Kuwait Inc.'s Historic Special Influence

“Buying quietly through Citibank, Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Chase Manhattan, the Kuwaitis have taken big positions—sometimes just under the 5 percent level requiring disclosure of ownership—in the top 70 industrials on the New York Stock Exchange. So obsessed with secrecy are the Kuwaitis that in the early 1980s they pulled much of their money out of Citibank when details of their holdings appeared in the press…They have concealed ownership of some New York skyscrapers because of possible backlash from Jewish tenants.” (Business Week magazine 3/7/88)

In the early 1980s, Brent Scowcroft ( http://www.scowcroft.com/html/staff/scowcroft.html ) was hired by the government of Kuwait Incorporated’s Kuwait Petroleum Corporation [KPC] to sit alongside Ali Jabar Al Ali Al-Sabah on the board of directors of KPC’s U.S. subsidiary at that time, Santa Fe International. Scowcroft sat on Kuwait Inc.’s Santa Fe International corporate board in 1984, 1985 and 1986, according to Poor’s & Standard’s Register of Corporations. Yet in 1991, the former director of Kuwait Inc.’s major U.S. subsidiary at that time--Brent Scowcroft--was allowed to sit in a White House office as President Bush I’s National Security Affairs advisor.

Like the historically less camera-shy Israeli government, the government of Kuwait Inc. seems to have had a special influence on U.S. politics historically. In the name of “liberating” the homeland of Kuwait Inc., for instance, the Pentagon’s war machine launched a 1991 military offensive against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi war machine to start Gulf War I at that time.

(Downtown 1/23/91)

Next: Kuwait Inc.’s Foreign Investments Historically