Khashoggi

"Khashoggi had made his fortune mainly by collecting agent's commissions from aircraft and arms manufacturers who sold their products to Saudi Arabia. So Khashoggi’s agenda was to sell more Boeing airplanes or missiles to Saudi Arabia. Munk was concerned about the potential repercussions: “If his king or the defence minister of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia leaned on him, and said, I'll give you the contract for this jet or for these missiles, Adnan, but we know you control this big hotel company in Australia because you've got this large position in it, so would you just like to do me a favour and make them put up two hotels here in my country?—SPP could have gone bankrupt with Khashoggi in control. With us in control, he could say, Well, Peter Munk will get us out of the problem. He will build two hotels, sir, to get me the contract.” Munk refused to put himself and SPP in that position."

"When I reviewed all of this a year and a half later with Birchall and Gilmour and Khashoggi, I said, “You know, we never lost so much money quicker. And we're smart guys, where did we go wrong?” I went through every single thing I’d done in Viking and actually had a full review. We found nothing wrong with our decision-making process. We'd do absolutely the whole thing over again. And yet we totally screwed up in eighteen months. We lost a big bundle of money. We had our tax losses and some other leftovers, and eventually we got part of our money back."

"But with something critical and big, like going private, like changing your ten-year program, like buying the hotels or buying out Khashoggi or going out of petroleum and into gold, all those strategic ideas are mine. I usually come back from Klosters with written proposals. I write and then at night I rewrite, because I get very excited so I write badly and I have to rewrite it ten times. Then I circulate my concept, my proposition, to the five or six people I need to convince. Then I bring them together and I give them my arguments. I don’t take any of those major steps unless I convince my colleagues and have their full concurrence. If I can’t convince them, and if they argue their opposition well, I abandon my plan."