Whatever one’s opinions of the politics or actions of the figures profiled in this book, most of them (I would specifically exclude Teodorin Obiang here) are formidable figures that flourished on the basis of intelligence, enterprise, charm, or a combination of such traits. But even more than most industries—perhaps because, as in the arms business, the financial payoff for closing even a single big deal can be so huge—the energy business attracts a relatively large number of con artists and hangers-on. Those in the latter category may not have any discernible talents but are able to thrive nonetheless due to their proximity to powerful, well-connected people.
Consider, for example, the case of Neil Bush.
The American oil industry, and indeed the entire global energy industry, owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the Bush family for years of faithful service promoting its general and specific interests. Which is the only imaginable reason that US and foreign energy firms continue to seek Neil’s services.
The son of one president and brother of another, Neil’s political clout has declined since Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in 2009. Two decades ago, the Washington Post observed that his business ventures had “a history of crashing and burning in spectacular fashion,” and time, alas, seems not to have improved his record. Neil claims to have thirty years in the energy industry, though at least ten people from the Texas oil patch I spoke with said they had never heard of him playing any notable role in the energy business. Of the former first sibling one international oil executive and consultant told me, “I can’t imagine anything he could bring to the table.”
Yet Bush, who declined to speak with me, seems to have no trouble staying busy and prosperous. Chinese firms hire him to try to open doors in Africa, and US companies retain him to do the same in Central Asia. Neil is also the founder and CEO of a number of small energy companies—it’s not clear exactly what they do or if he has financial backers—and lives a life of ease and comfort in Houston, where he resides with his second wife in a luxury condo and regularly graces the social pages.
He travels far in search of deals. As the chairman of Houston-based TX Oil, Neil met with Turkmenistan’s dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, in an effort to gain offshore oil concessions in the Caspian Sea. The tightly controlled state media claimed that he brought a letter from former president George H. W. Bush wishing Berdimuhamedov “sound health and successes” and thanking him for inviting Neil “to your beautiful country and for receiving him personally despite your heavy workload.”
In November 2010, Neil returned to the country for the Turkmenistan International Oil and Gas Conference, and TX Oil hosted the event’s closing cocktail party. “The oil business is in the Bush family bloodline,” he declared, according to an account in an energy industry publication, Nefte Compass.
Not everyone seemed happy about Bush’s potential involvement in Turkmenistan. A story in News Central Asia said:
It is the eastern tradition to receive all guests with open arms. However, as independent observers we would recommend that the government of Turkmenistan should consider carefully before committing to any proposals brought by Neil Bush. For one thing, [his company] is a virtually unknown entity … On top of that, he has a history of questionable business practices.
Predictably, Neil’s efforts to secure concessions in the country ended in failure.
Neil first distinguished himself when the Silverado Savings and Loan of Denver went belly-up in 1988 at a time when his father was finishing a second term as Ronald Reagan’s vice president. While serving on the S&L’s board of directors, Neil voted to approve $100 million in loans to two of his business partners—he somehow neglected to mention these relationships to fellow board members—who both subsequently went bankrupt. This adventure in socialized capitalism cost US taxpayers $1.3 billion.
One of the loan recipients was JNB International, an energy exploration company Neil founded with one hundred dollars out of his own pocket and somewhat larger sums from two Denver real estate moguls. “Tell him Neil Bush called,” he reportedly told a secretary when leaving a message for a Denver oilman during this period. “You know, the vice president’s son.”
The family safety net spared Neil from the full consequences of his misdeeds. In regard to Silverado, federal investigators found “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The younger Bush was banned from banking and ordered to pay a fifty-thousand-dollar fine at a civil trial, but a Republican fundraiser held on his behalf helped ease the sting of settling that debt.
Neil went on to found a gas-exploration company called Apex Energy with $2.3 million from Bush-family friend Louis Marx Jr. Neil, who put up $3,000 of his own money, received $300,000 in salary over the next two years, at which point Apex went broke. Little gas was ever found. Next up came a brief stint at TransMedia Communications, owned by a cable TV baron who had raised more than $300,000 for George H. W. Bush. Neil’s annual pay was $60,000 and his job description was daunting: “learn the business.” In 1993, two years after the conclusion of the first Gulf War, the emir of Kuwait flew Bush Sr. over on his private plane for a ceremony honoring him for leading the coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein. Neil and former secretary of state James Baker traveled along to try to arrange a power plant deal for Enron, which never happened.
The post-Silverado years proved dark for Neil, so it was fortunate that another family friend, Jamal Daniel, stepped in to help out. A Syrian-American fixer with substantial interests in the international energy business and beyond, Daniel has close ties to the ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Daniel lives in Houston and was a major donor to the presidential campaigns of both Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., and to the latter’s 1994 Texas gubernatorial campaign. In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, he and other Bush administration cronies set up New Bridge Strategies LLC to advise companies seeking business in post-Saddam Iraq. The consulting firm didn’t work out so well—probably because few businesses cared to invest in war-torn Iraq—though the Paris-based newsletter Intelligence Online reported in 2011 that Daniel had invested in an oil deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, so the invasion wasn’t a total loss for him. (There is no indication that Neil had any role in the investment.)
Daniel treats Neil like next of kin. Over the years he has paid for Neil’s family to take a trip to Disneyland Paris and bought Neil and his first wife, Sharon, a $380,000 cottage in Maine. Neil also married his second wife, Maria, at Daniel’s Houston mansion.
In return, Neil has occasionally exerted himself. Back in the late 1990s Daniel made Neil cochairman of Crest Investment Corporation and paid him $60,000 annually for a few hours of work per week. Separately, Daniel and other Bush family friends financially backed Neil’s education company, Ignite! Much of the firm’s business was obtained through sole-source contracts from school districts in Texas. In 2006, his mother donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that it be earmarked to buy Ignite! products for local schools that took in hurricane evacuees.
Yet for all the handouts from the Bush family network, Neil’s ventures still failed to generate much profit. His famously nasty 2003 divorce proceedings with Sharon revealed that he was essentially broke. At the time, a well-placed source told me, he drove a minivan owned by his mother. The proceedings also revealed that on at least three business trips to Asia, women Neil didn’t know came into his hotel room unbidden and had sex with him. The practice, he acknowledged, seemed “very unusual.”
“You don’t think he was picked to be part of all of those business deals because he was so brilliant, do you?” Marshall Davis Brown, Sharon Bush’s attorney, asked when I met him at his Houston office. “He had a big hat but no horse.”
Neil has received relatively little press attention since his divorce, though he has been living well. In February 2005, Mexican magnate Jaime Camil hosted a fiftieth birthday party for Neil at his estate in Acapulco. The Houston Chronicle reported that two-dozen Houstonians flew down for the festivities. “Saturday night, the host-with-the-most pulled out the stops at his expansive villa,” wrote the newspaper’s society columnist. “A lavish fireworks display topped off a night that included a 16-piece mariachi band, dancers from Mexico City’s Ballet Folklorico and gourmet fare.”
The truth is, failure has been very good to Neil. He currently resides in a $1.6 million, six-bedroom, five-bathroom condominium located near Houston’s upscale West Oaks Mall. He has in recent years set up at least ten firms in Houston and Austin, according to incorporation records filed with the Texas secretary of state’s office. His companies have generic names like GCC Source Point, Global XS2, BTZ Holdings, and ATX Oil, and it’s hard to find out much about them, since they are registered as limited liability companies (and hence little public disclosure is required), mostly don’t have Web sites, and almost never turn up in news accounts. If he has consummated any deals through these firms, they were probably not big.
One of Neil’s firms is registered at an address that doesn’t exist, and several are registered at his condo, including a firm called Nexus Energy, which actually operates from (or at least has an office at) an oil firm headed by his current wife’s ex-husband, Robert Andrews. Neil established Nexus in late 2008 “to pursue business opportunities both overseas and in the United States,” according to a corporate profile it has distributed. “[Neil has] cultivated many relationships among private business people and large energy-related enterprises in Asia and the Middle East. Nexus seeks to leverage these relationships to act on behalf of a client or partner company.” In November 2009, Neil represented Nexus at an energy conference in New Orleans, at which Karl Rove tagged along.
Firms from China regularly retain Neil, which isn’t surprising given the deep ties his family has there. Bush Sr. was appointed as US liaison in Beijing under President Gerald Ford, and during his presidency sought greatly expanded trade with Beijing while downplaying human rights concerns. George W. Bush also forged a close relationship with China, and Neil’s deceased uncle, Prescott Bush Jr., was a close friend of former premier Jiang Zemin and did a good deal of business there.
In March 2013, Bush Sr., wife Barbara, and Neil had dinner at the residence of the Chinese consul general in Houston. The Chinese government expressed hope in a written statement that the Bushes would “continue playing an important role in making contributions to … the friendship between the two peoples.” For their part the Bush family said the visit felt “like home” and expressed special pleasure at being served “their favorite Beijing Roasted Duck.” The consul general and the Bushes also “exchanged views on China–US relations … and other issues of their common interest.”
These sorts of ties have surely contributed to Neil’s list of Chinese clients, mainly companies seeking natural resource deals in Africa, including Shougang Holdings, a state-owned steel giant. In 2009, Neil led a delegation of the company’s officials to Liberia, where Shougang was seeking an iron ore mining concession. The Neil connection didn’t help: An Israeli firm ultimately won out.
The same year Neil traveled to Ghana with executives from oil giant Sinopec, the world’s seventh-largest firm and a major competitor of US companies. Neil managed to get meetings with top local political leaders. A source familiar with Bush’s efforts said that he opened doors in Ghana with the help of his friend Chris Wilmot, a businessman originally from Ghana who now lives in Houston. “Chris has the ties in Ghana that go all the way to the top,” this person told me. “Neil was riding on his coattails over there.” To no avail. Neil’s clients didn’t get the deal they were angling for.
On a weekday morning in 2011, I stopped by TX Oil’s headquarters in a bland office building on Westheimer Road in Houston. New Age music played from a Bose system in the reception area, which was decorated with a cowboy painting, an aquarium, and a leather sofa. The office wasn’t bristling with activity, and the secretary told me no one would be available to talk to me about TX Oil.
“Is there a brochure or any information you can give me?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she replied with a cool smile.
In late 2013, Neil turned up in suburban Cincinnati, where two other companies he is involved with—American Pacific International Capital Inc. of Portland, Oregon and Singapore-based SingHaiyi Group1—had paid $45 million for the Tri-County Mall. The property, which had been in foreclosure, was sold at an auction by the local sheriff’s office.
The local mayor, Doyle Webster, told WCPO TV that he hoped Bush’s name would help bring in tenants to the mall. “He can certainly open up some doors,” Webster was quoted as saying. “People are going to take his phone calls where they wouldn’t take yours or mine.” WCPO noted that the Bush family had “extensive political and business ties” in the area, and that Cincinnati was “home to three of the twenty most lucrative zip codes for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign.” Neil, who was touring the mall, told the TV station that he had sought advice from several Cincinnati business leaders before making the investment. “They said their wives come to this mall,” he said. “They come to this mall like six times a year. I said, ‘It must be in a good neighborhood if my friends are coming here.’ ”
Why do companies keep hiring Neil? It can’t be for his business acumen. More likely, his employers write checks out of friendship, loyalty, and interest in currying favor with his family’s business and political network. In a reflection of the declining value of the Bush family name in the age of Obama, Neil does not seem to command the fees he once did.
In 2002, he received payments of $2 million in stock and $10,000 per board meeting from Grace Semiconductor—a firm backed by the son of Jiang Zemin—even though he knew nothing at all about semiconductors. In December 2012 he was named a director of China Timber Resources Group, which has forest resources in Guyana and China. Neil’s director’s fee was a mere $1,200 a month, which the company said “was determined with reference to his experience, scope of work, level of involvement, seniority, as well as the prevailing market conditions.”
Ouch. It’s tough to be a fixer who can’t fix much, and yet for Neil Bush and other denizens of the secret world of oil, there will always be other opportunities.