At Banque Havilland, #AbuDhabi’s Crown Prince Was Known as ‘The Boss’ - Bloomberg #Qatar #UAE

At Banque Havilland, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Was Known as ‘The Boss’ - Bloomberg

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed
Photographer: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images

Financier David Rowland, who used Britain’s Prince Andrew as an unofficial door opener, has another close relationship with a member of royalty. This one lives in the Middle East, and executives at Rowland’s Banque Havilland referred to him as “the Boss.”

A trove of emails, documents and legal filings reviewed by Bloomberg News, as well as interviews with former insiders, reveal the extent of the services Rowland and his private bank provided to one of its biggest customers, Mohammed bin Zayed, better known as MBZ, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. Some of the work went beyond financial advice. It included scouting for deals in Zimbabwe, setting up a company to buy the image rights of players on the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City Football Club and helping place the bank’s chairman at the time on the board of Human Rights Watch after it published reports critical of the Persian Gulf country.

None was as brazen, though, as a 2017 plan devised by the bank for an assault on the financial markets of Qatar, a country that had just been blockaded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain for allegedly sponsoring terrorism. “Control the yield curve, decide the future,” read one of five mission statements featured in a presentation prepared by a former Banque Havilland analyst that called for a coordinated attack to deplete Qatar’s foreign-exchange reserves and pauperize its government.

One of Rowland’s sons, a senior executive at the Luxembourg-based bank, emailed the plan to Will Tricks, who had swapped a career in the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service MI6 for a job advising MBZ. Tricks, who acted as a go-between for the Rowlands, was paid as a contractor by Banque Havilland. The presentation found its way to the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., who stored it on his computer under “Rowland Banque Havilland.”

A page from a 2017 presentation prepared by a former Banque Havilland analyst that is now part of a London lawsuit 

brought by the government of Qatar.