The article contains much damning info about GW Bush that I have wrtitten and complained about many times. The Bush apologists will probably try to ignore this article too and sweep it under the rug-they are in denial.
They have trouble believing that the Repubs and Democrats have incestuous relationships with Saudi terrorists, Jackson Stephens, BCCI, BNL,Iraq that are treasonous and harmful to the national security of the US. Do they think world government will save them?
I didn't ignore it. I just found it interesting in what Bill decided to "highlight" with his "pretty" HTML.
James Ring Adams
The American Spectator
November, 1992 Stephens and Bush
Even after the sharp contraction of Worthen Bank's ambitions, Jack Stephens and Stephens Inc. kept their foreign deals going. The one now gaining most notoriety put together Saudi money men, elements of the BCCI network, and George W. Bush, eldest son of the President. The deal, first reported by David Twersky of the Forward and then covered in some depth by the Wall Street Journal, provided financing for the Harken Energy Corp. of Houston. Eyebrows were raised when this small and untried company landed a "potentially lucrative" offshore drilling contract with the Persian Gulf princedom of Bahrain. Many saw it as no coincidence that George W. Bush, often called George, Jr., sat on the board of Harken with a consulting contract worth as much as $120,000 a year. But the fascinating details came in the financial history that put George Jr. in this position.
In the late 1970s, George Jr. tried to emulate his father's business success in the Oil Patch by setting up a series of drilling partnerships. Called Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and so forth, they attracted capital from, among others, a Houston aircraft broker and financial manager named James Bath, who according to a former associate had acted as liaison between Saudi businessmen and the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976, the year in which George Bush, the elder, served as director of central intelligence. Bath's associate also disclosed in the course of a bitter legal fight that Bath managed millions of dollars of Houston investments for Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, the most important commercial banker in Saudi Arabia and for a time one of the largest shareholders in BCCI. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau indicted Sheik bin Mahfouz this July for a "scheme to defraud" in connection with his investments in BCCI. George W. Bush has given conflicting statements about Bath's investment in Arbusto, finally admitting to the Wall Street Journal that he was aware that Bath represented Saudi investors.
The Arbusto partnerships were busts as money-makers, but the investors managed to recoup their stakes through several stock swaps that wound up giving them shares in Harken Energy. But Harken itself needed help, and George Jr. gave it a boost in finding new financing through Stephens Inc. George Jr. attended a meeting in Little Rock between Harken officials and Jackson Stephens that produced an unusual rescue plan. Mr. Jack obtained a $25 million cash infusion for Harken from Union Bank of Switzerland, which rarely invested in small American companies. (UBS, coincidentally, held the minority interest in the BCCI subsidiary in Geneva, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements, and you can spin threads from that web for as long as you like.) U.S. banking laws forced the Swiss bank to sell its holdings, and Stephens found another buyer.
The new man was a Saudi named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh. The Jeddah-based real estate mogul did business with some of the kingdom's most prominent private figures, such as former Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani and current Oil Minister Hisham Nazer. Although Bakhsh picked up 17.6 percent of Harken's shares, he delegated his role in the company to a Palestinian from Chicago named Talat Othman. As Twersky of the Forward first reported, Othman not only sat on Harken's board, he attended three White House meetings with President Bush as part of a small group of Arab-Americans close to former chief of staff John Sununu. The first meeting took place in August 1990, days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and Othman has drawn stormy criticism from other American Palestinians for his staunch support of the American defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In spite of his absentee position in Harken, Abdullah Bakhsh continued his American investments. In October 1990 he revealed in an SEC filing that he had bought a 9.6 percent stake in Jack Stephens's Worthen Banking Corporation, the same percentage as the holding relinquished earlier by Mochtar Riady.
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