Merchant Bridge and Co. Ltd

Merchant Bridge

Baroness Chalker is also a senior advisor of the merchant bank Merchant Bridge and Co. Ltd along with Lord Lamont, Lord Denman (of Consolodated Goldfields) and Andrew Buxton the former chairman of Barclays Bank. [1] Since 1988 Merchant Bridge (which acts as a bridge between Middle East North African ('MENA') clients and the international financial community) has been the advisor to British Government's side of the Offset Programme [2] which manages the Al Yamamah ('the Dove') Programme, a £1 billion economic investment agreement in Saudi Arabia, part of the UK Ministry of Defence's Saudi Armed Forces Project — the staff includes a number of secondees from BAE SYSTEMS. [3]

"Offsets" generally require that 30 percent of the value of the imported component of a major defense purchase be reinvested in commercially-viable businesses in the Saudi Arabia. These U.S. firms, plus British Aerospace and Thomson-CSF are among key participants: Lucent Technologies (formerly AT&T), Boeing, General Electric, General Dynamics, United Technologies, Hughes Aircraft Company, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Smith Industries. [4] Merchant Bridge was recently appointed Lead Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Minerals for their Lease of Industrial Factories Programme. [5]

The company say they provide "Knowledge and access to key decision makers in Washington and Iraq." [6] The London office is run by Basil Al-Rahim Al-Rahim was Managing Director and CEO of Safron Advisors, (Merchant Bridge's previous name) which he founded in in partnership with a number of large institutional investors. Prior to that he was based in Washington D.C. where he was Managing Director of Carlyle International. [7] The Carlyle Group had become the gatekeeper to foreign investing in Saudi Arabia through running the Saudi Economic Offset Program [8]

"Carlyle had a relationship with the bin Ladens that began in the early 1990s, when they tried to put together a deal for the Italian Petroleum (IP) company. At the time, Basil Al Rahim, a young Carlyle associate, was travelling from Saudi Arabia to Amman to Bahrain, to United Arab Emirates, drumming up support for Carlyle's forthcoming international funds. One of the clients that Al Rahim helped secure was the bin Laden family, which owned a $5 billion construction business by the name of Saudi Binladin Group." [9]

Al-Rahim was also the co-founder (in 1991) with Rend Rahim Francke of The Iraq Foundation [10] [11] [12] which promotes Al-Rahim's guidelines for rebuilding Iraq, called the "Phoenix Plan." [13]