SHEIKH Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates since its inception in 1971, began his adult life as a poor Beduin tribal leader and became one of the richest men in the world. He was the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the largest and richest of the seven Trucial States of the Gulf which became united under his presidency in December 1971 after the withdrawal of British Forces from the region.

As such he wisely oversaw the spending in the UAE of the huge revenues from oil which had come on stream in Abu Dhabi from 1962. These revenues were augmented by petroleum finds in neighbouring Dubai, the second-largest of the emirates, in 1966. The UAE is the third-largest oil producer in the Gulf after Saudi Arabia and Iran, its reserves being estimated at 10 per cent of the world total.

From being a collection of huts clustered round the ruler’s fort, Abu Dhabi had already become a city of modern buildings and facilities, and Zayed oversaw an investment of its oil revenues in hospitals, schools and roads throughout the UAE. Abu Dhabi itself became a centre for finance and banking, while Dubai greatly expanded its revenues from trade.

Yet, amid the high-rise, hypermodern image of the emirates today, Zayed did not distance himself from his Beduin roots. Skilled in falconry and a great judge of racehorses and camels, he had a reputation for courage and honesty.

Yet these qualities were no match for the drug dealers, crooks and carpetbaggers who entangled him and the UAE in one of the biggest banking scandals of the 20th century. The darkest moment of his career was in July 1991, when the Bank of England, without informing him, announced that it was shutting down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and seizing its £13 billion sterling assets after finding evidence of large-scale fraud going back over a number of years.

Sheikh Zayed had befriended Agha Hassan Abedi, the Pakistani banker who helped to found BCCI, in 1972. The Abu Dhabi Government and ruling family held a 77 per cent stake in the bank, but failed to reform it after two subsidiaries were discovered to be laundering drug money in the US for the notorious Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega.

The move to close the bank followed an unprecedented swoop by bank regulators around the world, disclosing massive theft and fraud which, the Bank of England asserted, “involved representatives of the shareholders”.

BCCI, the seventh-largest privately owned bank, had been portrayed as the Third World Bank, although to its critics it was known as the “Cocaine Bank”. Sheikh Zayed was outraged at the Bank of England’s action and Abu Dhabi issued a statement that it “deplored the unjustified action taken by the Bank of England”.

There was even a suggestion that Sheikh Zayed might withdraw his huge investment portfolio, but British courts allowed him a few months’ delay in winding up the bank while Zayed launched an unsuccessful £50 million rescue bid. The bank reportedly stole more than £2 billion from Abu Dhabi and the whole disaster, including compensations to bank customers, was estimated to have cost Sheikh Zayed around £7 billion. He was regarded as having behaved honourably throughout.

Sheikh Zayed was the fourth son of Sultan al-Nahyan, and was thought to have been born in 1918. After a rash of murders among his uncles, his mother made her sons promise not to commit fratricide and the tribe began to flourish. Apart from camels, horses and small-scale pearl fishing, the family had little income. No one had realised that Abu Dhabi was sitting on a vast lake of oil. Zayed’s elder brother, Sheikh Shakbut, appointed Zayed as governor of al-Am, an area which included the Buraimi oases whose territorial claim was hotly dispute by Abu Dhabi’s giant neighbour Saudi Arabia.

Zayed was much involved in tribal disputes and warfare during the 1940s, when the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger met him and published this description: “He was a powerfully built man of about thirty with a brown beard. He had a strong intelligent face, with steady observant eyes, and his manner was quiet but masterful. He wore a dagger and cartridge belt; his rifle lay on the sand beside him.” His companions told Thesiger admiringly: “Zayed is a Bedu. He knows about camels, can ride like one of us, and knows how to fight.”

Abu Dhabi comprised a collection of mud forts and houses until the first oil revenues began to arrive in the 1960s. The problem was that the ruler of the time, Sheikh Shakbut, who showed no interest in what the West had to offer, gained the reputation of being the most tight-fisted ruler in the Gulf. He did not trust banks, and kept the state treasure in bank notes in a shoebox beneath his bed, where it was devalued from time to time by the gnawing of rats.

This did not at all suit the British authorities. They wanted to see Abu Dhabi’s fast-growing oil revenues out of the shoebox and into profitable British-sponsored development programmes. And so, in one of the last British imperial moves in the Gulf, Britain’s Deputy Political Resident to the region, H. G. Balfour-Paul, engineered in 1966 a bloodless coup to replace Shakbut with his brother Zayed.

Shakbut was exiled, but surprisingly the two remained friends and, after a short absence, Shakbut returned to live amicably with Zayed in Abu Dhabi. The official British explanation for deposing Shakbut was for “failing to create an efficient administration, failing to govern and for not using the state’s wealth for the benefit of the people”.

Zayed promptly banked his oil revenues in the Abu Dhabi branch of the British Bank of the Middle East and at amazing speed set about transforming his impoverished desert state into the mini-Manhattan it has become today, with, besides skyscrapers and hospitals, colleges of advanced technology and hundreds of gardens watered at great expense by desalinated seawater. Four thousand gardeners are employed in the capital alone to manage the irrigated lawns and parks.

Despite the westernisation of Abu Dhabi, which is one of the most pleasant, harmonious and tolerant welfare states in the Gulf, Zayed preserved the customs of falconry, camel racing and pearl-fishing. He also established one of the world’s leading wildlife reserves for many species, including the endangered Arabian oryx and hundreds of varieties of birds. Abu Dhabi-trained horses have won the Derby and the L’arc de Triomphe.

As President of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed held the loose federation together while generously using Abu Dhabi’s oil revenues to help support and develop the poorer emirates. Although he chose to spend little time abroad, Zayed became a big investor in property in Britain, purchasing four houses: in the Boltons, West London; the old Berkshire mansion Ascot Place; the former Vestey residence, Park Gate at Ham Gate, Richmond; and Tittenhurst Park, Ascot. He also purchased a 1,200 acre vineyard in the champagne region.

In July 1989 Sheikh Zayed paid a four-day state visit to Britain and insisted on inviting Bassam Abu Sharif, who was then political adviser to the PLO leader, to visit him at Buckingham Palace. The Palace allowed the visit to go ahead to avoid offending him.

During the 1990 Gulf War Sheikh Zayed agreed for the UAE to be used as a logistics base for US and Arab forces facing the Iraqi Army.

Sheikh Zayed had made several marriages, and had an undisclosed number of sons and daughters.

Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, was born in 1918. He died on November 2, 2004, aged 86.