Business: Born-Again Bert

Dealing with Armand and Agha and Jimmy

Five months after he was forced out as U.S. budget chief, his finances in disarray and his future in doubt, Bert Lance is well on the way to new riches from a number of ventures. One of them is serving as the American connection for oil-rich Middle East millionaires in search of investment opportunities in the U.S.

Last week Lance got into a new battle. He had been dealing to buy control of Financial General Bankshares Inc., the second largest bank holding company in Washington, D.C.; with assets of $2.2 billion, it controls the Union First National Bank of Washington and close to a dozen other banks in Maryland and Virginia. At a meeting set up by Armand Hammer, who is chairman of Occidental Petroleum and a Financial General board member, Lance told the bank’s senior officers he was acting for the London-based Bank of Credit & Commerce International, which specializes in managing Arab funds. At week’s end, a group of Financial General shareholders filed suit accusing Lance of engaging in “an unlawful conspiracy secretly to acquire control” and asked Washington District Court to block the takeover.

One of the fastest growing banks in Britain, BCCI has assets of more than $2 billion, much of it from Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The bank was founded in 1972 by innovative, hard-driving Agha Hasan Abedi, who left his native Pakistan five years ago, when the government nationalized banking. It was Abedi who got Lance together with Ghaith

Pharaon, a Saudi Arabian entrepreneur, on a deal for Pharaon to buy 120,000 of Lance’s 200,000-odd shares in the National Bank of Georgia for $2.4 million. That bailed out Bert and enabled him to pay off some of his daunting loans.

Lance has had several lengthy meetings with Abedi in recent months, and there have been persistent reports that Lance may join BCCI as a high officer. According to British bankers, Lance, Abedi and Pharaon have talked about creating a company that would be connected with BCCI and aimed primarily at channeling funds from the Middle East into investments in U.S. securities and real estate.

It is uncertain whether Lance may also hold an executive position with Financial General if it is taken over by BCCI. The Securities and Exchange Commission is still examining Lance’s management of the National Bank of Georgia and the Calhoun National Bank; among other things, he and his family ran up large and persistent overdrafts while he was the boss of Calhoun. Lance shrugs off rumors that the SEC is debating whether to bar him at least temporarily from holding a management post with a U.S. bank.

The amiable, sleepy-eyed Georgia banker is much more reticent than he once was, especially about his improving finances. Says he: “I don’t have to go into detail on that any more.” What is beyond question is his continuing closeness to Jimmy Carter. Lance sees or speaks with Carter about twice-a month, often over lunch in the White House. He also performs special tasks for the President. For example, Lance, among others, was given the job of phoning key businessmen to tell them—before the news was announced—that Carter had decided to nominate William Miller as Federal Reserve Board chairman. When the State Department tried to withdraw Lance’s diplomatic passport after he left office, the White House intervened to let him keep it, because, some Carter aides insisted, the President might send Lance on foreign missions in the future.

Meanwhile, Lance keeps busy giving cornpone, populist TV news commentaries in Atlanta and doing a lot of traveling, constantly talking deals and making speeches. In Atlanta in January, he served as chairman of a $500-a-plate “Southern Salute to the President” that raised almost $1 million for the Democratic National Committee. Judging from the reception Lance gets, especially in the South, his reputation has not unduly suffered. At a recent fund-raising affair in Greensboro, N.C., Lance shared the platform with Vice President Walter Mondale. The supposedly disgraced banker was introduced by a local pol as “the best thing there was or is about the Carter Administration.” Hardly anyone batted an eye.