DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCE. Where’s the capital capital of the world? Just ask Luther Hodges, the president of National Bank of Washington.
Two years ago Hodges put together a syndicate of nearly 100 investors and orchestrated the acquisition of NBW from the United Mine Workers. The biggest chunk of capital for the deal came from an investor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Wafic Said, a Saudi trader and contractor, now owns a controlling interest in Washington Bancorporation, NBW’s parent. Said holds 99 percent of the voting shares in Washington National Holdings NV (a Netherlands Antilles corporation organized solely for the purpose of investing in the bank), which in turn owns 27.6 percent of Washington Bancorporation’s outstanding shares.
Said’s investment in NBW is lodged in a short-term personal trust called the Safinance Settlement. (The settlement is an English form of discretionary family trust.) Safinance is governed by the laws of Liechtenstein, may hold only cash or precious metals, and, under the terms of the settlement document, must be terminated “within 21 years after the death of the last lineal descendant of King George V of England living on January 29, 1985.”
The rest of the names in NBW’s syndicate read like a Who’s Who of Washington money, although Said’s sizable block of shares makes the others seem puny. Among them: Dr. Laszlo Tauber, a neurosurgeon and real estate developer (1 percent); lawyer R. Robert Linowes (0.8 percent); James and Theodore Pedas, the owners of the Circie Theatre chain (0.7 percent each); and parking-lot czar Dominic F. Antonelli, Jr. (0.5 percent).
Hodges owns only 2.9 percent of Washington Bancorporation’s outstanding shares.
SEX IS HOT. WAR IS NOT. Thanks in part to Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Monarch Avalon is back in the black. The Baltimore-based game, toy, and printing company has scored big with its Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex and is hoping to boost sales even more with its first television commercial for the game.
“Dr, Ruth called to tell us she loved the commercial and thinks it’s the funniest and most stimulating commercial she has ever seen,” president Eric Dott recently reported to stockholders. “She wished us mazel tov.”
Good luck is exactly what Monarch Avalon needs. The company says that sales of its Avalon Hill war games — Blitzkrieg, D-Day, Gettysburg, and Waterloo among them —have been “extremely weak,” and may reflect a long-term downturn in the strategy-games segment of the market. Why the slide in sales? One reason may be that the typical playing time for many of the games is 10 to 12 hours.
So Monarch Avalon has been turning to games with either more mass appeal (such as Super Sunday, a computer game that features notable Super Bowls) or more sex appeal. Last fall, for example, it unfolded Playboy: The Game of Elegant Lifestyles and tested a game titled Quest for the Ideal Mate.
YES, BUT WE STILL REPRESENT RINGLING BROS. BARNUM & BAILEY. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, one of the giants of Washington’s law-and-lobbying business, has lost a big-name Wall Street client; Ivan F. Boesky & Company.
Last year Boesky retained Akin Gump to lobby Capitol Hill politicians on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and “tax matters in general.” The relationship, according to Akin Gump’s most recent lobbying registration report, ended some time during the last three months of 1986. In November Boesky agreed to cough up $50 million in illegal profits and to pay another $50 million in fines to settle a charge of insider trading.
Shed no tears, though, for Akin Gump —for its number-one rainmaker, smooth-talkin’ Bob Strauss. The firm’s lobbying operation still has more than 70 clients, including General Motors, T. Boone Pickens’s Mesa Petroleum, Morgan Stanley & Company, the National Football League, Rupert Murdoch’s News America Publishing, and — I wasn’t kidding — the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus.
This column originally appeared in the August 1987 issue of Regardie’s.
Under the Counter
DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCE. Where’s the capital capital of the world? Just ask Luther Hodges, the president of National Bank of Washington.
Two years ago Hodges put together a syndicate of nearly 100 investors and orchestrated the acquisition of NBW from the United Mine Workers. The biggest chunk of capital for the deal came from an investor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Wafic Said, a Saudi trader and contractor, now owns a controlling interest in Washington Bancorporation, NBW’s parent. Said holds 99 percent of the voting shares in Washington National Holdings NV (a Netherlands Antilles corporation organized solely for the purpose of investing in the bank), which in turn owns 27.6 percent of Washington Bancorporation’s outstanding shares.
Said’s investment in NBW is lodged in a short-term personal trust called the Safinance Settlement. (The settlement is an English form of discretionary family trust.) Safinance is governed by the laws of Liechtenstein, may hold only cash or precious metals, and, under the terms of the settlement document, must be terminated “within 21 years after the death of the last lineal descendant of King George V of England living on January 29, 1985.”
The rest of the names in NBW’s syndicate read like a Who’s Who of Washington money, although Said’s sizable block of shares makes the others seem puny. Among them: Dr. Laszlo Tauber, a neurosurgeon and real estate developer (1 percent); lawyer R. Robert Linowes (0.8 percent); James and Theodore Pedas, the owners of the Circie Theatre chain (0.7 percent each); and parking-lot czar Dominic F. Antonelli, Jr. (0.5 percent).
Hodges owns only 2.9 percent of Washington Bancorporation’s outstanding shares.
SEX IS HOT. WAR IS NOT. Thanks in part to Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Monarch Avalon is back in the black. The Baltimore-based game, toy, and printing company has scored big with its Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex and is hoping to boost sales even more with its first television commercial for the game.
“Dr, Ruth called to tell us she loved the commercial and thinks it’s the funniest and most stimulating commercial she has ever seen,” president Eric Dott recently reported to stockholders. “She wished us mazel tov.”
Good luck is exactly what Monarch Avalon needs. The company says that sales of its Avalon Hill war games — Blitzkrieg, D-Day, Gettysburg, and Waterloo among them —have been “extremely weak,” and may reflect a long-term downturn in the strategy-games segment of the market. Why the slide in sales? One reason may be that the typical playing time for many of the games is 10 to 12 hours.
So Monarch Avalon has been turning to games with either more mass appeal (such as Super Sunday, a computer game that features notable Super Bowls) or more sex appeal. Last fall, for example, it unfolded Playboy: The Game of Elegant Lifestyles and tested a game titled Quest for the Ideal Mate.
YES, BUT WE STILL REPRESENT RINGLING BROS. BARNUM & BAILEY. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, one of the giants of Washington’s law-and-lobbying business, has lost a big-name Wall Street client; Ivan F. Boesky & Company.
Last year Boesky retained Akin Gump to lobby Capitol Hill politicians on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and “tax matters in general.” The relationship, according to Akin Gump’s most recent lobbying registration report, ended some time during the last three months of 1986. In November Boesky agreed to cough up $50 million in illegal profits and to pay another $50 million in fines to settle a charge of insider trading.
Shed no tears, though, for Akin Gump —for its number-one rainmaker, smooth-talkin’ Bob Strauss. The firm’s lobbying operation still has more than 70 clients, including General Motors, T. Boone Pickens’s Mesa Petroleum, Morgan Stanley & Company, the National Football League, Rupert Murdoch’s News America Publishing, and — I wasn’t kidding — the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus.
This column originally appeared in the August 1987 issue of Regardie’s.
Akin Gump Avalon Hill Bob Strauss Dominic F. Antonelli Jr. General Motors Ivan F. Boesky James Pedas Laszlo Tauber Luther Hodges Mesa Petroleum Monarch Avalon Morgan Stanley & Company National Bank of Washington National Football League News America Publishing R. Robert Linowes Ringling Bros. Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Robert Linowes Rupert Murdoch Ruth Westheimer T. Boone Pickens Theodore Pedas United Mine Workers Wafic Said