Word: sama
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...average interest rate on SAMA's unadventurous investments has been about 10%, and as a top SAMA official admits, their return has not kept pace with U.S. inflation. Yet the Saudi moneymen remain cautious, in part because they are relatively inexperienced. Since the Koran forbids the charging of interest, Western-style banking came late to the kingdom, and even today the Saudis use such phrases as "service fee" and "return on investment" as euphemisms for interest...
...When SAMA was founded in 1952, its headquarters was a rabbit warren of small buildings near the old Jidda airport. Decision making rested largely with foreigners. The bank's first governor was an American, and as late as 1974, at the time of the first big surge in OPEC oil prices, SAMA was headed by a Pakistani...
...that year Abdul Aziz al Quraishi, now 51, became the first Saudi to hold SAMA's purse strings. A member of the kingdom's expanding corps of Western-educated technocrats, Quraishi has a master's degree in business administration from the University of Southern California, but has had to learn about banking through on-the-job experience. A trio of early outside advisers helped him to master the mysteries of global high finance: John Meyer, onetime chairman of New York's Morgan Guaranty Trust, Alfred Schaefer, once chairman of Union Bank of Switzerland, and Robert Fleming...
Today, Quraishi moves among international bankers with ease. Almost every day financial pilgrims to SAMA check into Riyadh's sumptuous Inter-Continental Hotel near the bank's headquarters and await an audience with Quraishi. Even David Rockefeller, recently retired chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, was once spotted in the Inter-Continental lobby whiling away the time before his appointment...
Though Western bankers give Quraishi high marks for learning his craft quickly, he still leans on outside help. Among the 300 staff members at SAMA's central office are currently perhaps a dozen key foreign advisers, including investment strategists on loan from Merrill Lynch, the largest U.S. brokerage house, and Baring Brothers, the venerable British merchant bank that 178 years ago helped finance the Louisiana Purchase. Top-level outside advice also flows in from senior officials of Morgan Guaranty, London's National Westminster Bank and Frankfurt's Deutsche Bank...