Lloyds' Register shows that when the Montkaj was completed in July 1995, its ownership was transferred to a second anonymous Guernsey company, Guevar Investment Corporation. Such transfers are a common accounting device to prevent disputes with shipbuilders leading to seizure of a completed boat. The Channel islands' regimes deny their tax-haven anonymity is open to abuse. This has been easy to do in the absence of hard facts. For ordinary islanders will have had no idea until now that they are being used as a 'laundry' by the Saudi royal family.
Yachts turn out to be a favourite Saudi extravagance.
Said Ayas, while organising the construction of the Prince's boat, also built himself one, via his own Guernsey front companies - the 14 million MV Katamarino. According to Ayas, it was in the mid-1970s that the Prince opened the first of several Swiss accounts at the Union Bank of Switzerland, at No 8, Rue de Rhone, Geneva. Over the next two decades, hundreds of millions of dollars poured into UBS account 205471 from US, German, Japanese, Dutch and British companies willing to pay the 'commissions'. Ayas made a list of the biggest international deals for his lawyers, with sums running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. This was the man to whom Old Etonian Jonathan Aitken attached himself like a parasite throughout his parliamentary career, hoping to get his hands on some of the money.