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Perry's property buyer in '07 land deal was influential but 'invisible'
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, July 25, 2010
Alan Moffatt has moved in some influential circles, but he has attracted little notice during his time in Texas.
"He was like the invisible man," said Jamie Boerner, who lived next door to a house Moffatt once owned in Alamo Heights, a San Antonio suburb.
A 60-year-old British national, Moffatt owns a condo in Alamo Heights, where he has lived with his 31-year-old wife. He also spends time in the United Kingdom and Spain, and has done business around the world.
Moffatt stayed low-key when he paid Gov. Rick Perry $1.15 million for a waterfront lot in 2007. The purchase was made in the name of his company, Wallace Holdings LLC, which is registered in Delaware.
Some acquaintances said they knew Moffatt only as a business partner of Doug Jaffe, the aviation entrepreneur and owner of the Horseshoe Bay resort where Perry had owned his land.
Susan Pierce, president of American Bank of Texas in Marble Falls, has made several loans to Moffatt on land deals. "I've known Mr. Moffatt for years," she said, "and I don't have anything negative to say about him."
Documents and interviews portray Moffatt as an international businessman active in aviation, whose company once faced accusations of arms deliveries in connection with a brutal civil war. He also has ties to controversial Third World leaders, The Dallas Morning News found.
In 2006, for example, he and Jaffe traveled to Gambia, a small Muslim country on the western coast of Africa. Jaffe owned an executive Boeing 727 and found a potential buyer in President Yahya Jammeh, who once vowed to "cut off the head" of any homosexual in his country.
The jet was also transported to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it was shown to another potential buyer, President Joseph Kabila. The president is a former commander of child soldiers, called kadogos, and was trained at the People's Liberation Army National Defense University in China, according to published reports.
Jaffe and Moffatt also made stops in Nigeria, Rwanda and United Arab Emirates, Moffatt said in an interview.
In the 1990s, Moffatt and Peak Aviation, a company he owned, were in the spotlight when the British government investigated Peak in connection with arms shipments to Africa for alleged use in the Rwandan genocide. About 800,000 people may have died in the 1994 tribal conflict.
Peak was accused in the British press of acting as a subcontractor for another aviation company, Mil-Tec.
"I do recall an investigation into Mil-Tec and Peak Aviation in respect of breaches of the U.N. arms embargo on Rwanda," Cedric Andrew, formerly a senior investigator for British customs, said in an e-mail to The News.
Moffatt acknowledges his company made at least one arms flight into Goma, a city bordering Rwanda in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then called Zaire. He said the flight was a legal government-to-government transfer between Bulgaria and Zaire.
He was never charged with a crime. The British government never prosecuted anyone involved with Mil-Tec because of "delays and omissions" in implementing the U.N. arms embargo, according to the U.N. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry for Rwanda.
Peak Aviation was involved in four arms flights to Goma, according to information first aired in a British television news show. Moffatt was confronted by the show's camera crews and denied involvement in arms shipments. "We don't do any gun-running," he said.
"After the TV program, they (British customs officials) had to interview me," Moffatt told The News. "The interview didn't last very long. And, they were very amenable. It was a very pleasant interview. And that was that. Everything was correct."
Moffatt later told The News that he met with British customs officials a second time.
Accusations concerning Peak Aviation's role in African arms shipments have since been repeated by The Arms Fixers, a 1999 report by the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers, British American Security Information Council and the International Peace Research Institute.
Peak Aviation was accused of shipping about 40 tons of Egyptian grenades, machine guns and Chinese-made ammunition, according to The Shallow Graves of Rwanda, a book by the U.N. secretary-general's special representative to that country during the 1990s.
Mike Selwood, a 40-year veteran of the aviation business, said he flew arms into Zaire on orders from Peak Aviation. "That's the only flight that I've ever been involved in where I've gone, 'Uh oh. No more. This is wrong,' " Selwood told The News.
Reached in Kuwait, Selwood said he recalled one flight aboard a Boeing 707. "You couldn't miss the fact that there were arms on the plane," he said.
Selwood told the British television show that he carried "some 36-and-a-half tons, primarily of hand grenades" on a Peak Aviation flight into Zaire. "What is quite apparent is that Peak Aviation and Mr. Moffatt would be only too happy to carry whatever you want, wherever you want and to whoever you want," Selwood told the show.
Staff writers Steve McGonigle and James Drew contributed to this report.
rmcneill@dallasnews.com
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