Saturday, 6 August 2011

Lunch with the FT: Amanda Staveley - FT.com

The dealmaker who has dated a British prince and now brokers multibillion dollar deals for Middle Eastern royalty talks to Roula Khalaf about provoking envy and having her eye on Iraq

Within a few minutes of arriving at Scott’s, and before we glance at the menu, I’ve heard about Amanda Staveley’s wedding dress (made by Sarah Burton, who designed the Duchess of Cambridge’s dress), her latest dealmaking in Dubai, from where she has arrived this morning, and – most intriguingly – her big parallel pursuit of advising an opposition tribal leader in Yemen.

Yes, Yemen. The occasional former model, one-time girlfriend of Prince Andrew and now financial fixer to sheikhs is embracing the Arab spring and hoping that her client, Sheikh Hamid al-Ahmar, a major businessman in Yemen, will emerge as a beneficiary of an eventual, and inevitable, political transition in the region’s poorest country.

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