Adnan Khashoggi

Adnan Khashoggi
Adnan Khashoggi at his apartment in Manhattan
Khashoggi is a byword for arms dealing. He made many, many millions by acting as a middleman for arms companies wanting to sell their wares to the Saudis.

At the top of his game, in the early 1980s, the flashy fixer was billed as one of the richest men in the world, with wealth of up to $4bn (£2bn).

He was born in Mecca in 1935, and his father was the personal doctor of King Abdul Aziz, who founded the modern Saudi state.

He began trading on this connection to the Saudi royal family and was soon pulling in commissions of hundreds of millions of dollars a year acting as a middleman for American companies such as Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon and Boeing.

Money was in turn funnelled to Saudi princes and officials.

He worked for British arms companies Marconi and Westland Helicopters.

He owned 12 homes - including a house in 2,000-hectare (5,000-acre) grounds in Marbella and others in Paris, Cannes, Madrid and Monte Carlo. His property on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, was 16 flats knocked into one. He had a stable of Arabian horses and 200 exotic animals, 100 limousines and a $75m yacht. He was protected by a South Korean martial arts bodyguard called Mr Kill.

He was portrayed as having a jetset lifestyle, mixing with celebrities and wheeling and dealing on lucrative contracts. His life was a model for Harold Robbins's swashbuckling 1974 novel The Pirate. In the 1990s he ran into financial difficulties.

He was the subject of a biography, The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi, by Ronald Kessler, published in 1986.