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Zayed is every bit as passionate a sportsman as he is an indulgent father. The lithe sheik is a fervent falconer who decamps regularly with an army of servants for lengthy hunting trips in Pakistan and the Sudan. He has raised camel racing to the status of a national pastime and financed efforts to reintroduce teeming herds of gazelles to Abu Dhabi (pop. 700,000), which in Arabic means "Father of the Gazelle." Zayed also loves greenery, and has lined Abu Dhabi's boulevards with flowers, trees and lawns.
Zayed's free-spending habits made him an easy mark for Agha Hasan Abedi, a visionary Pakistani financier who founded B.C.C.I. in 1972. Abedi joined Zayed on falconry expeditions and, after winning the sheik's trust, persuaded him to acquire a 35% stake in the bank, which Abedi described as a Muslim-owned institution that would play a key role in financing Third World development. "Zayed is a totally instinctive man," says a Western diplomat who knows the sheik well. "He reacts from the heart and the gut, which is what gives him his sense of morality and fair play. But this, and his loyalty, is also why he stayed so close to Abedi even after he began to learn that things with Abedi and the bank were not as he thought."
While the sheik remained personally aloof from financial details and steadfastly supported Abedi, B.C.C.I. was acquiring a reputation as the "bank of crooks and criminals," and its foundation was crumbling. In an effort to rescue the bank, Zayed put up $1 billion last year with the encouragement of the Bank of England and thereby raised his stake in B.C.C.I. to a controlling 77%. Zayed has maintained his man-of-the-desert dignity in the midst of the bank's turmoil. The sheik agreed to provide $200 million of fresh capital to First American, which is struggling with real estate loan problems in Washington, when he learned that his control of B.C.C.I. also made him owner of the U.S. bank.
Zayed now appears headed for a showdown with his old friend Abedi, who is suffering from a heart ailment, and with B.C.C.I. managers in Pakistan, where the bank's dirty-tricks operations are headquartered. "There's going to be a big fight," said a Karachi-based B.C.C.I. official, who predicted that "Pakistan will refuse to go along" with global efforts to wind down the bank. The official added that B.C.C.I. managers in Pakistan were "trying to figure out a way to restructure it, maybe shut it down and open under a new name in Southeast Asia." But with his eyes open at last, Zayed will have little reluctance to thwart such schemes -- or walk away from them.