Is this the end of Abu Dhabi group in Pakistan? And who is to blame? Sheikh Nahayan has poured billions of dollars worth of investments into Pakistan. But over the years, most of these have either been divested or simply left to rot. During all this, he hired and fired multiple management teams including two Pakistani CEOs, both of whom are now involved in a messy legal battle. Has the Sheikh had enough of Pakistan? By Babar Nizami and Abdullah Niazi - October 7, 2019 If you were to pick an area of Lahore to live in, an area for the elite of the elite – for titans of industry – where would it be? You might think Defence, but that just reeks of new money, as impolite as it is to say. You might then argue Model Town, but it is not nearly grand enough. Gulberg is not quite enough, and Shah Jamal simply not clean enough. Where then do you build a house if you have made it in Pakistan? And by ‘made it’, we mean really made it. Cigars with the President after a work and a dinner date with the Chief Minister on what you would call a lazy Wednesday made it. The answer, of course, is Cantonment – the historical and de facto hub of Lahore’s socio-economic elite. Two houses in Cantt are central to this story. Both massive constructions with sprawling lawns, high ceilings, and the gaudiest, most expensive decor you can imagine. Both are also relatively new. The men living in these houses are Bashir Tahir and Adeel Bajwa, and the similarities between the two men are almost as apparent as the polite antagonism between the two. Both men are of, not humble, but also not particularly well-off beginnings. Both lived in Iqbal Town, a solidly middle-class Lahore neighbourhood. Both rose high in the world of international business. Both moved to Cantt after making their fortunes. Both faced a meteoric crash. Both are currently condemned to a life of early retirement. Both are opposing parties in a criminal case regarding land grabbing. And both owe their dizzying highs and eventual abysmal lows to one man: Sheikh Nahayan bin Mubarak Al Nahayan. Sheikh Nahayan, if you have not heard of him, is a member of the extended royal family of the United Arab Emirates and is currently the Emirates’ Minister for Tolerance. Back in the 1980s, he was the up and comer of the royal family, not entitled to the wealth and power that his second-cousin Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the current President of the UAE, was set to inherit. But cousin Nahayan had other things going for him. For one thing, he had a good education, having managed to graduate from Magdalen College at Oxford University (the same one that has amongst its other alumni, Erwin Schrödinger, Oscar Wilde, and King Edward VIII of England). Nahayan developed a keen eye for business, and would go on to found the Abu Dhabi Group, a loose family association of investments that would go on to pour billions of dollars in many parts of the world, the biggest chunk of which was in Pakistan. The Abu Dhabi Group would eventually become one of the largest investors in Pakistan. And even as they invested in Africa and Central Asia, Pakistan became Sheikh Nahayan’s playground, and the group’s core asset. It currently owns a controlling stake in Bank Alfalah (Pakistan’s seventh largest bank), the telecom company Wateen (or whatever is left of it), and minority stakes in Jazz (formerly Mobilink, Pakistan’s largest mobile operator), and in United Bank Ltd (Pakistan’s third largest bank), and major real estate projects worth at least several hundred million dollars, if not billions of dollars. Over the years, the Sheikh would appoint two Pakistanis as chief executives for his group. His first right hand man was Bashir Tahir, and by extension Bashir’s brother Pervez Shahid. For years ‘the brothers’ were flying high, until 2011, when they were forced to exit the group shrouded in mystery and shame. For the next five years, the group would be run by a four-person team of mostly Europeans with some Pakistani input. The Sheikh was also unable to retain their services, firing the entire board in one fell swoop in 2016. The next Pakistani to be elevated to the top job by the Sheikh was Adeel Bajwa, a lawyer turned investment banker with a similar roller-coaster trajectory. Bajwa assumed the role of CEO after the 2016 board debacle, though his tenure was not to last long. In March 2019, he too was given an honourable discharge, and ‘resigned’ as the group’s main man. He was succeeded by Dominique Liana Russo, the Columbia and MIT-educated former management consultant, and the first woman to hold the job. The two former favourites of the Sheikh’s have currently pulled up their drawbridges and are hiding behind their castle walls. It is clear enough that they have a lot to say, both about the group and about the Sheikh himself. But both are reluctant to open up. In interviews with Profit, Bashir Tahir and persons close to Adeel Bajwa maintained a tact decorum, even when discussing nasty bits like police reports, corruption, and threats. But behind the facade of politeness, there exists an epic triangle of almost Victorian proportions. The Sheikh is the hasty, Byronic hero who believes any and every rumour that the wind carries in – in a word, unreliable. Bashir Tahir and Adeel Bajwa are his spurned confidantes. Embroiled equally in their admiration for the Sheikh, their bitterness at how it ended, and their hatred for each other. And being torn apart in the process is the family heirloom that is the Abu Dhabi Group in Pakistan. As the Abu Dhabi Group looks to possibly depart from the murky, drama-filled landscape of Pakistan, it could take with it billions of dollars worth of investments from the country. The Punjab government has already tried to mend fences, but has the Sheikh had enough of Pakistan? And if he has, how much of the group’s failure to consolidate is he himself responsible for? As with anything worth explaining, let us start at the very beginning, and an ominous beginning at that, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Rising from the ashes If you ever want to see a disaster, you need not look farther than Agha Hasan Abedi and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). The bank’s misdemeanours and Abedi’s life are well recorded and extensively profiled, including by this magazine. But from the disaster of corruption that was the BCCI, there also came out men and women that had given the bank much of their lives and had risen high in its ranks. One of these men was Bashir Tahir, who had been in the world of banking since the early 1970s, leaving somewhere around 1991, when things at BCCI were really going down the drain. In that year, he was arrested as one of the five high-profile figures from the bank and let go sometime in 1994 after a three-year prison stint. But it was back in the 1980s, when he was still a part of BCCI, that Tahir first interacted with the UAE royal family, to a section of which he would become a central figure in the decades to come. His first interaction with the Nahayan family was with Mubarak bin Mohammed al-Nahayan, who was then interior minister of the UAE, and the father of our story’s central figure. So, when Mubarak bin Mohammed Al Nahayan, died soon after these initial interactions in a road accident in London, his son came back to the UAE to manage his father’s affairs. And that is where the relationship between Bashir Tahir and the Sheikh began. At this time, the BCCI was operating in the UAE with two different kinds of branches, both as branches of their bank holding company in Luxembourg, as well as locally incorporated branches. In the UAE, Agha Hasan Abedi decided to set up the Bank of Credit and Commerce Emirates (BCCE), a locally based version of the BCCI. To lead this new venture, he chose Bashir Tahir as his General Manager, a title that belies the importance of the role that he was to play. BCCI had a 40% stake in this new bank, and the governments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi both had a 10% stake each. The remaining 40% was publicly held. The next decade would see the bank grow under Tahir’s management. It would also, in 1991, change its name to Union National Bank, with Tahir as CEO, to try and distance itself from the unavoidable link with the BCCI, which was nearing its own crash. But back when the bank was first formed in 1983, there had been one fateful decision Abedi had made, and Tahir had unwittingly helped him make. With the forming of the new bank, there had come the issue of appointing a Chairman. The name that came to Bashir Tahir’s mind was of the young, Oxford-educated, suave, sharp-minded Sheikh Nahayan. Having interacted with the son of his former acquaintance, Tahir pitched his name to Agha Hasan Abedi who appointed him Chairman of the BCCE. This was the beginning of a close professional relationship between Bashir Tahir and the Sheikh. The beginnings By the time BCCE, which had become the UNB by then, collapsed under the weight of the crimes of the BCCI and Abedi, Tahir had already left the bank, been jailed, freed and was in the short wilderness period of his career.