In 1977 Bin Mahfouz with Bath and John Connally, (former US treasury secretary) bought the Main Bank of Houston.
In 1982, according to the author, Bin Mahfouz and his brothers, with the Texas Commerce Bank, developed a Houston skyscraper. The bank was the family firm of James Baker, the former White House chief of staff.
In 1987, he says a Saudi associate of Bin Mahfouz, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, helped the young George W. Bush and his struggling oil firm, Harken Energy, by buying 17 percent of its stock. More help for Bush came in 1990, when the prime minister of Bahrain, Khalifa bin Salan al-Khalifa, awarded offshore drilling rights there to Harken.
The Bahrain premier was a shareholder in a controversial bank, BCCI, along with Bin Mahfouz, who owned 30 percent.
The final link asserted by Unger came in 1995 when, he says, Bin Mahfouz's two sons invested US$30m in the Carlyle Group, a firm linked to the Bush family.
What Unger describes in his book is the kind of exploitation of oil-rich Saudis which has often been linked to US and British politicians in the last 30 years.
Bin Mahfouz points out that he neither personally funded Harken nor paid anybody else to do so. On the other alleged business links, his lawyers, Kendall Freeman, say he "does not propose to comment".
But what gives the book a controversial edge is the linking of this phenomenon with the financing of terrorism. Unger accuses Bin Mahfouz of making donations to Osama bin Laden.
Bin Mahfouz has an answer to this: he says Osama's brother, Salem, asked him in 1988 to hand over US$270,000 to Osama's cause. He believed it was going to Afghanistan.
At that time, as he accurately says, this was entirely in line with US foreign policy.
"This donation was to assist the US-sponsored resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and was never intended nor, to the best of Sheikh Khalid's knowledge, ever used to fund any `extension' of that resistance movement in other countries," he says.
Similarly, Bin Mahfouz has an answer to Unger's repetition of the charge, based on more recent allegations by US Treasury officials, that officials of Muwafaq, an international Islamic charity launched in 1991 by Bin Mahfouz, went on to funnel money to al-Qaeda. He was unaware of this, he says, and has appointed lawyers to investigate Muwafaq.
As far as his own National Commercial Bank (NCB) is concerned, Bin Mahfouz's lawyer says: "Like upper management at any other major banking institution, Khalid Bin Mahfouz was not, of course, aware of every wire transfer moving through the bank. Had he known of any transfers that were going to fund al-Qaeda or terrorism, he would not have permitted them. At no time did Khalid Bin Mahfouz have any knowledge or reason to believe that members of the Saudi royal family were transferring funds to Muslim charities that were sending funds to al-Qaeda."
Another of Unger's points is that Saleh Idris, the owner of the alleged al-Qaeda Sudan pharmaceutical factory bombed by the US in 1998, was an associate of Bin Mahfouz, being deputy manager of the NCB.
Bin Mahfouz's response is: "The Clinton administration initially claimed that the plant was financed by Bin Laden based upon the mistaken assumption that it was owned by a Sudanese government corporation. This was withdrawn after it was discovered that it was privately owned by Idris. The administration then accused Idris of association with terrorism and froze his assets. But the US declined to defend this claim in a legal action brought by Idris and released his assets. The international press has been virtually uniform in its conclusion that the bombing of the El-Shifa plant was a mistake."
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