Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani profile: Sheikh who bought the pharaoh's bazaar The Emir of Qatar bought Harrods last week. The department store is the latest trinket bought with his nation’s oil wealthTo outward appearances, the Emir of Qatar presents the stereotypical picture of a portly sheikh of Araby who squanders his country’s oil wealth on western baubles. His treasure chest contains sumptuous super-yachts, a £37.4m mansion in London’s Park Lane and — after a secret deal with Mohamed al-Fayed last week — Harrods, the world’s most famous department store.
However, there is more to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani than meets the eye. The 57-year-old ruler of the tiny desert state has eschewed the excesses of his Gulf neighbours in order to pursue an intriguing vision.
The Sandhurst-educated Anglophile disdains Dubai, the footballers’ wives paradise, and the luxury hotels of Abu Dhabi. Rather, he has taken a different route to modernity by ploughing the country’s riches — Qatar has the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas — into education and culture.
“He’s streets ahead of most of his Arab confrères in all sorts of ways,” said one Gulf analyst. “He clearly wants to take bigger risks to make Qatar a genuinely modern state.”
As a boy, Thani was reported to have been led away in “hysterical” and disbelieving laughter from the balcony of the House of Commons after witnessing his first parliamentary debate, yet he is credited with modernising a country where the rule of hereditary leaders was once absolute. Women have the right to vote and some hold government posts.
In person, the sheikh confounds his reputation as a progressive leader. “He does not have the air of a man who is polished in dealing with newspapers,” said a journalist who met him. “He seems rather bemused that he has to talk to the media at all.”
This is a little surprising, given that Thani abolished media censorship and in 1996 launched Al-Jazeera, the 24-hour satellite television news television channel accused of giving a platform to Osama Bin Laden under its prospectus of offering Arab audiences independent news, however unpalatable. In a rare interview Thani told Time magazine: “Our problem was with the Arab leaders. There was no voice for the Arab people.”
In parallel with his reforms, Thani and his clan — among the largest of the ruling families in the Middle East — have seized a golden opportunity during the West’s recession to “rescue” ailing high-profile companies. Hence their stakes in J Sainsbury, Barclays Bank and Credit Suisse. “With the current crisis, many countries prefer to keep their money instead of investing it abroad,” the emir told Der Spiegel, the German magazine, last year. “For us, though, this is an opportunity that will not be repeated in the next 20 years.”
Thani, with a personal fortune of more than £1 billion, is one of the richest men in a country with the world’s highest per capita income. Strictly speaking, the reported £1.5 billion sale price for Harrods was met by Qatar Holding, the investment arm of the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. But such is the complex linkage of personal, royal and state wealth that the emir is effectively the figure who takes the credit — or the blame — for the acquisition.
The emir’s dealings in Britain have not always gone so smoothly. The collapse of his exorbitant plans to redevelop London’s Chelsea Barracks, after the Prince of Wales’s intercession, have led to an £81m legal dispute with Nick and Christian Candy, the property developers. Last year he was embroiled in another row when Jack Straw, then justice secretary, was accused of trying to woo the Muslim vote in his Blackburn constituency by soliciting a £1.5m donation from Thani towards the cost of a local mosque.
However, like many Arab rulers trained in Britain, Thani prefers to do business here. He took such a shine to Sherborne, the Dorset school attended by his son, the crown prince, that the family established a branch in Qatar.
Not immune to expensive toys, Thani enjoys cruising on his 436ft super-yacht Al Mirqab, one of the largest in the world. As well as having some of the finest equine bloodstock in his stables, he also shares the Qatari passion for camel racing — after complaints, he banned the practice of using child jockeys in favour of robot riders. Nor has he resisted the lure of a project worthy of Dubai — an island complex called the Pearl built on reclaimed land that includes 16,000 luxury apartments, townhouses and villas, nightclubs and boutiques.
The emir’s reinvented country is far from perfect. Although not a police state, its security forces are vigilant in keeping track of foreigners. It is still an autocratic place subject to the whim of one man who has tried to balance strict Wahhabi religious tradition with modernity. The results of this “middle way” are sometimes unexpected. “The restrictions on things such as alcohol and the way people live are more repressed than the other Gulf states,” said a visitor to Doha, the capital. “Qatar has this image of being relaxed and forward-looking, which it is, but socially it’s quite odd.”
The Thani clan have come a long way since their propensity for spilling each other’s blood won them the title “the thugs of the Gulf” from one pre-independence administrator. They are still not without their squabbles. When the emir’s cousin Sheikh Saud al-Thani was suspected of lining his own pockets while spending millions on government contracts, he was summoned home and thrown into jail, although he later returned to the fold.
Under Thani, contradictions abound, some comical. Keen to forge ties with the United States, he invited the Pentagon to install a huge forward base for the Iraq invasion. Then he hosted an Islamic conference aimed at forestalling the invasion while American warplanes could be heard roaring overhead. His multi-faceted approach led Qatar to become the only country to host representatives of Israel and Hamas — until the war in Gaza.
Last year the emir said he would not support America against Iran. “Iran never bothered us,” he argued. In essence, Thani wants to be friends with everyone.
His aim is to turn Qatar into an Arab version of Switzerland — a nation that played an indirect but significant role in the Thanis’ turbulent history. The story began in 1960, when Qatar was a British protectorate under the rule of the ancient Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah bin Qassim al-Thani. The latter took to spending summers in Switzerland to escape Doha’s heat — and no doubt also the capital’s “huddle of malodorous mud hovels”, as Time magazine put it. Debts and discontent forced him to step down in favour of his son, Ahmed.
A year after independence in 1971, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, the current emir’s father, seized power in a coup. But in later years he developed a taste for luxury, spending more and more time out of the country. Fatefully, he was in Switzerland when his son overthrew him in a bloodless coup in 1995.
Thani was born in Doha in 1952. Educated in Qatar, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, returning home as a lieutenant-colonel to command a mobile brigade in the country’s small army. After his father’s coup, his fortunes soared as he was promoted to minister of defence and an overseer of the country’s oil and gas industry. By 1995 he was the second most powerful man in the land.
In his view his father was becoming too close to Iraq and Iran and arbitrary in his promotions and demotions. By one account, Thani informed his father that he was deposed in a telephone call and then promptly hung up. The old sheikh did not take the news well: the following year his son foiled a counter-coup. The young pretender settled the matter by freezing his father’s revenues.
As emir, he dispensed with ritual and began to run his almost bankrupt country like a corporation, forging its new identity. To this end he broke with convention in the choice of his collaborator — his wife. Sheikha Mozah, the second of his three wives, had spent much of her childhood in cosmopolitan Cairo and her increasing visibility — not wearing a headscarf and speaking up for women’s rights — had some conservatives grumbling. To many women she is a role model.
“Without question she is the most prominent and powerful woman in the Gulf elite,” said an informed journalist. “She’s the only one at royal level who has ever gone public on anything.”
Mozah has spearheaded many of the country’s crucial initiatives, notably developing tourism around learning. Education City, a modern campus hosting branches of top American universities, has become a hub for students within the Arab world. Instead of trying to compete with Dubai for tourists seeking luxury, Qatar focused on a different demographic — those in search of knowledge and sophistication.
The same principle is manifest in the emir’s pride and joy, the Museum of Islamic Art, a magnificent structure designed by I M Pei, the architect who was responsible for the Louvre’s pyramid in Paris. Whereas Dubai brought in art from the West, here was a showcase for the Islamic world’s finest works.
The emir is a popular figure, said to drop in at local restaurants unguarded, but history has taught him a crucial lesson — not to take his holidays in Switzerland.
[cite]Posted By: Lincsaddick[/cite]Finances? .. structure your companies in the right way and a football club is a good loss leader against tax on profits from your 'real' business interests. You own Redrobin Supermarkets and make a profilt of (say ) £30 million on which you owe tax of (say) £5 million. CAFC which you also own makes a loss of (say) £2 million. The CAFC loss will be offset against your tax liability. So you have the prestige of owning a football club which owns a large property in London (the Valley), you can entertain your business contacts, rub shoulders with professional sportsmen, impress your staff and a lot of lovely young ladies, get brand loyalty from the loyal fans who will buy from Redrobin supermarkets and rrs.com.uk online, hire and fire as many managers as you feel like and the taxpayer helps you pay for it all.
Think .. why does Mandarich continually buy only skint clubs? .. tax reasons.
Either do the above or register your companies in Zug, Switzerland in which case no-one will ever know your business dealings.
So what your saying is, they've done it to meet Akpo Sodje?
[cite]Posted By: Bexley Dan[/cite]Can somebody comment on the above - i like the sound of it - if you can't beat em join em. Top 3 will do me. Normally by now, somebody would have dismissed it as nonsense so i can only assume we're about to go 'cosmic'.
Put another way, is there literally nothing you would not believe ?
Why would any of the above not be believable AFKA? are we much different to QPR or Man City? Safer to dismiss everything as nonsense i guess or have you got the inside track?
[cite]Posted By: Bexley Dan[/cite]Can somebody comment on the above - i like the sound of it - if you can't beat em join em. Top 3 will do me. Normally by now, somebody would have dismissed it as nonsense so i can only assume we're about to go 'cosmic'.
Put another way, is there literally nothing you would not believe ?
Why would any of the above not be believable AFKA? are we much different to QPR or Man City? Safer to dismiss everything as nonsense i guess or have you got the inside track?
And PV has had dealings with the Qataris through the Community Trust -- google it and see.
[cite]Posted By: Bexley Dan[/cite]Can somebody comment on the above - i like the sound of it - if you can't beat em join em. Top 3 will do me. Normally by now, somebody would have dismissed it as nonsense so i can only assume we're about to go 'cosmic'.
Put another way, is there literally nothing you would not believe ?
Why would any of the above not be believable AFKA? are we much different to QPR or Man City? Safer to dismiss everything as nonsense i guess or have you got the inside track?
I'm sure there will be plenty of 'I was in the know' types on here soon enough - about 10% of those actually may have been.
If it's a middle eastern connection I think we may have heard something to that effect by now but anything's possible I suppose. My money's on a consortium of well off, well meaning businessmen who will aim for steady progress.
Pretty sure the guy will have more important things than to takeover us. ;o) Unless he plans to build a new stadium for us to house our fans in, knock down the Valley to use in third world countries for building, and making himself worldwide known.
[cite]Posted By: UP...THE...ADDICKS[/cite]'Interestingly enough - when someone was doing some digging a short while ago I'm sure there was something based in Qatar that was rumoured'
If I remember rightly that was just due to the Seb Sainsbury link... Qatari Investments took over Sainsbury's
[cite aria-level=0 aria-posinset=0 aria-setsize=0]Posted By: UP...THE...ADDICKS[/cite]'Interestingly enough - when someone was doing some digging a short while ago I'm sure there was something based in Qatar that was rumoured'
If I remember rightly that was just due to the Seb Sainsbury link... Qatari Investments took over Sainsbury's
Can see it coming together now. Varney as Chairman, rich arab pumping in millions, Curbishley director of football, Poyet manager, Zola nr.2, Richard Murray club ambassador, Keith Peacock and Derek Hales assisting Richard, me as Real Ale advisor. 40,000 stadium in 2 years, league title and champions league double in 3. Cosmic.
[cite]Posted By: Bexley Dan[/cite]Can see it coming together now. Varney as Chairman, rich arab pumping in millions, Curbishley director of football, Poyet manager, Zola nr.2, Richard Murray club ambassador, Keith Peacock and Derek Hales assisting Richard, me as Real Ale advisor. 40,000 stadium in 2 years, league title and champions league double in 3. Cosmic.
Please calm down people. Don't start talking about Qatar etc. The rumour mill has gone into overdrive and is already spitting out cosmically silly possibilities and I can't handle it. I have only just got over the Zabeel business, and this is threatening to spoil my weekend and send me in a deep depression - I don't want to be sobbing into my pint later - the ladies are not impressed by that kind of thing!
[cite]Posted By: PL54[/cite]Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani is our financial backer - FACT.
He wants to be a face in English and International football well in advance of the 2022 World Cup and he plans for us to be a top 3 side in the Qatar Airways English Premiership. He is also a back-room adviser to Zabeel Investments.
I made every word of that up, but it does seem sensible now that I re-read it ;~)
AFKA just out of interest, do you happen to know anything? I seem to remember you laughing off the fact it could be Sainsbury involved in something again - common sense approach or anything else? just curious.
Theres all this qatar and dubai crap the consortium is probly comprised of welathy buisnessmen NOT billionaires even though i love them to be billionaires they probly arnt
Bear in mind that we have to spend the next three weeks waiting for the correct facts. Therefore if we are going to spend the time speculating, at least lets share some big dreams for a while, what the hell. Anybody seen my Burkha ?
The PV deal was on the table in July and was rumoured to consist of wealthy individuals with strong Charlton connections and close links to Lord Curbs.
Hopefully this is still the case as I do not want the club sold to a group of cocaine snorting, mega rich ego maniacs with no sympathy for the clubs heritage or the local community.
Charlton always had a soul and the club has done the right things off the pitch (anti-racism/community trust etc). This should not be for sale at any price.
English football does not need any more corrupt marketing brands run by crooks looking to save tax and sell nylon replica shirts to Malaysians.
Comments
Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani profile: Sheikh who bought the pharaoh's bazaar
The Emir of Qatar bought Harrods last week. The department store is the latest trinket bought with his nation’s oil wealthTo outward appearances, the Emir of Qatar presents the stereotypical picture of a portly sheikh of Araby who squanders his country’s oil wealth on western baubles. His treasure chest contains sumptuous super-yachts, a £37.4m mansion in London’s Park Lane and — after a secret deal with Mohamed al-Fayed last week — Harrods, the world’s most famous department store.
However, there is more to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani than meets the eye. The 57-year-old ruler of the tiny desert state has eschewed the excesses of his Gulf neighbours in order to pursue an intriguing vision.
The Sandhurst-educated Anglophile disdains Dubai, the footballers’ wives paradise, and the luxury hotels of Abu Dhabi. Rather, he has taken a different route to modernity by ploughing the country’s riches — Qatar has the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas — into education and culture.
“He’s streets ahead of most of his Arab confrères in all sorts of ways,” said one Gulf analyst. “He clearly wants to take bigger risks to make Qatar a genuinely modern state.”
As a boy, Thani was reported to have been led away in “hysterical” and disbelieving laughter from the balcony of the House of Commons after witnessing his first parliamentary debate, yet he is credited with modernising a country where the rule of hereditary leaders was once absolute. Women have the right to vote and some hold government posts.
In person, the sheikh confounds his reputation as a progressive leader. “He does not have the air of a man who is polished in dealing with newspapers,” said a journalist who met him. “He seems rather bemused that he has to talk to the media at all.”
This is a little surprising, given that Thani abolished media censorship and in 1996 launched Al-Jazeera, the 24-hour satellite television news television channel accused of giving a platform to Osama Bin Laden under its prospectus of offering Arab audiences independent news, however unpalatable. In a rare interview Thani told Time magazine: “Our problem was with the Arab leaders. There was no voice for the Arab people.”
In parallel with his reforms, Thani and his clan — among the largest of the ruling families in the Middle East — have seized a golden opportunity during the West’s recession to “rescue” ailing high-profile companies. Hence their stakes in J Sainsbury, Barclays Bank and Credit Suisse. “With the current crisis, many countries prefer to keep their money instead of investing it abroad,” the emir told Der Spiegel, the German magazine, last year. “For us, though, this is an opportunity that will not be repeated in the next 20 years.”
Thani, with a personal fortune of more than £1 billion, is one of the richest men in a country with the world’s highest per capita income. Strictly speaking, the reported £1.5 billion sale price for Harrods was met by Qatar Holding, the investment arm of the nation’s sovereign wealth fund. But such is the complex linkage of personal, royal and state wealth that the emir is effectively the figure who takes the credit — or the blame — for the acquisition.
The emir’s dealings in Britain have not always gone so smoothly. The collapse of his exorbitant plans to redevelop London’s Chelsea Barracks, after the Prince of Wales’s intercession, have led to an £81m legal dispute with Nick and Christian Candy, the property developers. Last year he was embroiled in another row when Jack Straw, then justice secretary, was accused of trying to woo the Muslim vote in his Blackburn constituency by soliciting a £1.5m donation from Thani towards the cost of a local mosque.
However, like many Arab rulers trained in Britain, Thani prefers to do business here. He took such a shine to Sherborne, the Dorset school attended by his son, the crown prince, that the family established a branch in Qatar.
Not immune to expensive toys, Thani enjoys cruising on his 436ft super-yacht Al Mirqab, one of the largest in the world. As well as having some of the finest equine bloodstock in his stables, he also shares the Qatari passion for camel racing — after complaints, he banned the practice of using child jockeys in favour of robot riders. Nor has he resisted the lure of a project worthy of Dubai — an island complex called the Pearl built on reclaimed land that includes 16,000 luxury apartments, townhouses and villas, nightclubs and boutiques.
The emir’s reinvented country is far from perfect. Although not a police state, its security forces are vigilant in keeping track of foreigners. It is still an autocratic place subject to the whim of one man who has tried to balance strict Wahhabi religious tradition with modernity. The results of this “middle way” are sometimes unexpected. “The restrictions on things such as alcohol and the way people live are more repressed than the other Gulf states,” said a visitor to Doha, the capital. “Qatar has this image of being relaxed and forward-looking, which it is, but socially it’s quite odd.”
The Thani clan have come a long way since their propensity for spilling each other’s blood won them the title “the thugs of the Gulf” from one pre-independence administrator. They are still not without their squabbles. When the emir’s cousin Sheikh Saud al-Thani was suspected of lining his own pockets while spending millions on government contracts, he was summoned home and thrown into jail, although he later returned to the fold.
Under Thani, contradictions abound, some comical. Keen to forge ties with the United States, he invited the Pentagon to install a huge forward base for the Iraq invasion. Then he hosted an Islamic conference aimed at forestalling the invasion while American warplanes could be heard roaring overhead. His multi-faceted approach led Qatar to become the only country to host representatives of Israel and Hamas — until the war in Gaza.
Last year the emir said he would not support America against Iran. “Iran never bothered us,” he argued. In essence, Thani wants to be friends with everyone.
His aim is to turn Qatar into an Arab version of Switzerland — a nation that played an indirect but significant role in the Thanis’ turbulent history. The story began in 1960, when Qatar was a British protectorate under the rule of the ancient Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah bin Qassim al-Thani. The latter took to spending summers in Switzerland to escape Doha’s heat — and no doubt also the capital’s “huddle of malodorous mud hovels”, as Time magazine put it. Debts and discontent forced him to step down in favour of his son, Ahmed.
A year after independence in 1971, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, the current emir’s father, seized power in a coup. But in later years he developed a taste for luxury, spending more and more time out of the country. Fatefully, he was in Switzerland when his son overthrew him in a bloodless coup in 1995.
Thani was born in Doha in 1952. Educated in Qatar, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, returning home as a lieutenant-colonel to command a mobile brigade in the country’s small army. After his father’s coup, his fortunes soared as he was promoted to minister of defence and an overseer of the country’s oil and gas industry. By 1995 he was the second most powerful man in the land.
In his view his father was becoming too close to Iraq and Iran and arbitrary in his promotions and demotions. By one account, Thani informed his father that he was deposed in a telephone call and then promptly hung up. The old sheikh did not take the news well: the following year his son foiled a counter-coup. The young pretender settled the matter by freezing his father’s revenues.
As emir, he dispensed with ritual and began to run his almost bankrupt country like a corporation, forging its new identity. To this end he broke with convention in the choice of his collaborator — his wife. Sheikha Mozah, the second of his three wives, had spent much of her childhood in cosmopolitan Cairo and her increasing visibility — not wearing a headscarf and speaking up for women’s rights — had some conservatives grumbling. To many women she is a role model.
“Without question she is the most prominent and powerful woman in the Gulf elite,” said an informed journalist. “She’s the only one at royal level who has ever gone public on anything.”
Mozah has spearheaded many of the country’s crucial initiatives, notably developing tourism around learning. Education City, a modern campus hosting branches of top American universities, has become a hub for students within the Arab world. Instead of trying to compete with Dubai for tourists seeking luxury, Qatar focused on a different demographic — those in search of knowledge and sophistication.
The same principle is manifest in the emir’s pride and joy, the Museum of Islamic Art, a magnificent structure designed by I M Pei, the architect who was responsible for the Louvre’s pyramid in Paris. Whereas Dubai brought in art from the West, here was a showcase for the Islamic world’s finest works.
The emir is a popular figure, said to drop in at local restaurants unguarded, but history has taught him a crucial lesson — not to take his holidays in Switzerland.
So what your saying is, they've done it to meet Akpo Sodje?
I've heard the same.
Not really, I have no contacts :-)
Why would any of the above not be believable AFKA? are we much different to QPR or Man City? Safer to dismiss everything as nonsense i guess or have you got the inside track?
And PV has had dealings with the Qataris through the Community Trust -- google it and see.
I'm sure there will be plenty of 'I was in the know' types on here soon enough - about 10% of those actually may have been.
If it's a middle eastern connection I think we may have heard something to that effect by now but anything's possible I suppose. My money's on a consortium of well off, well meaning businessmen who will aim for steady progress.
I have got the right guy haven't I? ;o)
Is that Arabic? Are you suggesting we should all learn it?
If I remember rightly that was just due to the Seb Sainsbury link... Qatari Investments took over Sainsbury's
and guess who owns Qatari Investments
http://www.qia.qa/QIA/about.html
We can dream
It's our new centre-back.
Not going to happen now is it?
Arabs allowing alcohol??
I made every word of that up, but it does seem sensible now that I re-read it ;~)
Hopefully this is still the case as I do not want the club sold to a group of cocaine snorting, mega rich ego maniacs with no sympathy for the clubs heritage or the local community.
Charlton always had a soul and the club has done the right things off the pitch (anti-racism/community trust etc). This should not be for sale at any price.
English football does not need any more corrupt marketing brands run by crooks looking to save tax and sell nylon replica shirts to Malaysians.