A Saudi who buys American
With his short, grizzled hair and dour expression, he looks more like the head of a Soviet trade mission than a Saudi businessman with far-flung interests and resources. He owns no jets or yachts, and is never seen at the playgrounds of the rich. Suliman Olayan, 62, is instead a self-made, thoroughly westernized entrepreneur who, among other activities, has been quietly using a cash surplus of about $300 million to buy big stakes in more than 60 U.S. companies.
Nonetheless, Olayan's name was rarely seen on the financial pages until October, when he paid $18 million to raise his holdings in the First Chicago Corp., which owns the ninth largest U.S. bank, from 4.5% to 7.5%. Later, for the first time, he accepted an invitation to join a U.S. board of directors. That was at Mobil, the nation's No. 2 oil company; Olayan owns $15 million worth of stock in Mobil, which depends on Saudi wells for about half its crude oil.
For all of his anonymity, Olayan is well known to influential Americans such as Occidental Petroleum Boss Armand Hammer, former Bechtel Chief Stephen Bechtel and Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller. Says Olayan, whose investment in Chase is second only to Rockefeller's 1.7%: "I make quite sure that my share is always smaller than his." The man in charge of Olayan's U.S. operations, run from its headquarters on Manhattan's Park Avenue, is ex-Treasury Secretary William Simon, who is also one of Ronald Reagan's advisers.
The son of a spice merchant, Olayan (pronounced o-la-yan) started work in 1937 as a dispatcher for an organization that became the Arabian American Oil Co. and used his excellent English, learned in high school in Bahrain, to make himself invaluable. In time he was negotiating land rights for Aramco and accompanying its resident boss on visits to the Saudi royal court. In 1947, when Aramco began a major pipeline project, Olayan was asked to become a contractor. He mortgaged his house for $8,000, bought four trucks and was on his way.
Eventually his contracting firm became the nucleus of the Olayan Saudi Holding Co., a Riyadh-based-conglomerate that boasts revenues of $300 million a year from such varied sources as sales of International Harvester construction equipment and the distribution of Campbell's soups and other foods. An Olayan-controlled insurance firm, the first in Saudi Arabia, earned $101 million in brokerage fees last year; another Olayan outfit owns or controls 35 companies engaged variously in farming chickens, desalinating water and building Riyadh's new $4 billion airport.