Urban Legend or Dis-Turbin History?

It's designated as an urban legend-

Claim: Osama bin Laden owns Citibank, one of the world's largest financial institutions.

Source: Numerous websites.

Status: False. The rumour is thought to have started when it emerged that the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal had a 4.8 per cent holding of Citibank's stock. Talal has no connections whatsoever with bin Laden or any other terrorist group.

Just hold on to your legends, there bucko.

Who is Alwaleed bin Talal?

He's the fourth richest person in the world.

In Fahrenheit 911:

“His name is Alwaleed bin Talal. His grandfather was Saudi Arabia's founding monarch. With huge stakes in companies ranging from Citigroup Inc. to the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain, he is one of the richest men on the planet....Last year, Forbes magazine ranked Alwaleed the fifth-richest man in the world, with a net worth of nearly $18 billion. His Kingdom Holding Co. spans four continents. Over the years, he has acquired major stakes in companies such as Apple Computer Inc., AOL Time Warner Inc., News Corp. and Saks Inc., parent of retailer Saks Fifth Avenue .” Richard Verrier, “Disney's Animated Investor; An Ostentatious Saudi Billionaire Prince Who Helped Bail Out the Company's Paris Resort in the Mid-'90s is Being Courted to Do So Again,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2004.

It's interesting to note that all business connections of bin Talal and the bin Laden Group have been purged from the web. Google can still find the sites- but when you try to open the link it's all "site not found" or "access forbidden".

It's curious that one of the richest people in the world is in Saudi Arabia, with absolutely no visible connection to another one of the richest companies in the world.

Also in Saudi Arabia.

As of Sept. 21, 2001, the exact relationship was this:

The Binladin business empire began in the 1930s when Mohammed bin Laden, a sheikh from Hadramawt in southern Yemen emigrated to what is now Saudi Arabia.

Having pleased King Abd al-Aziz with his building work on the royal palace, he won two other important contracts: for the renovation of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, and, exclusively, for all construction of a religious nature.

That was the start of a special relationship with the Saudi royal family - based partly on patronage but also on friendship - which continues today and has proved extremely lucrative for the bin Laden family.

The company has built thousands of miles of highway in the kingdom, as well as tunnels and dams. It has become an international conglomerate with interests in industrial and power projects, chemicals, mining, telecoms, manufacturing, media, retail and trading.

It has revenues of $5bn and employs 40,000 people. The group built the new airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was a backer of the failed mobile phone satellite operation Iridium...

Citigroup, the Wall Street bank which is one of Binladin Group's backers, said it had no cause for concern but would cooperate with US investigators into the terrorist attacks.

"We provide typical banking services to the Saudi Binladin Group which has denounced and completely disowned Osama bin Laden," a spokeswoman said...

Perhaps the oldest business relationship is with Saudi Hollande, part of Dutch bank ABN Amro, which has backed the company for 70 years...

As we've referenced before, the bin Laden group owns quite a lot of America. So it's nice to know they back their owners- that kind of loyalty touches me somewhere.

Although they offically "disowned" Osama, there's some evidence that's just their public face as a Family.

The remarkable rise of the bin Ladens begins with Osama's father, Muhammad bin Oud bin Laden. "His people were either Yemeni slaves or Yemeni laborers," Stanley Guess, a former United States military test pilot who flew the father around the kingdom in the early nineteen-sixties, said. "Either way, you couldn't get much lower." Although Muhammad was illiterate, Guess told me, "he was a genius in many ways. His mind was like a computer for figures." He was a talented engineer, and Guess believes that in the nineteen-fifties Muhammad won the favor of King Saud, who was confined to a wheelchair, by building him a ramp so that he could be pushed up to the second floor of his palace. Other sources have pointed to Muhammad's skill at building a road full of hairpin turns up a nearly sheer cliff, in order to shorten the royal family's commute to the summer palace in At Taif.

When Faisal ascended the throne, in 1964, the new king thanked Muhammad by giving him the contract to build virtually every road in the country, which at the time, according to Guess, had only one well-paved route, from Riyadh to Dhahran. Generous though these contracts were, they don't compare with the contract that the bin Laden family was given by the royal family in 1973 to rebuild the Islamic holy sites at Mecca and Medina, a project so prestigious and ambitious that it has been likened to rebuilding Vatican City. The renovation, which began as the kingdom experienced a rush of oil dollars and is estimated to have cost seventeen billion dollars so far, continues with no completion date in sight.

Guess and others said that although Muhammad was an observant Muslim, he "was certainly not a fanatic." And because Muhammad had eleven acknowledged wives during his lifetime, four at once, as is allowed under Islamic law, Osama almost certainly grew up in a separate household from his father. Indeed, the patriarch moved freely among the households of his various wives. "Muhammad was peculiar about his women," Guess said. The pilot recalls that Muhammad once brought three or four wives on a trip with him, but that he insisted that they not return together to Jidda until nightfall, "because he didn't want anyone seeing them." Much speculation has been printed about the psychological dynamics within the bin Laden family; sources in the Saudi royal family have painted Osama as a stigmatized outsider, because he was the only child of a less favored, foreign-born Syrian wife. But Yeslam's estranged wife, Carmen, told me that she never detected any distance between Osama and the rest of the family: "In front of me, they never disowned Osama. They spoke of him as a brother." She acknowledged, however, that she has not seen much of the family in years.

In the late sixties, when Osama was about eleven, Muhammad was killed in a plane crash. Osama's oldest brother, Salem, by most accounts a debonair and Westernized figure, who had attended Millfield, the English boarding school, took over the family empire. Salem brought the family into the modern world; he was, one American friend says, "as at home in London and Paris as he was in Jidda." A former United States diplomat in Saudi Arabia says, "I used to call him the playboy of the Western world." An enthusiastic amateur rock guitarist, Salem loved to jam with bands and go disco dancing when he was in the United States on business trips, in the nineteen-seventies. He was married to an English art student, Caroline Carey, whose half brother Ambrose is the son of the Marquess of Queensberry.

Salem's ties to America may have been not just cultural and commercial but political as well. During the nineteen-eighties, when the Reagan Administration secretly arranged for an estimated thirty-four million dollars to be funnelled through Saudi Arabia to the Contras, in Nicaragua, Salem bin Laden aided in this cause, according to French intelligence. Salem was reportedly one of the two closest friends of the King, and was frequently sought out by American diplomats and businessmen. (In 1993, the family hired Philip Griffin, the former American consul-general in Jidda, to work as its American representative in Washington.)

In 1988, Salem was killed outside San Antonio, Texas, when an experimental ultralight plane that he was flying got tangled in power lines. Leadership of the family business passed to the next eldest bin Laden brother, Bakr, whose style and orientation were more conservative. The family's commercial ties to the West, however, burgeoned. Currently, the company employs some thirty-two thousand people in thirty countries. A veteran lobbyist in Washington who knows the family well said, "The bin Ladens understand capitalism and the West better than I do, and they've made a lot more money, too."

Over the years, there have been warm, substantial ties between members of the bin Laden family and leaders of the foreign-policy establishment in America and Britain. Until late last month, the family had a stake amounting to two million dollars in the Washington-based Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with a large interest in defense contracting. The Carlyle Group is known for its politically connected executives such as former President George H. W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker, and former British Prime Minister John Major. In the nineteen-nineties, both Bush and Baker visited the bin Laden family when they were prospecting for business in Saudi Arabia. The chairman of the firm is former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who has been a trusted friend of the current Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, since their days on the Princeton wrestling team. Sources inside the firm suggest that there was a spirited discussion among the partners about whether to sever connections with the bin Ladens, with some believing that to penalize the family for guilt by association was, as one put it, "monstrous." But the prospect of President Bush's father being in business with the half brother of Osama bin Laden was politically untenable, and, when "the irony became too much," as one insider in the firm put it, the bin Ladens recouped their initial investment, plus five hundred thousand dollars.

The family continues to have a stake, estimated by one source at about ten million dollars, in the Fremont Group, a private investment company, on whose board of directors sits another former Secretary of State, George Shultz. Much of the family's private banking is handled by Citigroup, which is chaired by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The family has equity investments with Merrill Lynch and Goldman, Sachs. Among the family's business partners is General Electric. A spokesman for Jack Welch, the chairman of G.E., says that the family threw a party for him in the nineteen-nineties in Saudi Arabia, and that Welch "considers them good business partners." One American diplomat says, "You talk about your global investors, it's them. They own part of Microsoft, Boeing, and who knows what else." Others note that the family has been awarded contracts to help rebuild American military installations, including the Khobar Towers, which were damaged in a terrorist attack that killed nineteen servicemen in 1996.

The family's embrace of the West occurred as many in Arab intellectual circles were recoiling from it...

So it's also nice to also know that the bin Laden Group had the foresight to let their domain name expire on September the 11th, 2001.

Funny how 9-11 changed things. And how Bu$hie's re$election keeps the unthinkable discountable.