His days were numbered, and he knew it.
In July 1985, without saying anything to anyone about it, Yamani began to remove all of his personal papers from the ministry.
He took his personal files and set up three private offices - one in Jeddah to handle his affairs in Saudi Arabia; a small office in Geneva, staffed by a couple of people, to look after his bills, his expenses, staff salaries and a few investments; and a larger office in London. That one, he said, was to handle “research and servicing” of his various projects.
By July 1985 he was already planning his exit.
The royal family never said so in public, but everyone in Saudi Arabia and everyone in the oil business and everyone with any banking connections in the Middle East knew what King Fahd and his brothers were telling each other when they were alone. The country was on the verge of going broke.
The way they reckoned, Yamani should be able to get them out of these difficulties. All he has to do is tell the other members of OPEC that Saudi Arabia is demanding a larger cut of the action. All he has to do is say, as of right now Saudi Arabia is upping its oil production and upping its oil prices and, just like that, with a wave of Yamani’s magic wand, the good times will roll again.
But Yamani knew that the real world doesn’t work like that. He desperately wanted to keep OPEC together, however, under the stress of the oil glut, the already splintered 13-member cartel was visibly cracking at the seams. His prophecy of doom was coming true.
Time and time again, ensconced behind closed doors, Yamani restated his case, that OPEC’s only chance of survival was a united front. That, as a group, they simply had to cut back on production. That they had to sit tight until the glut dried up. That any country not abiding by its imposed production quota was doing so to the detriment of the group.
Unfortunately for him, too many of the members were in desperate economic shape. They needed money, and oil was the only way they had of getting it. Then too, only some of the ministers could grasp Yamani’s argument that, in this case, less is more. That, in this case, the only sure way to higher revenues was through lower production.
The ones who didn’t understand, accused Saudi Arabia of not caring about the rest of OPEC because Saudi Arabia could best afford to wait out the glut.
Yamani kept his cool.
Not everyone else bothered. At one meeting, the oil minister from the United Arab Emirates lost his temper and openly accused the Nigerians of cheating on their quotas. The Nigerian minister shouted back. The other ministers took sides. Insults were exchanged. Yamani begged for some calm. That’s when the UAE minister shoved himself back from the table, stood up, bellowed at the Nigerian minister, “You are stabbing OPEC in the back,” and stormed out of the meeting.
It was left to Yamani to clean up, to stand in front of the television cameras and newspaper reporters and news magazine writers who covered his every word and looked for nuances in his every grin. “This is not the first time that we have not been unanimous,” Yamani mumbled, in gross understatement, putting on a brave face. “And it will not be the last.”
Prices continued to fall. So did confidence in the market.
The official OPEC ceiling was 16 mbd, and each member had an agreed quota. But agreements inside OPEC aren’t always worth the paper they’re printed on.
Nigeria was desperate for income and even if it was willing, at this point, to sign $28 a barrel contracts on the table, it was also fast to do deep-discount deals under the table. Nor was Nigeria alone. The spot markets were alive with discounts from Algeria and Libya. There was plenty of bargaining room too with Iraq and Iran, both of whom needed oil revenue to continue their extremely bloody war of attrition. In addition, the world was still awash with discounted non-OPEC oil from England, Norway and Mexico.
As each barrel came onto the market below the official price, Saudi Arabia slipped deeper and deeper into financial trouble.
When the price of oil nudged down to around $27 a barrel, Yamani telephoned his fellow ministers, then went to see them and he lobbied them one by one. “If we increase production, prices will start dropping. But don’t think that they will come down to $26 or $25. They will not come down gradually. Prices will drop sharply to something below $20. There will be no limitation to the downward price spiral. The urgent problem is discipline.”
Despite his pleas, only Saudi Arabia seemed to be playing the game by the pre-established rules.
It was a buyers’ market in the purest sense. The oil companies were fat enough that they could afford to sit around, waiting for prices to fall further. And everyone knew they would. Yamani couldn’t even talk up the market the way he was able to in the old days when a word from him or a subtle wink could bring about a price movement.
He tried telling some reporters, “The world crude oil market cannot worsen further. We will not allow prices to go down any more.”
But before long, Norway cut its prices and so did Britain, and the Nigerians continued to produce over their quota and the Libyans and the Iranians and the Iraqis did too.
He tried again with, “I think the possibility of improving the situation is much better now than before.”
Nobody believed him this time either. The buyers stayed at home. Downward pressure on the price increased.
Now Yamani came up with another tack. By his own count there were two million barrels per day too many pouring onto the market. To support the $27-28 price, he knew he had to get that excess oil off the market. But cutting back that much on his own production would, in effect, take Saudi Arabia out of the oil business. So, he decided, if production cannot be cut to create a price, then prices have to be cut to support production. In other words, the price of oil would have to keep coming down if Saudi Arabia was going to sell any of its own. He knew that wouldn’t make him very popular with the OPEC members who were overproducing to keep their own economies afloat. But it would teach them a lesson. And, he was convinced, teaching some of them a lesson was long overdue.
His message to his OPEC partners was simple. “If you do not fall into line with agreed production quotas, Saudi Arabia will abandon its role as the swing producer.”
The cheaters went right on doing their own thing.
In August, Yamani put the cartel on notice again. And again, nothing much happened.
With his own credibility severely on the line, Yamani turned to Aramco and the “netback” - a complicated way of arriving at the price of crude.
Instead of pricing oil in the usual manner - by supply and demand in the open market the day oil comes out of the well - netbacks established a price based on the aggregate weighted value that a basket of refined products would fetch 40-50 days after the crude is lifted from the ground, minus various costs such as transportation and refining. These netback deals produced an attractive market-related price for Saudi oil, the Saudis guaranteed supply for at least six months, and Yamani’s refiners could count on a guaranteed margin of profit regardless of the volatile market. The Aramco partners could buy oil at discounts of up to a couple of dollars per barrel, while the Saudis increased their share of the market without resorting to the threatened production increase.
Yet, Yamani’s threat was still on the table. He promised to make good on it if he was pushed too far. A price war was in the offing and everybody knew it.
It was clear to everyone that Yamani and the Saudis were acting in their own national self-interest. They had cash reserves then of an estimated $100 billion. By sticking to 2.3 mbd at $27, those reserves would disappear in about three years. They were better off selling, say, 4.3 mbd at $20.
So. this time, word went out around the oil and banking communities of the West, “The Saudis are for real this time.”
One American oil analyst put it even more bluntly. He said, “Yamani has simply run out of room to maneuver.”
The market believed him and, in very real terms, he succeeded in talking up the price of oil. By sheer force of his personality, and with the power of Saudi Arabia behind him, oil prices started rising. At one point they hit $29. But Yamani knew how fragile the situation was. He knew the oil market could collapse at any time.
As it happened, it was sooner rather than later.
*****
In November 1986, Yamani tried to intervene in a barter deal with the British.
Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, had hoped to buy 132 military aircraft - 72 Tornado fighters, 36 Hawk trainers and 24 turbo-prop trainers - plus spares, hangars and pilot training from Great Britain, paying part of the £3-£4 billion price tag with oil.
Yamani argued with Fahd and Sultan that dumping so much excess oil onto the market would have an adverse effect on prices.
He must have made his point because, a few days later, he announced to the press that oil would “most probably” not now figure in the deal. It was the right thing for his country. However, by not minding his own business, he stepped on some Sudairi toes. After all, the middleman’s 15 percent commission on £3-£4 billion is £450-£600 million.
Yamani won’t discuss this, but other people will.
According to a very senior oil company executive in London, this transaction was not exactly a straight barter deal. The British government, anxious for the sale, pressured BP and Shell to lift enough Saudi crude to pay for the planes. The Saudis then turned those funds over to British Aerospace.
Based on information that a London source has provided, together with information from a non-Saudi Middle Eastern oil executive, and information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from Washington, it turns out that voicing his opinion about the deal for British fighter jets was not the first time Yamani got in the Sudairis’ way.
In 1984, with the oil market already glutted. Prince Sultan, as aviation minister and chairman of Saudia Airlines, was forced to accept 10 new Boeing 747s with Rolls- Royce engines.
To pay the £1 billion bill for those planes, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly revealed that the king ordered Yamani to open the pumps and deliberately exceed their OPEC quota. PIW even quoted Fahd saying to Yamani, “And don’t tell OPEC.”
In Fahd’s mind, obviously, the jumbos wouldn’t actually cost anything. It wasn’t as if they were paying for the planes with real money. It was only oil that would otherwise have stayed in the ground.
Yamani’s objection was that 34.5 million barrels of extra oil would be floating around the marketplace, feeding the glut and helping to depress prices even further.
Except that, in this instance, Fahd knew exactly where the oil would go. In a rare exception to a traditional oil barter deal, instead of letting Rolls-Royce and Boeing sell the oil to anyone they wanted, Saudi middlemen stipulated that it had to go to buyers they’d name. It was, the middlemen said, to protect Rolls and Boeing from taking too big a risk on the price of oil. It was, more likely, because the middlemen were cut in on that side of the deal too.
When news reached Fleet Street that a barter deal was in the works, UK Energy Minister Peter Walker warned his staff that no one was to say anything to anyone, on or off the record. Nor were many “inside” details forthcoming from Saudia Airlines, Rolls-Royce, Boeing or the middlemen.
Regardless of the fact that the 10 new Boeing 747-300s doubled the size of Saudia’s jumbo fleet overnight and that they didn’t actually need the planes in the first place, Rolls-Royce made out, Boeing made out and so did the Saudi royal family.
According to a very reliable source with heavyweight connection to Walker’s former ministry, the agents for the deal were Fahd’s favorite brothers-in-law, Abdul Aziz and Khaled - the bin Ibrahim boys - whose father was Governor of Bal Jourashi in the Western Province and whose sister is Fahd’s main wife.
Also according to that British source, the bin Ibrahims have a very special silent partner.
The way the story goes - and this has now been confirmed in documents filed with at least two US government agencies and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act - the bin Ibrahim pair are merely front men for the business interests of Fahd’s (and their sister’s) teenaged son, Prince Abdul Aziz.
At 16, the boy was easily the wealthiest high-schooler in the world.
As middlemen in the 747 deal, the Ibrahims were entitled to a legitimate 10 percent commission. That comes to $100 million. By setting up the companies to buy the bartered oil, and keeping it secret long enough for those companies to move 34.5 million barrels into an already flooded marketplace before anyone realized it, the likelihood is that the bin Ibrahims were cut in there as well.
How much of that they were allowed to keep for themselves, no one outside Fahd’s immediate family will ever know. Or if they do know, they’ll never say. But the largest share of it went straight into the bank account of Fahd’s son.
One version of the story, popular around the Boeing Corporation, is that the teenager netted as much as £400 million in commissions on the deal. That doesn’t include the gift of a 50-meter (165 foot) Boeing hydrofoil boat.
That same source at Boeing suggests that, when Prince Sultan objected to the 747 deal on sound commercial grounds, saying that Saudia didn’t need the planes, the young Abdul Aziz had very little trouble convincing his father to overrule his uncle.
What is known to everyone who had anything at all to do with the deal is that Yamani was vehemently against it. In fact, word around OPEC was that Yamani objected so strongly that the bin Ibrahims prudently waited until he was out of the country before doing it.
Yamani’s objections, it must be said, had nothing to do with who got what kickbacks. That’s all part of business in the Middle East and Yamani would understand that’s how the game is played. He was simply disturbed that all this oil would be coming onto the market at exactly the wrong time. On top of that, he didn’t appreciate the fact that the national Treasury would not benefit by even a single rial in, exchange for $1 billion worth of oil.
Another knowledgeable source, this one in Washington, confirms, “Yamani fought them on that 747 deal. He understood that if you pay out a lot of oil for airplanes and dump that oil onto the market, it’s got to have an effect on price. But Fahd and his brothers wouldn’t be able to make that connection. You see, the Saudis are very odd from a rational, western, business standpoint. They don’t comprehend that there’s always a connection between this and that. Yamani was opposed to all of these barter deals. Fundamentally, he cared for the market, about which he was arrogant enough to think of himself as the chief pundit.”
As it happens this wasn’t the first or last time that Fahd and his family had circumvented the Treasury. Some few years later, Fahd worked out a deal with his pal John Latsis.
As a Latsis associate delicately explains, the king wanted a new refinery and some new ports. Latsis agreed to take oil in lieu of cash. The only problem was that Latsis did the deal when oil prices were high, and got caught red-handed by the glut. Since doing the deal, he was forced to store expensive oil until he can somehow recoup his very serious losses.
Nor was the 747 deal the first or the last time Prince Abdul Aziz made any money. When the king visited Great Britain in the spring of 1987, his son came with him. It was revealed in the British press at the time that Prince Abdul Aziz had just received a cash gift from his dad of $300 million.
Next, it was discovered, dad came up with an even more unique gift. He gave his son a hospital in the heart of Mecca, across a corner from the Grand Mosque. But hospitals have got to be small potatoes to the teenaged businessman. Especially when the source at Boeing insists that Prince Abdul Aziz might have made as much as $1.6 billion in commissions on the Tornado fighter jet deal with British Aerospace.
If that’s true, it would easily stand alongside the largest commissions in history.
However, only because certain members of the family objected, the Boeing source adds, the teenager is believed to have split one-fourth of his commission with two of his cousins (both Sultan’s sons) - Prince Bandar, who is the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, and Prince Khaled, Chief of the Saudi Arabian Air Force.
And still those deals are just the tip of the iceberg. Some time in the late 1970s, explains a well-respected Egyptian journalist, an engineering professor at the University of Petroleimi and Mineral, named Nassir al- Rashid, and a Lebanese accountant working in Riyadh, named Rafiq Hariri, formed a company called Rashid Engineering. They soon joined forces with a French construction company called Oger and created a new entity known as Saudi-Oger.
Their first important deal was the construction of the Al-Massara hotel in Taif. It was so successful that al-Rasiud and Hariri were able to buy out their French partners. Once they did that, they went about building government hotels, office complexes and palaces. Oddly, none of the work they got was ever put out to tender, as is government policy. The Egyptian journalist contends it was always negotiated directly between Saudi-Oger and King Fahd.
Someone formerly associated with the French company before it joined forces with Hariri and al-Rashid, explains that, on paper, Saudi-Oger is 100 percent owned by Hariri and merely has a working relationship with al- Rashid. In reality, when a project is implemented it’s on a cost-plus basis and profits from Saudi-Oger projects are divided this way: Hariri 20 percent, al-Rashid 20 percent. Prince Abdul Aziz 60 percent.
Again, none of the teenager’s business dealings especially concerned Yamani, except that so many of the deals were being bartered with oil.
Because they took place during the glut - known in more proper terms around the kingdom as “the cash-flow crisis” - most of the young prince’s barter deals were tied into defense projects so they could then be-explained away as “strategically necessary.”
Enter here a disgruntled member of the Saudi royal family who feels the time has finally come to speak out. “The lower national budget has meant that for these activities, which all come above stated government finances, their strategic flavor has to be accentuated. Speed in these deals is of the essence, especially when it comes to recouping the commissions. The use of oil is most important as it confuses the real contract values and enables the kingdom to pay for these projects while stalling other less-important creditors in Saudi Arabia.”
Yamani must have known what he was doing when he took on the role of main adversary to these glut-period barter deals. It has been suggested by some people in Saudi Arabia, that Yamani argued with the king that barter deals were ruining the economy, that cheap oil was flooding the market, that none of the money for this oil was going into the Treasury, and that this sort of business was going to bankrupt the country.
The royal Saudi confirms that, on several occasions, Yamani is known to have told Fahd and Sultan that he simply could not be party to any of this. “King Fahd grew increasingly displeased with his oil minister as Yamani consistently opposed these barter deals. King Fahd did not need a minister who would interfere in so-called ‘vital strategic’ matters. Anyway,, the king was believing less and less in Yamani’s price war policy which meant more oil was being pumped to reach -the same targets in the barter deals. In other words, Yamani was becoming a nuisance.”
By mid-1985 the king decided Yamani had to go.
Everyone in Saudi Arabia knew that Fahd liked the idea of making Hisham Nazer the oil minister.
Everyone in Saudi Arabia also knew that Nazer wanted to be petroleum minister ever since he’d first started working as a secretary to Abdullah Tariki in 1958.
Two years younger than Yamani, he’s a handsome man with a thick-black moustache, a bright smile and a Master’s Degree in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Until now, he’d always been in Yamani’s shadow. The Minister of Planning could never be in the same league internationally as the Minister of Petroleum. What’s more, Fahd knew, Nazer wouldn’t raise a stink about barter deals or get involved with the Sudairi Seven’s family affairs. As importantly, Nazer carried with him the stamp of approval of all the right people.
According to a highly reliable western intelligence source, and confirmed by that member of the Saudi royal family, there is in the kingdom today, a Masonic-like organization known as Fataa Nejd. Supposedly not unlike the Italian P-2, which had strong ties with the Vatican and found itself linked to the Banco Ambrosiano scandal which left Roberto Calvi hanging dead under Blackfriars Bridge across the Thames, this group is centered around powerful men from the Nejd - the Riyadh area - who share strong views with the king.
Again, according to these two sources, the de facto leader of the group is Aba al-Khail, Fahd’s Minister of Finance. Over a period of ten years, al-Khail reconstructed the kingdom’s financial bureaucracy by installing a “financial controller” in every government ministry. This “financial controller” happens to be a lodge member.
The result was that the Fataa Nejd wielded veto power over the Saudi government by controlling the money that made every ministry work. More simply stated, al-Khail made it his business to see that every branch of the government, including certain aspects of the kingdom’s banking system, had effectively become a sub-ministry of the king’s purser.
The only office that seems to have escaped this reorganization was Aramco. And the reason for that, noted the royal Saudi, was because Yamani wouldn’t have it.
“By getting in the way of the Fataa Nejd,” he claims, “Yamani not only upset Fahd who had approved it, he also ran up against a secretive, influential force of men from the Nejd who wouldn’t necessarily care to see a Hijazi impede their plans to seize and hold the ultimate rule of Saudi Arabia.”
With Hisham Nazer known to be acceptable to the Fataa Nejd, Fahd, Sultan and Salman plotted to get rid of Yamani.
Of course, Fahd could have simply fired Yamani and no explanations would have been necessary. But Sultan and Salman came up with a better idea.
Salman had recently purchased a group of Arab periodicals published in the West. The most efficient way to eliminate Yamani, they decided, would be to discredit him in the world press. It would make his “holier than thou” attitude a national joke.
According to that royal Saudi, the three Sudairi brothers spent over a year trying to get something on Yamani, trying to come up with anything at all that could ruin him. By Autumn 1986 they gave up.
Despite all of their resources, and all of their efforts, they found nothing.
*****
Once oil dropped below $27, it sank like a stone.
The momentum was incredible. The world’s most important commodity lost two thirds of its value in under nine months. There was nothing any one person could do to stop it. Yamani tried and failed. And, by the time he arrived at the OPEC meeting in October 1986, he knew he might not be attending many more.
Increased production and $18 a barrel. Not even a royal decree could make that happen.
Throughout the meeting. Yamani made statements which Fahd, at home in Riyadh, then contradicted.
Increased production and $18 a barrel.
Yamani insisted it was impossible. Fahd believed his minister should be more enthusiastic in advancing the views of his king.
Ever talkative, Fahd is reported to have said in a meeting of the Council of Ministers in September 1986 - as related by a minister who was there to an American friend - “Instead of Yamani coming to me with oil policy, trying to convince me and let me say yes, I have to go to him, to try to convince him, and he says no.”
More than a month later, the king himself admitted to at least one person outside his most immediate circle that during the October OPEC meeting he’d sent a cable to Yamani. He wanted Yamani to sign a statement proposing to fix the price of oil at $18 and to allow the Saudis to up their quota.
Yamani refused.
According to a US State Department source with several years of experience in Saudi Arabia, Yamani said he would issue the statement with the king’s name on the bottom of it if the king insisted, but that he would not put it in the name of the petroleum ministry.
As it happened, the policy Fahd was advocating was the very same policy he’d worked out with Agazadeh, the Iranian oil minister.
Yamani repeated that it simply couldn’t succeed.
A fellow OPEC master who saw Yamani daily throughout the grueling 16-day October session, and claims to have seen the cable from Fahd, adds that Agazadeh then poured salt onto the wound by pointing out to King Fahd that his own minister wouldn’t do what he was being ordered to.
Fahd evidently agreed that this was just one more instance where Yamani had gone too far.
The OPEC—meeting broke up on Wednesday, October 22.
Yamani returned to Saudi Arabia and, it was reported in the press, met with Fahd on at least two occasions over the next seven days. The nature of their discussions at that point has never been revealed. But on Wednesday night, October 29, the announcement was made on Saudi television that Yamani had been fired.
What happened that night, how Yamani heard the announcement and his reaction to it, instantly became a favorite topic of conversation around the dinner tables of Riyadh.
The story goes like this.
Yamani was playing cards with friends, and he was losing. He seemed distracted and kept turning around to watch the television set, almost as if he was waiting for something to happen. Then the evening news came on.
Some people in the room were said to have been shocked by the announcement.
But Yamani is said to have sighed deeply, as if a great weight had finally been lifted from his shoulders. He went right back to his card game. And now he started winning.
The story hit the front pages around the world over the next few days.
In the United States, someone who knows Yamani well summed up what happened. “Zaki clearly understood that all of these other oil producers had to be taught a lesson. Well, he taught them half a lesson before his departure. But the king wasn’t prepared to lose that much revenue in order to indulge in pedagogy. He didn’t understand at all. The king is totally confused. He doesn’t grasp that there’s a relationship between price and quantity. He thought the reason prices had fallen was because Zaki was talking them down.”
Another aspect of Yamani’s problems with Fahd, he feels, had to do with his own self-confidence. “He was not as inclined as most Saudis are to grovel before the king. It was partly Zaki’s self-confidence, but in this case it was compounded by the desire of the Iranians to get him. They went to Riyadh twice, once in July when the king arranged for the position that Yamani ultimately accepted in the OPEC discussions. And once in October. Fahd sent that cable and Yamani wouldn’t sign it. We now know that Agazadeh went back to the king and said, this is one fine representative you have there, he won’t even accept your words. That was the end. He was effectively fired the next day.”
Calling Yamani, “The most independently minded of the technocrats,” the American says it’s easy to see what the world can expect from Yamani’s successor. “The job is not one that warrants a lot of independent statements on the part of ministers. Hisham Nazer hears the king saying, ‘The low oil price is over and it’s Zaki’s fault and I want $18 a barrel.’ But he’s not going to say, ‘Look Mr. Fahd, we knew each other before you became king, when you were a playboy in Paris and I want to tell you this is more complicated than you think.’ First of all, that would remind the king of Yamani. Secondly it requires a good deal of guts. So what does he do? He says, ‘Right, I’m going to get you the $18 price.’ And he did. But it depended on cutting their production by 1 mbd. And who knows if he even told the king he had to cut production to get it. It’s kind of lost in the tall weeds. The king wants revenue and he wants a high price but he doesn’t want to sacrifice production. So they tell him he’s getting it, even if he isn’t. Nobody comes along and says, ‘Your majesty, come off it.’ Yamani did and he got fired.”
Within a few weeks of Yamani’s firing, word leaked out of Saudi Arabia that he was under virtual house arrest. The king had instructed the Ministry of Interior to make certain that Yamani did not leave the country. All the border posts were alerted.
At first there was even trouble when Yamani tried to fly from Riyadh to Jeddah. But a phone call at the airport to a high official in Riyadh quickly solved that. The rule was, Yamani would be allowed to travel freely inside Saudi Arabia, but Fahd wanted to be certain he didn’t leave. Presumably Fahd didn’t want Yamani bad-mouthing Saudi oil policy.
Not that he necessarily would have. He is still, to this day, totally silent when it comes to discussing his personal relationship with Fahd, his last few years in government and his firing. No amount of prodding or coercing can get him to open up.
But when the story broke in the West that Yamani was denied the right to travel, that too hit the front pages.
Fahd is a man who can’t stand up to public criticism, so when he saw those press reports they were quickly amended with the news that, “This is not true. Sheikh Yamani is perfectly free to travel as he wishes.”
With the restriction hurriedly rescinded, Yamani spent part of that winter in Switzerland, trying to get used to the fact that 26 years later, it was all over.
“In some ways I guess,” says Sir John Wilton, “Yamani became a victim of his own media. The royals are always worried about the over-mighty subject. Or about anybody thinking he’s indispensable. Which of the brothers actually got him? There’s no way of really knowing because nobody is present when the family takes decisions of that sort, when Sultan or Salman finally decides it’s time to put the knife in and goes to Fahd and tells him, nobody else is there.”
Some people say Yamani’s pro-western stand was the reason he got fired. But not Wilton. “They pick on the westernization of Yamani as the excuse. You always must find something to complain about. But no, Yamani didn’t cease to be the oil minister because some chaps objected to women lawyers in his office. It was a question of oil policy. I’m not contesting the view that his public image was bound to provide pretexts for burying him one of these days. Charles I didn’t get his head chopped off because of his little idiosyncrasies. He got his head chopped off because the policy was unacceptable.”
Other people think Yamani simply hung on too long. That a quarter of a century in the same job is too much.
At the same time there are those who believe that Fahd should have at least given Yamani the chance to retire.
One person who admits to being very surprised at the firing is the man Yamani replaced, Abdullah Tariki. “Yes, I was surprised. I felt that after 25 years as the oil minister he should be made oil minister for life. But I don’t think he was a very good minister, because he was a yes man. He was the type that suits the government.”
A bizarre thing for Tariki to say because, obviously, Yamani didn’t suit King Fahd’s style of government.
The Kuwaiti petroleum minister, Sheikh Ali Khalifa al-Sabah, insists that Yamani will be missed. “He is an exceptional man. As far as OPEC is concerned, of course we miss him a great deal. We are talking about a man of foresight, of wisdom, of great diplomatic tact and of experience. He contributed to the long-term strength of the organization.”
One of America’s foremost independent oilmen, Oscar Wyatt of Coastal Corp, agrees with al-Sabah. “Prior to Fahd taking a position in oil, Zaki was probably the most important man in the Middle East. To me, he represented a degree of stability. I consider the loss of Zaki Yamani from the world oil scene as a pretty serious happening.”
So does James Schlesinger. “He was the smart one. He looks at the world and learns from experience. Why did the power of the cartel weaken? Because the cartel overshot its goals, over the protest of one Zaki Yamani. Prices would never have been $35 a barrel if he’d had his way.”
So does James Nasmyth of Petroleum Argus. “Many Arabs feel they have some sort of divine right, or that they’ve been done some sort of cosmic injustice, and that the West owes them. But Yamani was never like that. He was the exception. He understood the marketplace. He was always able to state his mind clearly. He was always to the point. Many of the others are just a lot of hot air. Yamani was always the exception.”
And, so does Ian Seymour at the Middle East Economic Survey. “He leaves a gaping hole.”
Obviously, he does, because OPEC hasn’t been the same since.
Of course, the show will keep running. But without Yamani, it won’t get the big reviews any more. It won’t be the standing-room only affair that it used to be. Not now. Not any more.
The star is gone.
*****