Princely sums

The rich are different from you and me. And it’s not just because they have more money. It’s how they spend it.

Which I find if not endlessly fascinating, then pretty darned fascinating. So I was quite interested in an article on the Sultan of Brunei’s brother that appeared in the July Vanity Fair.

Prince Jefri Bolkiah is or was Brunei’s “notorious royal playboy.”

Notorious royal playboy is not a category I’ve followed closely over the year, so I had never heard of old Prince Jef. But he reputedly holds the informal record for having blown through more money than anybody else on earth which, given things like the Kardashian engagement ring and Donald Trump’s preference for gold and marble, must really mean some serious spending of the green.

I had,  of course, heard of the Sultan of Brunei, and it’s not as if he were at home eating pilchard from cans and extending shoe life with cardboard insoles while his brother spent with abandon.

Initially, the Sultan led the notorious playboy charge with his bro:

They raced their Ferraris through the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital, at midnight, sailed the oceans on their fleet of yachts (Jefri named one of his Tits, its tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2), and imported planeloads of polo ponies and Argentinean players to indulge their love for that game, which they sometimes played with Prince Charles. They snapped up …an array of international companies (including Asprey, the London jeweler to the Queen, for which Jefri paid about $385 million in 1995, despite the fact that that was twice Asprey’s estimated market value or that Brunei’s royal family constituted a healthy portion of its business)…The brothers routinely traveled with 100-member entourages and emptied entire inventories of stores such as Armani and Versace, buying 100 suits of the same color at a time.

I wonder whether that “same color” was at least something practical like navy or charcoal, rather than something more morning-after-regrettable like bottle green or maroon. And perhaps it’s because I have the advantage of a business education, but I do not believe that I would ever pay twice the market value of a business that largely relied on my family’s purchasing power. This reminds me of a story an accounting professor once told us about a client of his who inherited some money and set up a business with it. After a year in “business”, he went to his accountant and show him the books. The biggest expense line was the salary that he had paid himself…

And that polo playing with Prince Charles isn’t the only Brunei-boys connection to The Royals. They apparently financed the purchase of Harrods by Dodie Fayed’s father. Another one of those six degrees of separation thangs.

But all good things must come to an end, and the brothers had a falling out over suspicion that Jefri – who spent at a $50M a month clip that would make Paris Hilton blush – had, as finance minister, looted Brunei’s treasury to the tune of nearly $15 B. (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking some serious money.)

So where’d all the money go?

Well, some, of course, went for girls. And then there was the $17M paid to Michael Jackson for a private concert, and the $6M to Whitney Houston.

Some went to gifts to friends, family, and hangers-on, like the badminton coach who was kept in birdies by a small cash gift of $1.5M. Then one of Prince Jefri’s sons, Hakeem, wanted to learn how to play football. So,

… Jefri imported N.F.L. stars Joe Montana and Herschel Walker to Brunei, at a cost of seven figures each, to teach him the game. Hakeem and his friends showed up in brand-new uniforms, the gargantuan prince weighing 300 pounds, trailed by a valet and guarded by a state security force. Hakeem was not able to catch the ball, so a teammate would hand it to him, and he would then shuffle down the field for an easy touchdown, because no one was allowed to tackle a prince.

I’ll bet those touchdowns made Joe Montana and Herschel Walker proud. Bet they felt they earned that seven-figure pay day, but one would hope that the two of them would have the grace to have been just a tiny bit embarrassed about the episode.

A lot of Jefri’s spending went for just plain stuff. Life’s goodie bag included 2,300 cars, 5 boats, 9 aircraft, a statue of himself holding a solid gold polo mallet, and all sorts of stuff stuffed in 21 warehouses.  Some of those cars, not surprisingly, had barely been driven – if you have 2,300 cars you can use some just to drive around the garage to get to another one -  and the tires and rubber gaskets around the windows of some of the vehicles had melted in the Brunei heat.  Smaller consumer items that had caught Jefri’s eye and opened his wallet over the years included:

…a rug woven with jewels in threads of solid gold ($7 million), 10 jewel-encrusted wristwatches that depicted on the hour a couple copulating ($8 million), and similarly erotic fountain pens ($1.3 million).

Watches like that? Do you buy them off the shelf – ‘Hey, Herb, could you see if we have any more of those watches with the couples screwing? Guy here says he’ll take 10 if we have them.’ – or are they specially designed – “I’d like the face encircled with a combination of diamonds and rubies, and every time the big hands at 12, I’d like Adam and Eve to pop out, in flagrante, just like the cuckoo springs out of the cuckoo clock.”

And what’s going one in the watch makers’ minds when they’re making them? The customer is always right? It would be interesting to have Joe Montana and the watch makers compare notes, wouldn’t it.

Taking out an erotic fountain pen to sign a check must have added a special flourish to any transaction, as well.

The mind – at least this mind – can’t help but boggle at the thought of someone blowing through $15B. But, of course, money does seem to matter less when you haven’t actually had to do a darned thing.

“Shopping, restaurants, enjoyed life,” one of Jefri’s sons answered when asked how he occupied his time.

Well, I like shopping, restaurant, and enjoying life as much as the next guy, but there’s only so much of it you can do.  Wouldn’t you think you’d come up with a sport, a hobby, a good cause? At least Hakeem tried to learn football…

Any how, the Sultan has been cracking down on Jefri, repossessing assets, etc., so the days of buying erotic million dollar watches are in the past. Wonder what he’s doing with his time these days.