Osama’s lingerie model niece Wafah Dufour reclining on a bed in a magazine shoot. With their monstrous black sheep apparently 20,000 leagues under the Arabian Sea, it’s back to business for the much misunderstood Bin Laden clan. And for most of them — but not all, as we shall see — that business is making money. Ten years of living with the stigma of the most infamous surname in the world will have done little to boost profits for one of the Middle East’s richest families.
A 14-year-old Osama Bin Laden (circled) on holiday with 21 of his siblings in Falun, Sweden, in 1971. Ten years of living with the stigma of the most infamous surname in the world will have done little to boost profits for one of the Middle East’s richest families. But while Osama’s notoriety has understandably seen a shift in business focus away from the U.S. and Britain, the good times have continued to roll elsewhere. The Saudi Red Sea trading port of Jeddah is the business HQ for the construction family’s fabulously successful Saudi BinLadin Group (SBG). Meanwhile, the Swiss have been European hosts to several of the family’s scions throughout the difficult years of post 9/11. But the question today is how many of the hundreds of the Al Qaeda chief’s close relations will mourn Osama’s passing. His own generation within the family has stuck to the public line that he disgraced the name Bin Laden. Well-connected ‘friends’ are already making statements about how the wider family hope his demise signals ‘a page of history that’s closed’. No kidding. But not all who bear the family name — if they are still alive — will agree. Below, a 1971 photograph of a 14-year-old Osama posing with just a fraction of his 50-plus siblings, while on holiday in the small Swedish town of Falun, shows just how westernised his roots were.
If Bin Laden don’t look like his daddy! They have been linked to major shareholdings in Microsoft and Boeing, through the family’s Geneva-based equity arm, the Saudi Investment Company. This is headed by another of Osama’s half-brothers, Yeslam Bin Laden. Aged 60, Yeslam has lived in Switzerland for many years and has become a citizen of that country. One of the most westernised of Osama’s siblings, he is, however, not quite as free-thinking as one of his daughters, Wafah Dufour. Born in California, of a Swiss-Iranian mother, Wafah was studying at Columbia Law School in New York when her uncle’s operatives hit the Twin Towers.
Mohammed married a staggering 22 times. The path to the Bin Laden riches was hardly one taught at Harvard Business School. Gaining exclusive rights to all religious building projects under Saudi control in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, Mohammed Bin Laden then branched out into lucrative civil projects. When he was killed in a plane crash in 1967, it was his Millfield-educated son, Salem — he is also in the Falun picture — who eventually took over as figurehead of the family firm. Salem became a close friend of Saudi King Fahd. He also had business connections with future U.S. President George W. Bush, through a mutual associate called James Bath…Mr Bath worked for Salem Bin Laden and reportedly invested in a Bush venture. The conspiracy theorists picked up on this when the U.S. Government allowed some 13 Bin Laden family members to fly out of the U.S. shortly after 9/11. Like his father, Salem died in a plane crash, in Texas in 1988. He was succeeded as family business supremo by his Miami-educated brother, Bakr, who continues to head SPG from its base in Jeddah. While rarely seen in public, Bakr is said to be regarded as the most important figure in that city, whose international airport he has inevitably won the contract to expand. More than a dozen Bin Laden brothers and half-brothers sit on the SBG board and help to run its operations from regional HQs across the Middle East. SBG is estimated to be worth many billions of pounds. How much the Bin Ladens also own abroad is a moot point.
I see that aside from Osama everyone is pretty much americanized.. I know they were so embarrassed when he made the mess that he made, disgracing the family…. that daddy looked crazy too…. lol
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