Faisal Saud al-Fulaij

Faisal Saud al-Fulaij was a Kuwaiti businessman who acted as a nominee for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in its secret acquisition of Financial General Bankshares, later First American, through the holding company Credit and Commerce American Holdings (CCAH). He was one of the four "persons of substance" named in the January 1978 memorandum of the BCCI officer Abdus Sami, testified before the Federal Reserve in April 1981, and in July 1992 was indicted in New York with Clark Clifford, Robert Altman, Agha Hasan Abedi, Swaleh Naqvi and Ghaith R. Pharaon.¹²

Nominee

In his memo to Abedi of January 30, 1978, Sami wrote: "We have already given the names of Sheikh Kamal Adham and Mr. Fulaig [sic]. We want two other names immediately." Part of the money for Fulaij's share purchases was borrowed from the Kuwait International Finance Company (KIFCO), which, according to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, BCCI "purportedly had a 49 percent interest in, but actually owned and controlled through its nominee, Faisal al-Fulaij." Clifford's firm represented him, with Bert Lance, Abedi, BCCI and members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, in the litigation brought by Financial General in 1978.¹ A Price Waterhouse report to the Bank of England of June 1991 listed him among "the four investors" used "to keep individual ownership below 5% and to ensure that BCCI's name did not appear."³

The 1981 Hearing

At the Federal Reserve hearing of April 23, 1981, Fulaij followed Kamal Adham in assuring the regulators that future relations with BCCI would be for the new management to decide. According to Robert Altman, Fulaij had asked his representatives to find investments in the United States and BCCI had brought Financial General to their attention. When the Federal Reserve's counsel, Robert Mannion, asked whether it was a coincidence that BCCI had first analysed Financial General for Adham and then advised "several of their investment clients" to invest in it, the transcript records "MR. FULAIJ: (Nods in the affirmative.)" and Adham's reply, "That is very possible. Such things happen in our parts of the world." Adham told the Federal Reserve that he had not met Fulaij for ten years; the Senate report called this false and said the two had acted together as BCCI nominees in dealings in the shares of BCCI's oil company, Attock Oil.¹

The Federal Reserve found in 1991 that Adham, Fulaij, Khalil and the other Middle Eastern nominees "had secretly done precisely what the Federal Reserve had sought to assure they would not do." After the acquisition BCCI added capital to First American partly through loans to its nominees Fulaij, Khalil and Shorafa, and in later planning for the purchase of the Eagle Bank in Florida, Naqvi and BCCI's New York manager Abdur Sakhia discussed using Fulaij as the nominee in place of Pharaon, in Altman's presence.¹⁴⁵

The Senate report also recorded that the CIA did not tell the Federal Reserve that Adham and Fulaij had been the subjects of a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act into arms sales to Saudi Arabia by Boeing and Lockheed.⁶

Indictment

On July 29, 1992, the New York County District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, announced a state indictment of Clifford, Altman, Abedi, Naqvi, Pharaon and Fulaij.²