In the War Against Terrorism, Sudan
Struck a Blow by Fleecing bin Laden
By ROBERT BLOCK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- With American bombs dropping on Afghanistan,
Ibrahim al Rufai Abu el Hassan is pleased to announce that Khartoum Tannery
Co. is under new management. "The previous owner is long gone," he says with
a wry smile.
Curiously, Dr. Hassan, a chemical engineer, says he doesn't know who that
owner was, except that he was a Saudi businessman who had to leave Sudan
abruptly.
The man he is referring to, in all but name, is Osama bin Laden, who took up
residence here in 1991 and ran the tannery as part of a business empire that
Washington says funded his terrorist network. In 1996, Sudan, under U.S.
pressure, expelled the then-relatively-little-known Mr. bin Laden.
Five years later, many in Sudan are loath to talk about their dealings with a man
whose name many in the West have come to regard as a synonym for evil. In
1998, the U.S. launched a missile attack on a Sudanese pharmaceuticals
factory on the still-unproven theory that Mr. bin Laden was using his
investments here to make chemical weapons. Now, the Taliban are in retreat
and Washington is promising to expand its war against terrorism beyond
Afghanistan. But there may be yet another reason for Sudan's reluctance to
discuss Mr. bin Laden: Its government ripped him off for millions of dollars.
In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
leaders of Sudan's Islamic government have given U.S. investigators access to
important records and accounts of Mr. bin Laden and the businesses that he left
behind here. Until recently, the most the Sudanese would admit to was
liquidating Mr. bin Laden's assets, with no explanation of what happened to the
proceeds. But as U.S. officials studied the paperwork, they discovered, much
to their surprise, that Sudan used them to line its own coffers.
"It's clear that the Sudanese were beneficiaries for much of what bin Laden left
behind," says a senior U.S. official. He adds that the Sudanese have accounted
for "pretty much all" the former bin Laden assets in their country, and that "what
he didn't take with him has now been spent or remains in their hands."
U.S. investigators say that many of those assets may have simply disappeared
into the chaos that surrounds Sudan's official finances. Even some Sudanese
officials grudgingly share that conclusion.
Sudan's current leaders came to power in a coup in 1989, declaring Sudan a
revolutionary Islamic state. They threw its doors open to Muslim radicals and to
international rogues of every stripe. The terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better
known as Carlos the Jackal, found refuge here for a time, as did Mr. bin
Laden. But the most notorious extremists eventually left or, like the Jackal,
were turned over to the West.
After Sept. 11, when President George W. Bush warned the world, "You are
with us, or you are with the terrorists," Sudan's leaders got the message. The
country rounded up as many as 37 Arabs and Africans with suspected ties to
Mr. bin Laden and stepped up cooperation with U.S. law-enforcement
officials.
Some Western analysts question whether Sudan's leaders have disclosed all
they know about Mr. bin Laden's activities. But the data they have provided
shed new light on the mystery of what happened to the millions of dollars he
brought here with him 10 years ago.
In 1991, Mr. bin Laden, fresh from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, left his
native Saudi Arabia, having turned against the Saudi royal family. Together with
a band of followers, he moved to Sudan, where he became the darling of the
ruling National Islamic Front. While organizing training camps here to tutor
hundreds of his followers in paramilitary tactics, he also invested in a host of
local construction and agricultural projects. It isn't clear how much of his own
wealth he brought to Sudan, but Western estimates range from $30 million to
$300 million.
Gutbi al Mahdi, a senior Sudanese official and former chief of Sudan's
intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, thinks those estimates are too high. "He
had money but not like people said," Dr. al Mahdi recalls. "As far as I know all
he brought into this country was $10 million and a lot of construction
equipment."
Those bulldozers, steamrollers, cranes and wrecking balls were the same ones
Mr. bin Laden used to build tunnels and roads for his military forces in
Afghanistan. They became the core assets of his best-known investment in
Sudan: the al-Hijra construction company.
It wasn't long before he was awarded one of the country's most lucrative
contracts -- for the construction of a modern 450-mile highway, called the
Thaadi or Revolutionary Road, to link the capital, Khartoum, with Port Sudan
on the Red Sea.
He tackled the project with pride. "It is a great plan which we are achieving for
the people here," he boasted at the time to a British newspaper. But the venture
gave him his first taste of the Sudanese government's way of doing business.
After al-Hijra completed key stretches of the highway, the government failed to
pay Mr. bin Laden the $20 million it owed him.
"We were way behind on our payments for the Thaadi Road," says Finance
Minister Abdul Rahim Mahmoud Hamdi.
In exchange for his work, Sudan offered Mr. bin Laden a controlling interest in
the Khartoum tannery, which had been built by Yugoslavia in 1959. Mr. bin
Laden accepted the tannery, which the government valued at $5 million,
swallowing his losses on the highway project.
Abdullah Adam Bashir, the plant's production manager, remembers Mr. bin
Laden, who he says visited the plant twice. "He looked like a very good guy,"
Mr. Bashir says above the din of paddle wheels beating sheepskins in an acrid
chemical bath. "I don't know how he could kill so many people like they say.
But he was a good owner."
The new management doesn't agree. Sitting in an air-conditioned office under
the gaze of a badly stuffed gazelle, Dr. Hassan scoffs at the idea that Mr. bin
Laden knew what he was doing -- at least when it came to leather. "It was
lousy management. I don't think they were qualified for this work at all," he
says. Dr. Hassan adds that among the previous owner's peccadilloes were
inappropriate improvements and poor record keeping.
When pressed as to who was actually running the tannery, Dr. Hassan throws
up his hands. "It is hard to say," he says, "There were simply no files. Nobody
can tell if they were economists, engineers or ... ."
Terrorists? Dr. Hassan shrugs at the question.
Dr. al Mahdi, the former spy chief, pauses for a long time when asked what
happened to Mr. bin Laden's property, including $12 million worth of
construction equipment and his shares in the tannery. "The government took it
plain and simple," he finally answers with a sigh.
The Finance Ministry assumed control of the tannery. Mr. Hamdi, the finance
minister, says Mr. bin Laden did call a few times requesting the money owed
him and that he may have recovered some of it. But the official says Sudanese
law allows the government to confiscate private property without compensation
when in the national interest. "The law allowed us to act the way we did," he
says.
After the 1998 missile strikes on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant that the
Clinton administration mistakenly identified as belonging to Mr. bin Laden, the
Finance Ministry closed the tannery. Then last year, the government effectively
sold the tannery back to itself. The government-run National Pensions Fund
paid the Finance Ministry $3.5 million for the tannery.
Dr. Hassan, the tannery's new boss, says the plant has a brighter future now
that proper management is in place. He says he expects its revenue this year to
reach $50 million, double what he figures previous management brought in. The
factory has been refurbished and outfitted with new equipment. The only legacy
of Mr. bin Laden's tenure is a green signboard with fancy Arabic calligraphy
quoting verses from the Koran concerning uses for leather.
What did Mr. bin Laden make of his Sudanese experience? In an interview
with an Arab newspaper after his departure from Sudan, Mr. bin Laden
claimed to have lost more than $160 million on his Sudanese ventures. When
asked to characterize Sudan's National Islamic Front government, he described
it as a "mixture of religion and organized crime."
-- Neil King Jr. contributed to this article.
Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com1 |
