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Arcapita
Last Updated: January 13, 2009

Two federal boards tasked with scrutinizing business deals for their impact on national security put the brakes on Arcapita’s bid for a U.S. telecommunications firm in 2004, when it discovered the name of Arcapita’s chairman on a list of Osama bin Laden’s financial sponsors.

But federal opposition melted away a few months later, when Arcapita signed a National Security Agreement, consenting to keep U.S. citizens in the top executive posts of the telecom, and promising that only U.S. citizens would hold jobs handling sensitive network and security information.

One of those on the team assessing the Arcapita deal was Department of Homeland Security official Faisal Gill, who was suspended (briefly), when it was learned his former employer was a convicted terror financier. Gill landed  high in the ranks of Homeland Security with little government experience; he is a protégé and associate of the power-wielding GOP lobbyist Grover Norquist.Norquist was also President George W. Bush’s main provider of Muslim campaign contributors.    
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Based in Bahrain, Arcapita, (formerly First Islamic Investment Bank), first made its $40 million offer for Cypress Communications in November 2004. Cypress is a fiber-optics firm serving 1,300 office buildings in the United States, offering everything from basic phone service to high-speed internet access to running its customers’ firewall protection. Because of Cypress’ access to such critical infrastructure, Homeland Security officials sounded alarms when they saw that Arcapita’s chairman is Mohammed Abdulaziz Aljomaih.

The name Mohammed Abdulaziz Aljomaih appears on the “Golden Chain,” a document seized during a 2002 anti-terror raid in Bosnia that was introduced by prosecutors in Federal courts, as a list Al Qaeda’s top 20 financiers. The chairman of Arcapita denies p terror funding  and says the list refers to another man of the same name, who died in 2004. According to an interview in CIO-Arabia, the Aljomaih on the  “Golden Chain” was the father of the current Arcapita chairman.

Nevertheless,in December 2004, FBI and other intelligence agency officials advised the  FCC to withhold approval of the Cypress Communications deal.   

Arcapita hired a law firm headed by the former Republican governor of Virginia, James Gilmore, who asked that the decision to approve the Cypress deal be moved to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The Chairman of  CFIUS is the Treasury Secretary, who at the time was John Snow. He would become well known three years later when he rubber-stamped the Dubai Port deal.

Two months later, in June 2005, CFIUS approved the sale. Arcapita agreed to sign a National Security Agreement, keeping U.S. citizens in senior executive posts and in charge of any sensitive information. Arcapita also changed the structure of its voting stock at CFIUS’ request, making sure that U.S. citizens held Cypress’ voting stock and relegating international investors to holding nonvoting stock.

Once the deal went through, Arcapita took Cypress private.

Arcapita continues to hold many U.S.-based investments, including Cirrus, the nation’s largest maker of single engine aircraft. Cirrus also runs nationwide flight training schools. Several 9/11 hijackers  attended US  flight training schools, and the use of small private planes was the hijackers’ original plan. Private planes have become increasingly popular since 9/11, in part because passengers aren’t required to go through prior security checks, and reporters have repeatedly exposed security at small airports as extremely lax.

In 2006, Arcapita sold former Navy contractor B.R. Lee to Singapore Technologies, which  once partnered with Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong-Kong company with U.S. nuclear screening  contracts. Hutchison Whampoa’s CEO, Li Ka-shing, has been called a national security risk by U.S. intelligence officials, because of his numerous  partnerships with the Chinese government and military.

Some Arcapita holdings have U.S. government contracts, including Cypress and Smart Document Solutions.

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International Finance | Information Technology | Terror Funding | Homeland Security | Energy

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