While Canada sent hundreds of millions in aid to Jordan, its king grew his collection of luxury homes

More from the Pandora Papers Pandora Papers leak exposes secret tax havens of the global elite

As his Middle Eastern monarchy strained under the weight of regional wars, Arab Spring protests and a flood of refugees, the King of Jordan secretly stockpiled a real estate portfolio of luxury homes from California to London, an investigation by the Star and its international partners has found.

King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein acquired 14 properties abroad worth more than $106 million (U.S.) using some of his 36 shell companies based in secretive tax havens, a cache of newly leaked documents reveal. He did it at a time when Canada and other Western nations were sending billions of dollars in humanitarian assistance to Jordan.

And the man who orchestrated King Abdullah’s obscured offshore asset acquisitions was a former Saskatchewan government accountant.

Andrew Evans’s career trajectory ascends from a $26,000 government salary in Regina in the 1980s to the Jordanian royal court where documents show he served as a personal wealth manager to the king.

During that tenure, Evans went to extraordinary lengths to hide King Abdullah’s ownership of offshore shell companies and ensure an expanding list of luxury homes could not be traced back to him.

In a written statement from his U.K. lawyers, the king acknowledged owning homes around the world for personal use and specified that three apartments are rented out for income.

But they vigorously deny any misuse of funds, saying the king’s real estate purchases were made with his personal wealth and that offshore companies were utilized to protect him and his family from potential terrorist attacks.

Evans, a British citizen who lives in Switzerland, did not respond to interview requests. When approached at his home by a reporter, he declined to address the allegations directly, saying, “I am retired, I have another life.”

The details of the king’s real estate deals and the accountant who facilitated them are contained in the Pandora Papers, a massive leak of offshore corporate records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the Toronto Star. They include corporate offshore registrations, internal emails, passports and client records that detail the identities of real owners who paid an army of accountants and lawyers to keep their names secret.

In emails, Evans asked the local corporate registry agents in the British Virgin Islands to list one of his own firms on the country’s corporate registry in place of the king so nothing could be traced back — a technique that may breach BVI law, according to experts who reviewed the documents on behalf of this investigation.

In one email, BVI administrators — Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee, better known as Alcogal — refer to a list of companies provided by Evans with the king’s companies highlighted in yellow. But instead of putting the king’s name in writing, Evans listed them as belonging to “you know who.”

Evans also asked Alcogal staff to print out all documents and keep them in hard copy only, shielding them from data leaks, and allow access “only on a need-to-know basis.”

King Abdullah, who awards an annual eponymous prize for transparency, purchased the homes between 2003 and 2017. They include a house in Ascot, U.K., where Queen Elizabeth attends horse races; multimillion-dollar apartments in the posh London, U.K., neighbourhoods of Kensington and Belgravia; and three luxury apartments in Washington, D.C., with panoramic views of the Potomac River.

They also include side-by-side-by-side beachfront mansions in Malibu, California. One, a seven-bedroom manor on sprawling grounds the size of a football field, was bought in 2014 for $33.5 million (U.S.). Another, next door, will be demolished and rebuilt at twice the size, according to California planning records. The third is currently undergoing renovations to add a swimming pool and a 20 sq. metre outdoor barbecue and fireplace.

The Pandora Papers show the king acquired nearly 80 per cent of the properties between 2008 and 2017.

In 2012, while the king bought one of his high-end Washington, D.C., properties, thousands of Jordanians filled the streets across the country protesting political and economic turmoil that included chants naming King Abdullah himself: “Oh, Abdullah son of Hussein, where did the people’s money go?”

Last year, Jordan’s then-Prime Minister Omar al-Razzaz launched a crackdown on tax evasion, which was estimated to be costing the government $800 million (U.S.) a year.

The king’s lawyers, in written correspondence, said there is nothing improper in the king’s ownership of properties through offshore companies and that he has not misused public money or aid.

Most of the companies identified by reporters either no longer exist or do not relate to him, they said. When asked to detail those properties, they declined due to alleged privacy and security concerns.

He has no motivation to avoid taxes by going offshore because, as king, he does not pay taxes, the lawyers said.

They said offshore holdings of real estate provided protection from terrorist threats in Jordan and across the Middle East that would put the king and his family at risk if their addresses were made public.

Experts in the region point to another possible motivation for the secrecy: potential scandal.

“I suspect Jordanians will be outraged,” said Jillian Schwedler, a leading international expert in Middle East politics and author of Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen, predicting the public response to the unpopular king’s secret real estate buying spree.

“It will be widely condemned and certainly the topic of public debate.”

Annelle Sheline, an expert on religious and political authority in the Middle East, told the ICIJ that Jordan isn’t as wealthy as some of the other oil rich states in the region.

“Jordan doesn’t have the kind of money that other Middle Eastern monarchies, like Saudi Arabia, have to allow a king to flaunt his wealth,” she said.

Sheline, a research fellow with the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C., added, “If the Jordanian monarch were to display his wealth more publicly, it wouldn’t only antagonize his people, it would piss off Western donors who have given him money.”

Since 2011 — when the king began purchasing many of his offshore properties — the crises in neighbouring Syria, Israel and Iraq have taken a heavy economic toll. Jordan, already one the region’s poorest countries, is where many refugees came to flee the nearby turmoil. The kingdom now depends on foreign aid to support its own people and the millions of refugees it hosts.

Since the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, international aid to the Middle East has skyrocketed. The 38 OECD countries, which represent the bulk of international aid, more than doubled their yearly aid to the region, sending a total of nearly $11 billion (U.S.) to Jordan from 2012-2019.

In that time, Canada’s assistance grew by almost 20 times, rising from $9 million in 2012 to $157 million in 2017, before dropping to $118 million in 2019, the last year for which statistics are available. In total, Canada sent more than $750 million to Jordan over the last decade.

Jordan is now the sixth largest recipient of Canadian aid dollars, getting more money than Iraq, Haiti or Lebanon. Canadian aid goes to fostering girls’ education, funding refugee settlement, anti-terrorism training and economic development assistance.

At the same time, King Abdullah’s personal net worth is estimated to be in the range of $750 million to $1 billion (U.S.) That’s almost double Queen Elizabeth II of the U.K’s $520 million estimated net worth but a tiny fraction of King Salman of Saudi Arabia’s approximately $18 billion in personal wealth.

“It’s far, far in excess of anything that the royal family ever possessed over the half century preceding King Abdullah’s ascension,” said Sean Yom, a Jordanian expert and associate professor of political science at Temple University.

He has not done it alone.

“He has always recognized that you need a team of really entrusted people, often from highly educated circles in the West — Western elites, financial elites, banking experts who specialize in private wealth management ... I think his assumption is that the people he pays very, very well to manage his assets for him, to manage his legal matters ... will make things right.”

The direct source of his wealth is not entirely clear.

But it has inspired nagging and widespread allegations of corruption from many Jordanians and Jordan watchers.

“Jordanians have openly declared the royal family as beholden to some sort of corrupt act that has resulted in self-aggrandizement and the market rise of their own wealth portfolios,” Yom said.

While Jordan has long been seen as relatively stable ground in an otherwise tumultuous region, that simmering public discontent with the unpopular king has begun spilling over.

In April this year, the king was the target of an alleged coup that posed a “threat to the country’s stability,” the government declared. Police arrested 20 people and the king’s younger half-brother, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, was accused of conspiring against the kingdom. The prince, who has been a long-time thorn in the Jordan government for his public criticisms of corruption in the country, denied involvement.

When asked about the political turmoil he is facing during a CNN interview in July, King Abdullah said, “if you’re a member of the royal family, you have privileges. You need to respect those privileges. But also there are restrictions. And the politics at the end of the day is a purview of the monarch.”

Throughout the king’s acquisitions, Evans was a fierce defender of his client’s privacy.

Little has been known or published about the accountant until now. A Star investigation has pieced together his unique career path.

In an online bio, Evans lists himself as an associate of Saskatchewan’s institute of chartered accountants. Saskatchewan government archives show he was hired as an internal auditor in the provincial ministry of finance in 1982 earning a salary of $26,965.

According to a former colleague in Saskatchewan, Evans was recruited to the Canadian prairies due to a shortage of accountants at the time and stayed for about a year until leaving for Dubai.

“He came in as a trained accountant and had to take Canadian courses at that time,” recalls Arlo Fielden, who worked at the provincial auditor’s office from 1976 to 1983.

After leaving Regina, Evans spent more than two decades with the branch office of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers in the United Arab Emirates as a tax adviser to local clientele before launching his own wealth management firms in Switzerland, Khalij Fiduciaire S.A. and Fidigere S.A, according to Swiss company records.

Through his companies, Evans acted as one of the king’s primary wealth managers, according to leaked emails between him and Alcogal, the BVI-based corporate agent that registers companies in Caribbean tax havens.

It is unclear how Evans came to represent King Abdullah in his offshore dealings, which would involve the incorporation of at least 36 offshore companies. The documents don’t reveal the exact purpose or assets of all the shell companies owned by the king. Some are described as owning unspecified investments in the U.S. and Europe.

In a 2016 draft business agreement between Evans and Alcogal, the king’s wealth manager repeatedly sought to limit when, where and to whom the sovereign’s name would be disclosed.

As originally written by Alcogal, the “written terms of business” agreement required the offshore firm to share information about the king’s ownership with BVI authorities, such as tax and law enforcement officials.

Evans modified the document to require Alcogal to shield his “unusually sensitive clients.” Alcogal must “store data ... in non-electronic form with access only on a need-to-know basis.”

The leaked documents do not say whether Alcogal accepted the modifications; the law firm continued to work with Evans and FidiGere after the agreement was discussed.

“Currently we only have one client who fits this category” of such unusually sensitive clients, Evans wrote. While he did not name the king or his companies directly, other documents sent around the same time mention Abdullah by name.

Evans was particularly worried about what could happen to the king’s passport. Evans agreed to provide Alcogal with an electronic copy but asked the firm to restrict access and secure it with a password. Alcogal complied.

With document handling issues resolved, Alcogal and Evans confronted a thorny question: whether to declare to BVI corporate registry authorities that the companies’ owner was the King of Jordan.

Under BVI laws enacted in the wake of bombshell exposes of offshore secrecy, including the 2016 Panama Papers investigation, firms that help create shell companies for clients must provide BVI officials with the names of the actual owners — known as “ultimate beneficial owners” — of all companies registered in the BVI.

The information is then recorded on a confidential BVI government registry known as Beneficial Ownership Secure Search, or “BOSS.” Under BVI law, Alcogal must record such information even for companies that move to other tax havens like Panama, as a number of the king’s were.

According to the leaked emails, Evans asked Alcogal instead to list on the confidential BOSS register one of his own firms — either Khalij Fiduciaire or Fidigere — and not the king himself as the beneficial owner of the king’s companies.

Alcogal’s compliance officer in the BVI found that recording one of Evans’ companies as the beneficial owner of the king’s shell businesses was possible, according to an email from December 2017.

But the compliance officer also declared that doing so flouted at least the spirit of the new law, which sought to clean up the island’s reputation as a haven for dirty money. The law required Alcogal to provide ownership information “without delay,” the compliance officer wrote. Listing Khalij or Fidigere “does not facilitate the ‘without delay’ part” of the law, he said.

The leaked documents do not show who was ultimately listed as the beneficial owner.

In a written response to questions, Alcogal said that the law does not require the firm to disclose details of ownership by politically exposed people, known as PEPs, on the basis of their political ties alone. The firm said that it conducts enhanced background checks on all politically connected individuals. Due diligence laws have changed over time in countries where Alcogal operates, it said.

Hakim Creque, a BVI lawyer who works for a firm led by Canadian lawyer and international fraud specialist Martin Kenney, reviewed the BOSS legislation on behalf of this investigation.

In a written opinion, he said a sovereign acting in a personal capacity “should be reported as the beneficial owner” and that a company agent who intentionally provides false information about beneficial ownership to the BOSS database would be guilty of a criminal offence punishable by a fine up to $75,000 and imprisonment up to five years.

With files from James Oliver, BBC; Mago Torres, Margot Williams, Emilia Diaz-Struck, ICIJ.The Pandora Papers is a global collaboration between the Toronto Star and the nonprofit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. If you like journalism like this, please make a donation to ICIJ to support it

SW Sheila Wang is a municipal politics and general assignment reporter for YorkRegion.com and its sister papers. Reach her via email: [email protected]

Will Fitzgibbon is a senior ICIJ reporter. He is also ICIJ's Africa and Middle East partnership coordinator.