Word: libya
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three years ago, Libya's ascetic, rabidly anti-Western President Muammar Gaddafi flew into a rage about a mild satire of himself printed by the Turin daily La Stampa. He threatened to have Fiat, the Italian megacompany that owns La Stampa, put on the Arab boycott list unless it fired the paper's Jewish editor, Arrigo Levi. Fiat Chairman Giovanni Agnelli stood by Levi, and the matter was forgotten. Time and oil money, however, can change the political-economic balance of power, and last week Levi had a new story to print. Agnelli announced that he is taking...
...devastatingly ironic example of petropower. The Libyan Arab Foreign Bank will lend Fiat $104 million and spend an additional $311 million to buy newly issued Fiat stock and bonds. That will give the government of Libya-which was an Italian colony until the end of World War II-an immediate 10% ownership of Fiat, the world's fifth biggest automaker, and eventually perhaps 13%; the Agnelli family's controlling interest will shrink from 35% to 30%. Libyans will take two seats on Fiat's 15-man board of directors and one place on the five-man executive...
What made Fiat do it? Although it has published no 1976 figures, the company seems to be rebounding well from two barely break-even years (1975 profits: $164,000 on sales of $4.9 billion). Still, says Agnelli, Fiat could use some more money, and Libya offered cash on attractive terms. In short, Agnelli, who insists that he has never met Gaddafi, presented the transaction as a straight business deal...
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat calls him "the lunatic of Libya." The CIA, TIME has learned, commissioned a secret psychological profile, which suggested that he was sound of mind. Nonetheless, Libya's mercurial strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 34, has given leaders everywhere plenty of reason to worry since he took power in a 1969 military coup. With the country's approximately $10 billion in annual revenues, mostly from oil, the ascetic, fanatically religious Gaddafi has become, among other things, one of the world's foremost backers of terrorism and insurrection. Pursuing a dream of a Libyan-led Islamic...
...course, oil money is a big help in making the Third Theory work. Libya has the highest per capita income in Africa: $4,000 from oil revenues alone. Of the government's $10 billion in total income, $5 billion is assigned to development projects such as irrigation programs and small factory construction. Another $2 billion goes to social services and welfare programs. The government claims to have built 346,000 new housing units since 1970, virtually eliminating slums. Medical care is free, and Libyans can increasingly afford the foreign consumer goods piled up in Tripoli's mile-long...