Ghaith Pharaon
Ghaith Rashad Pharaon (born September 7, 1940 in Riyadh (or Jeddah) and a citizen of Saudi Arabia) is a prominent Saudi businessman and financier, and was a key player in the global oil and banking industries in the 1970s and 1980s. A continuing subject of interest by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the IRS, the Arma dei Carabinieri and various other investigative agencies, he attained brief notoriety in the U.S. for his having been identified by the Federal Reserve Board as the "frontman" in the BCCI scandal, and for peripheral roles in the Harken Energy, CenTrust and numerous other scandals.
After the events of September 11th, he re-emerged as a subject of public interest, due in part to having been a former classmate of George W. Bush at Harvard Business School, and a prominent investor in Bush's short-lived venture Arbusto Energy. According to a 70-page French parliamentary report released in October of 2002, Pharaon has been identified as a recent player in the informal money- and value-transfering (or hawala) networks of Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden.
Notable affiliations
Business associates
- Roger Tamraz
- Khaled bin Mahfouz
- Kamal Adham
- Abdul Raouf Khalil
- Abbas Gokal, and other members of the Gokal Family of Pakistan.
- Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh
- Bert Lance
- John Connally
- James R. Bath
- George W. Bush
Banking affiliations
- BCCI
- Main Bank of Houston
- National Bank of Georgia
- Independence Bank of Encino
- CenTrust Federal Savings Bank of Miami, a "failed sattelite" of BCCI
- Bank of the Commonwealth
- First American Bankshares
Oil industry
- Arbusto Energy, seed investor.
- Occidental Petroleum Company, shareholder.
Other
- Interedec Inc, Savannah-based U.S. holding company, established 1983
- GRP Inc, another Georgia-based holding company, established 1981
Current activities
The extremely wealthy and camera-shy Pharaon is known to be quite fond of cigars, and in recent years has taken a keen interest in speedboat racing. He is said to have a principal residence near the Red Sea and to get around from time to time with the help of his 160-foot super-yacht, Le Pharaon.
External links
- http://www.pharaon.com - defunct personal website
- http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pharaon.com/ - snapshots of Pharaon's site at the Wayback Machine
- http://www.techmati.com/yachts/pharaon/index.htm - Le Pharaon photoblog at yachtmati.com