Imagine you have a collection of vintage cars, and a film featuring Tom Cruise displays one of them, in a blockbuster such as “Top Gun”. The whole thing seemed to me like a fantasy, but it is the true story of Luay Hashim Allawi, an overseas investment banker.
The black 1958 Porsche Speedster that was used in “Top Gun” — with Kelly Ann McGillis at the wheel — is but one of Allawi’s vast vintage-car collection. And his association with “Top Gun” is but one of his many claims to fame.
Allawi owns the Saracen Group. Allawi says “Saracen” was the term used through history, especially by medieval Europeans, to refer to Arabs or at times Muslims. This was particularly so during the Crusades and hence Saladin was referred to as a Saracen, he says. “As a student of military history, studying the many early Muslim campaigns, I grew to admire their tenacity and chivalry,” he says. “It is a glorious history.”
The name and concept stayed with Allawi and on establishing his family office, which was meant to be a bridge between the East and West, he thought it appropriate to allude to a source of strength.
“We should be proud of our history and not hide in its shadow,” he says.
Luay Allawi was born in Baghdad in 1954 to a prominent family; his father was chief medical officer during the reign of King Faisal and a number of his uncles held senior ministerial positions in government. That changed after the 1958 revolution, an event that the country has yet to recover from. He carried on living in Iraq until 1970, when he left for the United Kingdom to continue his studies.
He attended St Joseph’s Catholic School in the Alwiyah area and then the Baghdad College, the now long-gone Jesuit School, which was arguably the best school in the Arab world at the time. The teachers were both international Jesuit fathers and local Iraqi high-calibre tutors. (The school was taken over in 1969 by the Baathist regime. All the fathers were unfortunately forced to leave, having run this wonderful institution for 40 years.) In 1973 he was accepted by London University to study biochemistry and then proceeded to complete an MSc in cell biology. He was offered a studentship to do research for a doctorate, but he joined the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, where he both studied banking and worked at the same time.
Allawi’s 2,500 chess sets collection
Allawi’s fascination with chess began when as a 5-year-old he used to watch his older brothers play the game. He realised early that this game was one of planning and arguably had nothing to do with luck. He was not particularly lucky in the games where luck played a part, such as Backgammon, so he took to chess.
It is important to note that the game of chess was played in Iraq under the Abbasid caliphs long before it arrived in the West. Under Haroun Al Rashid some of the first “masters” appeared; their writings survive until today and their treatises on openings such as “Al Mujanah” and “Al Muqadam” are arguably the first theories developed on the opening strategies.
For Allawi, chess sets are works of art. They combine the tactile element of the material from which they are made and also the simple and beautiful carvings of the majestic chess men. The chessboard is a square of 64 smaller squares and there are 32 chess pieces. “Set a board up and walk around it, the beauty of this symmetry and the pride of the pieces speak for themselves,” Allawi says.
Allawi started his collection with a few worthy sets and ended up with more than 2500, almost 98 per cent of which are antique dating back to between 1700 and 1900.
Most precious of the antique chess sets
Allawi considers two sets very special. The first is the one that his wife gave him back in 1981, the first Indian set and a beautiful Kashmir. It initiated the collection. The second is an old wooden Staunton set which he used in Iraq for many of the tournaments, many of which he won.
The most precious set is a very early Peppys Indian set that predates the one that was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is arguably closer to, if not, the original Peppys set.
Did he ever plan to have this collection? Collectors rarely start off with a view of building a vast collection of anything, he says, it is most often evolutionary. There is always a missing set or one that is marginally different and so you end up acquiring it, assuming you can afford it, he adds. His collection has grown over the years, and now it is close to being definitive, but he is sure there are still many missing!
The first in his car collection was a VW Beetle. He quickly moved on to early Porsches. The first classic car he acquired was a 1952 VW, which was followed by a 1956 Porsche 356 A, and now after collecting for 28 years, he has a collection of 84 cars. The collection is today predominantly Porsche, Ferrari and VW, with a few Maseratis, Lancias and De Tomasos thrown in. The collection is now housed in a specialised warehouse that has built to museum specifications, with heating, dehumidification and lighting. The cars are all well maintained and in perfect condition. While the collection is mostly from the postwar period, most of them from between 1948 and 1978, he also has a 1942 VW and a 1038 Jaguar SS 100.
US trophy
Recently, Allawi had a Ferrari 250 LM restored and it was given a “Classiche” certification by Ferrari. This became a 5-year project, as the original engine was lost after a 1964 race. However, he found the original engine, purchased it and remarried car and engine under the scrutiny of Ferrari. Allawi had the car flown to Miami for the Cavallino event a few weeks ago and won the first prize on the first day. The car was shown by the group which maintains and exhibits his cars.
Chess a way of life
“Chess, like love and music, has the power to make men happy”, he says. There are so many parallels between life and chess, he explains: the starting of life in a simple orderly way, the opening when all is uncluttered, then the start, when we rush to make an impact, the middle is where all the real battles are fought and the end game when we try to capitalise on all the good work carried over from the opening and middle games. It a game involving great joy and sadness, for even in victory one cannot help but feel a sympathy for the vanquished, as Wellington so famously said after his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, “The next most melancholy to a battle lost is a battle won”. Chess, like life, is a struggle.
Allawi won a few championships in his early days in Iraq, famously at the Alwiyah Club, the Mansour Club and at Baghdad College. He also participated in the Baghdad under-18 championship in 1969 and won all. In the United Kingdom, he entered the west London school tournament in 1970, and lost in the final. The better man won, he says, recalling his last tournament.
Together with his two collections, he manages his investment company, Saracen Group, which in turn has many subsidiaries focusing on various industry sectors. The group is a net investor and does not rely on bank finance, but at times works with like-minded investors on certain projects. We have invested in property in the United States, a bulk tanker fleet, aircraft, industrial projects and trading. “We have worked very closely with the Islamic banking institutions as fellow investors for more than 20 years,” Allawi says. “We are represented in the US, Bermuda, the UK, Switzerland, Kenya and Iraq. We have recently won a licence to establish a $300 million [Dh1,101 million] cement plant in Samawa, Iraq. We are also in the final stages of completing a water purification project in Basra and have supplied two oil tankers to the Ministry of Oil. Our subsidiary, Global Refinery, is also very active in building oil storage facilities and introducing new oil technologies in Iraq.”
Chess is about planning, patience and the final conclusive act of “checkmate”. Unlike in chess, lady luck is always present in life, Allawi says, so to make it congruent to chess, you must either eliminate luck, which is probably impossible, or assume that luck will be against you. If you succeed in that or even have a possibility of success, he adds, then the planning principles of chess will apply to life, too: making a flexible and yet decisive plan, deploying your forces according to your plan. There is an accumulation of small advantages along the way and finally the advantage becomes so large, Allawi explains, that the inevitable happens when you announce, “Checkmate!”
