Arms dealer

born July 25 1935

died June 6 2017

Adnan Khashoggi, who has died aged 81, was a Saudi Arabian businessman whose dealings, many of them in the arms trade, funded his life as an almost clichéd example of the international billionaire playboy.

His fortune at its height was estimated at $4 billion, and he never discouraged reports that he was the world’s richest man (though he was nowhere near that status).

But he certainly spent as if he were; in the early 1980s, he was getting through $250,000 a day, hosting celebrity studded parties at his 5,000-acre estate near Marbella and nipping between his some of his other homes in London, Paris, Cannes, Monaco, and a 10,000-acre ranch in Kenya, travelling on one of his three private jets. His New York base was provided by buying up 16 separate apartments and knocking them together.

Much of his time, however, was spent on his $100 million, 281-ft yacht, then the world’s largest, which he called Nabila, after his daughter. He had it kitted out in the worst taste money could buy, with wall-to-wall hand-carved onyx, 150 telephone lines, solid gold sinks and a secret passageway to his bedroom for the strings of call girls usually on board.

There he entertained politicians, sheikhs, arms dealers and third world dictators; it was said that five heads of state were once on board at the same time, three of them kings.

In a case of art imitating life, it was used in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983) as the headquarters of the shady Maximilian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), senior lieutenant to Spectre’s leader Blofeld. In 1988 Khashoggi, who “went through yachts the way other people buy cars”, sold it to the Sultan of Brunei; it was later bought, for $29 million, by Donald Trump, who characteristically renamed it the Trump Princess.

This ludicrous expenditure was funded, for the most part, by Khashoggi’s cut from the sale of weapons and military equipment, often between large American arms manufacturers and Saudi Arabia.

The nature of his business inevitably meant that the details of many of his deals were secretive, but he was known to have been paid more than $100 million by one client alone (the American manufacturers Lockheed Martin) between 1970 and 1975, and he was also an agent for the missile manufacturers Raytheon, the fighter aircraft firm Northrup, Rolls-Royce, Marconi, Westland helicopters and BAC, the precursor of BAe.

He was embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair, in which missiles were clandestinely sold to Iran in order (unsuccessfully) to secure the release of US hostages in the Lebanon and divert funds to finance the Contra rebels against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Reports also claimed he was involved in discussions with the American defence advisor (and later Assistant Secretary) Richard Perle about the likely costs of an American invasion of Iraq.

He had several brushes with the courts. In 1988 he was arrested in Switzerland and charged with money-laundering, racketeering and fraud, but after spending three months waiting for extradition to the USA, in the end the most serious charges were dropped. Khashoggi and his co-defendant, Imelda Marcos, widow of the former president of the Phillipines, were eventually acquitted.

In 2006, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office dropped a case against him for bribery over an arms deal with Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, after the Labour government commented that prosecution would “not be in the public interest”. A few years earlier, he had been taken to court by the Ritz casino for failing to pay gambling debts; he reached an out-of-court settlement. In the end, Khashoggi was never convicted of a crime.

Adnan Khashoggi was born on July 25 1935 in Mecca, the son of the personal physician to King Abdul Aziz al Saud. The family name, which means “spoonmaker”, was of Turkish origin.

He had two sisters who both became writers; one, Samira, became the wife of Mohammed Fayed (who worked for her brother for a while) and the mother of Dodi Fayed.

He was educated at Victoria College, in Alexandria in Egypt and then at Chico State College in California. But he had already begun to explore the opportunities for business created by Saudi Arabia’s growing oil wealth, and after brokering a deal for the import of American trucks to the kingdom – from which he earned $150,000 – he abandoned his studies and concentrated on business. One of his chief customers was the Bin Laden family, which made its fortune in construction.

His high-profile Saudi connections served him well throughout the 1960s and ’70s, and by 1962 he had already begun dealing with defence firms. It was often claimed that Khashoggi’s first big break came from organising the supply of munitions for use in the Aden Emergency in Yemen for Sir David Stirling, founder of the SAS.

His company, Triad Holdings, brought on board members of the Saudi Royal family and forged connections with prominent businessmen and politicians from around the world: Richard Nixon was an early target of Khashoggi’s schmoozing. He also set up companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein and upped his commission rates to 15%.

His plans to branch out, with hotels, a shopping mall in Utah, a fashion house and various other schemes (including an ill-advised attempt to secure himself a share of the Saudi oil market), did not always prosper, however. By the mid-1980s Triad was in serious financial trouble and eventually went bankrupt. Khashoggi, though he continued to spend extravagantly, notably on a 5-day long party for his birthday at which Shirley Bassey sang, sold off many of his assets, including the yachts and jets, and increasingly spent his time trying to avoid creditors and the attention of the courts.

He married, first, in 1961, Sandra Daly of Leicester, who converted to Islam and adopted the name Saroya; they had four sons and a daughter, though it later emerged that Petrina Khashoggi’s natural father was the Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken. When they divorced in 1974, the settlement of $875 million was the highest ever recorded. He married secondly, in 1980, Laura Biancolini, an Italian who also converted under the name Lamia. They had a son. In 1991, he took an additional wife, Shahpari, with whom he had a son and a daughter, but they later divorced.

Andrew McKie