are on course to
reach just $97 billion this year, more than a third down from $148 billion in 1997, said
Leo Drollas of
London's Centre for Global Energy Studies.
OPEC's eleven member countries, spanning the globe from Indonesia to Venezuela, are taking the brunt of the lowest oil prices for a decade.
Benchmark Brent blend crude so far this year is averaging less than $14 a barrel and falling, more than a $5 shortfall compared to 1997.
OPEC is not only getting paid less for its oil than last year, it is pumping less in a bid to boost prices for its economic lifeblood.
But the supply-drenched market has barely responded to the 2.6 million barrels a day (bpd) of crude output cuts engineered by OPEC since March.
Dramatic budget shortfalls and the threat of big fiscal deficits mean OPEC producers are having to hack back spending on social and infrastructure developments.
Saudi Arabia -- which relies on petrodollars for three quarters of its state revenue -- is getting just $10 a barrel for its main Arab Light export grade against the $14.50-$15 it budgeted for this year.
For every dollar shortfall in the price of oil Riyadh's treasury loses $2.5 billion a year. Drollas of the CGES calculates Saudi oil revenues this year are likely to fall nearly $17 billion short of last year's $49.9 billion.
The price adversity has forced Riyadh to issue a decree halting new upstream projects, imposing a 10 percent cut on some existing contracts and a freeze on state hiring.
Fellow Gulf big gun Iran this month drew up an economic recovery programme to combat economic ills. Low petroleum revenues combined with unemployment and inflation rates both running above 20 percent have intensified conservative scrutiny on moderate President Mohammad Khatami.
Cheap oil is at least nourishing the prospect of an revival in the Asian economies, where oil exporters had been pinning so much hope on fast demand growth.
And low oil prices have also helped squash any threat of inflation in the West.
But as dwindling revenues fuel currency, unemployment and inflation woes in the
more populous of OPEC's cash-pinched economies, so the prospect of social and political
unrest
multiplies.
East Asia's main oil producer and the continent's only OPEC member Indonesia has already been forced into a change of leadership as its economic troubles intensified.
In Latin America Venezuela this week was forced to make another round of public
spending cuts, this time targeting investment programme as it bid to control its widening
fiscal
deficit.
Caracas has already cut public-sector spending and investment budgets by more than $3.5 billion this year.
The same pressures have forced non-OPEC Mexico to slice its budget plans three times so far this year. A fourth cut is in prospect.
The current hardship is a far cry from 1996 and 1997 when sustained price strength gave producers a revenue windfall.
The bonanza prompted OPEC to pump up production by 10 percent late last year.
But the move proved ill-timed, conspiring with Asian economic turmoil, a warm winter and
increased Iraqi exports to spur the long downturn.
There may be some light at the end of the tunnel. Some analysts are starting to argue that world prices are at a turning point, with the global stock glut beginning to subside.
London's Energy Market Consultants (EMC) has projected that the market's year-on-year surplus will soon ease significantly. But EMC added that the upside for prices this year remains very limited.
Saudi King Fahd re-admitted to hospital for "Minor Complications", Reuters, August 24, 1998
DUBAI, Aug 24 (AFP) - Saudi King Fahd has been re-admitted to hospital with "minor
complications" four days after he was discharged following the removal of his gall
bladder, diplomats in
Saudi Arabia said Monday. Both Western and Arab diplomats said the king had been
re-admitted to hospital early on Friday and was still there. One diplomat, speaking by
telephone from Riyadh, said the king was admitted to hospital suffering from "minor
complications" following the gall bladder operation.
"We think it was a fairly routine thing -- he needed to have some fluid drained or there was some sort of infection. We assume he's still in hospital," the diplomat said.
The diplomat said he thought King Fahd had been admitted into the King
Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, the best equipped medical centre in the kingdom,
where the original operation was
carried out.
There was no official confirmation from the royal palace on the king's health and a palace spokesman would only say "the king is in good health."
Journalists in Riyadh reported that the King Faisal Specialist Hospital had none of the usual security measures implemented when the king is there.
A surgeon told AFP that the most likely "minor complication" following the removal of a gall bladder was a slight infection, which happens in about five percent of cases.
This could be cleared up in about four to five days using antibiotics.
A fluid build-up was rarer and the procedure would vary from drug
treatment to surgical intervention depending on the severity of the build-up and whether
or not it was infected, the surgeon said.
Recovery time in less serious cases would be between a week and 10 days, but might be much
longer for older or frailer patients with more serious cases, he said.
King Fahd was discharged from hospital August 18 after undergoing two surgical procedures including the removal of his gall bladder.
The king, who is in his late 70s, was originally hospitalised August 2 to have pus removed from his abdomen under local anaesthetic following an inflammation of the colon.
A stone had already been removed from the king's bile duct in May 1994. The king was also hospitalised in March this year with an inflammed gall bladder.
In 1995, King Fahd was hospitalised after suffering a stroke, from which it took him many months to recover.
The king, believed to have been born in 1921, has reigned for 16 years over a country which is the world's largest petroleum producer and exporter, and holds a quarter of its oil reserves.
The king is rated by the US business magazine Forbes as one of the world's richest men.
By DANIEL PEARL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The apparent owner of a Sudanese factory destroyed by U.S. missiles is a westernized Saudi Arabian banker with no known ties to Islamic extremists.
Salaheldin Idris, believed to have bought the Ashifa factory in March, has some connections with the Islamist regime in Sudan, but also with a group of Sudanese exiles opposing the regime, according to Sudanese dissidents. "In my opinion he has nothing to do with the fundamentalists," says one dissident, asking not to be named. "He is not politicized."
U.S. officials said they have hard evidence that the factory, destroyed by U.S. cruise missiles last week, was making a key ingredient for the VX nerve agent, but they haven't specified the ingredient or the evidence. A U.S. official said Friday the U.S. believes the Ashifa factory is owned by the Sudanese government or military. But Sudan said Mr. Idris owns the pharmaceuticals factory outright. Sudan's version is backed by the original Saudi owner, by a British former employee, and by a dissident lawyer in Khartoum who said he represents Mr. Idris.
That lawyer, Ghazi Suleiman, told the Associated Press that Mr. Idris never met Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, the man targeted in the U.S. attacks, and that Mr. Idris may seek $50 million in compensation for the plant's destruction.
Targets Raise Concern
The Clinton Administration's choice of targets is at least likely to raise concern among the U.S.'s Arab allies. Mr. Idris, a 46-year-old Sudan native, is a financial adviser to Saudi Arabia's largest bank, National Commercial Bank, which has strong ties to the royal family. The bank's major shareholder is Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was indicted in the early-1990s BCCI banking scandal but later settled charges, and in recent years has pushed to restore his image in Washington.
Mr. Idris and Mr. Mahfouz are among a group of Saudi businessmen with African or Yemeni roots. Members of this group are known to be backing the WorldSpace digital-satellite radio network for the developing world, though Washington-based WorldSpace hasn't formally revealed its investors. Mr. Idris is a partner in at least one business with Saudi billionaire Mohammed Amoudi, who recently bankrolled an investment conference in Ethiopia cosponsored by White House-connected law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.
"It's a pro-American network, there's no doubt about it," said one former business associate of Mr. Idris.
Mr. Idris didn't respond to messages left at two of his London offices Friday. At the second office, M S Management Ltd., an aide said Mr. Idris was in London Friday but then left to an unknown destination. Mr. Idris was born in northern Sudan, but a spokesman for Jidda-based National Commercial Bank said he believes Mr. Idris was granted Saudi nationality. That is rare for foreigners. Mr. Idris's name has been cited as an owner of other businesses in Sudan, including a cargo airline and a battery factory.
A 50-50 Venture
The Ashifa plant, opened in 1996, was originally a 50-50 venture between a Sudanese businessman named Bashir Hassan Bashir and a Red Sea shipping company in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, called Baaboud Trading & Shipping Agencies, said Salem Baaboud, owner of the Jidda company. In an interview Sunday, he said the plant was supplying malaria tablets for children and veterinary medicine for cows and cattle, using equipment from India, Switzerland and the U.S. The partners sold it this spring, he said, because "it needed more finance, which we cannot afford."
Mr. Baaboud said he got cash -- he won't say how much -- from Mr. Idris after negotiating with him directly in Sudan. He said he never did business with Osama bin Laden and doubts Mr. Idris did either. "One is going west and the other is going east," he said.
But U.S. National Security Adviser Samuel Berger said last week that Mr. bin Laden was "an early contributor to an enterprise of which [the Ashifa factory] was a part." Mubarak Al Fadl Al Mahdi, leader of an antiregime umbrella group called the National Democratic Alliance, said Friday the factory, in northern Khartoum, had an Iraqi research director and was connected by road to a government-owned factory, where Mr. bin Laden had an office, in nearby Kafouri. Citing informers within Sudan, dissidents said Ashifa had unusually tight military security and wouldn't let visitors see the veterinary portion of the plant.
Not so, said Tom Carnaffin, a Briton who said he worked at the plant through 1996 installing fire and computer equipment. Mr. Carnaffin said he had the run of the factory, and that the government-provided security was "no different than any other manufacturing facility."
Iraq, a nonfundamentalist regime, may have figured in the U.S. suspicions about the plant. Bona Malwal, a London-based Sudanese dissident, claims Iraq stored chemical weapons in Sudan during the Gulf War and then agreed to help the regime develop its own. He said Sunday that Mr. bin Laden, before leaving Sudan in 1996, had bragged about funding the chemical-weapons complex in Sudan.
Mr. Malwal's newsletter, Sudan Democratic Gazette, warned of a new "military industrialisation project" in Kafouri in October 1997. The article mentioned Iran, Iraq, Russia, Bulgaria, Croatia and "Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt" as collaborators, but didn't mention either Mr. bin Ladin or the Ashifa plant.