Prince Bandar, the Doctor and the Mandarins

So there is a state bank in bangladesh that Saudi Prince Bandar has been taking a very long time to aquire, ignoring government dead lines and all sorts of things. Now he has popped up again halved his price and is whinging to General Moinudeen Ahmed that the Privatisation Commission did not treat him equitably.

Today's New Age quotes the whinge... It's a fairly crap excuse for what looks like a rich person dishonouring an agreement. Oh how i dream of the day when a fine Ghazi would do some justice to a situation like this.

‘The conduct of the PC and other responsible authorities in the finance
ministry and elsewhere has been quite discouraging from the very start. To my
utter disappointment, my team found great resistance in the body of responsible
government authorities to actually conclude my acquisition of the bank. I as an
investor (bringing in the single largest FDI into Bangladesh) was not accorded
equitable treatment,’ reads the letter, signed by the Saudi prince.
The letter identified Dr. Moosa Bin Shamsher as the ‘most trusted long time
friend and business partner’ of Bandar and a catalyst for the Rupali Bank
purchase bid. Media ‘slurs’ on Moosa also hurt the prince, who
described the Bangladeshi national as the ‘great man who has been most
influential in my investment decision, who has been the architect of this
investment.’

I wanted to explore the unstated relations between the Saudi prince, the most trusted long term freind and the country......and the thousands of potentially intriguing reasons why the Bangladeshi beaurocracy would put up such a.... spirited resistance/cock it up. But that was before i googled dr moosa bin shamsher and found a myspace account which blew my mind.

I cannot say whether the good doctor actually made the account. But given my small experience with the ignobility, braggishness and "£%$^%"% of the deshi super rich he just might have. Simultaneously the potential of deshis to pull off studiously coded, harmfull, mischevieous alliances and mind tricks should not be underestimated. Given that the good doctor... or prince appears to be one of these, one could be forgiven for vomitting.

An old dude once told me that poor Arabs from the najd-hijaz area used to end up in Chittagong with the line, 'I am syed, give me money'. How things have changed.

The deshi beaurocracy might have decided to scupper this for any number of reasons. I can only guess. Maybe to cause the govts of the times to 'lose face', because they cant help but bungle things, because they have 'arab' issues, or out of principle. Again drawing on my complex prejudices, the most likely reason seems to be that Prince Bandar didnt feel that the deshis were subservient enough (or important enough to be subservient enough) to him.

Saudi occupied Arabia is what we call it, either that or Saudi America. I dont know what's stranger, the good doctor, the good prince or the privatisation commission.

What a mess.