Abdullah Taha Bakhsh

Abdullah Taha Bakhsh is a Saudi investor based in Jeddah who became one of the largest shareholders of Harken Energy, the Texas oil company of which George W. Bush was a director and consultant. In its proxy statement of April 1994 Harken listed his address as the Bakhashab Building, Jeddah, and his holding as 6,935,364 shares, or 11.66 percent of its common stock, second only to the Harvard endowment's Aeneas Venture Corporation at 15.27 percent.¹

Harken

Time reported in 1991: "The year after Bush came aboard, a reclusive Saudi named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought an 11% stake in Harken through a Netherlands Antilles shell company. The Saudi, a tycoon with global interests in oil, real estate and jewelry, hoped Harken could someday serve as a vehicle for moving Saudi crude into the U.S. But the strategy would never come to pass." Bush's association with the company had begun in 1986.²

Harken's 1994 proxy recorded that the shares were "owned of record by Traco International, NV. ('Traco') and Atherstone Corporation N.V. ('Atherstone'). According to a Schedule 13D filed with Harken, Traco is wholly-owned by Mr. Bakhsh, and Atherstone is indirectly owned by Mr. Bakhsh. The basis for certain of this information is Amendment 8 to the report on Schedule 13D filed by Abdullah Taha Bakhsh dated August 7, 1992." The same filing listed as a director since 1987 Talat M. Othman, chairman and chief executive of the investment company Dearborn Financial, Inc. since 1983, and stated that "Dearborn Financial, Inc., of which Mr. Othman is the President, is an affiliate of Traco and Atherstone, significant record stockholders of Harken." In 1993 Othman and Bush made up Harken's audit committee until Bush resigned from the board on October 26, 1993.¹

In January 1990 Harken obtained an exclusive production sharing agreement for most of Bahrain's offshore territory. The Houston Chronicle, reporting in June 1992 on a federal review of the Houston businessman James R. Bath, an investor in Bush's earlier oil partnerships, noted that Harken "has been granted lucrative offshore drilling rights off the coast of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf" and that "One of the top shareholders of Harken, a public company, is Saudi businessman Abdullah Taha Bakhsh."³⁴

The journalist Lucy Komisar wrote in 2007 that when Harken got into financial difficulty in 1987, Jackson Stephens helped it obtain 25 million dollars in financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland, and that "as part of that deal, a place on the board was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz," referring to Khalid bin Mahfouz.⁵