Nov 17, 2009 05:22 AM
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Last week we reported that mystery playboy Jho Low - the one who flies Megan Fox around and drops hundreds of thousands on champagne - was mixed up with rumored arms dealers. Over the weekend we found out more.
We previously speculated that the rumors might refer to Hamad Al Wazzan, an associate of Low's named in the New York Post story that brought Low to light. He is a Kuwaiti whose family run a businesses conglomerate, the Al Wazzan Group, in the emirate. Their dealings are certainly vague enough to encompass arms dealing. And, totally circumstantially, he's a fan of Megan Fox on Facebook.
A tipster shed some light on the murky back story. Securities and Exchange Commission filings link the Al Wazzan Group to the Shaw Group, a US firm that specialises in infrastructure and energy but whose interests extend to security and defense. Al Wazzan also seem to have won computing business from the Defense Department back in 2004.
More convincingly, the group themselves have a security arm called Injifa Security Services. A look at their website seems to show that they are responsible for the security of several high-profile Kuwaiti ministries, the national banks, the airport and the petroleum company. Here are a couple of screengrabs:
They also sell weapons. There are no AK-47s and cluster bombs listed for sale on the site, but you can buy body armour, batons, restraints, and what appear to be gas projectiles. One would presume that the 50mm machine guns would not, if available, be listed publicly.
There is a pretty high demand for US-friendly security in Kuwait. The country is a major staging post for US troops deploying to Iraq. A rumoured CIA black site, Camp Bucca, on its border with Iraq, closed in September.
If Hamad Al Wazzan is the money behind Jho Low, at least he's learned some subtlety from his predecessors.
Send an email to Ravi Somaiya, the author of this post, at ravi@gawker.com.
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