JEDDAH, 21 June 2005 — A libel case brought by Saudi businessman Yousef Jameel against the UK newspaper Sunday Times has been settled, according to a statement released by Jameel’s counsel. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Yousef Jameel owns a number of companies, including major car dealership Hartwell PLC., through the Abdul Latif Jameel Co. Ltd. The case concerned an article published in June 2003 entitled “Car Tycoon ‘Linked’ to Bin Laden.”

In a statement read in the High Court in London on Wednesday, the Times accepted that Jameel was not a supporter of Osama Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda and expressed its regret if the article gave readers a different impression.

“The financial terms of the settlement are confidential,” said Andrew Stephenson of Carter-Ruck, the solicitor acting for Jameel. “The most important thing is the statement by the Sunday Times accepted that Mr. Jameel is not a supporter of Osama Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda,” he said.

The article in the Times was accompanied by pictures of Jameel, one of his car dealerships and the New York World Trade Center in flames. Jameel’s lawyer explained, “Mr. Jameel was concerned that readers of the article might have understood it to suggest that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that he had financially supported Osama Bin Laden in connection with terrorism and that he had helped fund the training of terrorists who carried out the attacks.”

As a result he started the libel action.

The lawyer told the court that the Sunday Times had reported that Jameel had been named as a defendant in the US on behalf of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks simply because his name was on a list of wealthy Saudi businessmen found in the offices of a charity in Bosnia in March 2002. The list was subsequently described by a judge in New York as a document “with serious foundational flaws.” The judge ruled that he could not “make the logical leap that the document is a list of early Al-Qaeda supporters,” Jameel’s counsel said.

The list is believed to date from 1988 when Bin Laden’s role supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union was looked upon favorably by Western governments, including the US, the lawyer pointed out. Jameel denies that he has ever made a donation to Bin Laden, to Al-Qaeda or to the charity in Bosnia.

Stephen Suttle, on behalf of the Sunday Times, said it was not the intention of the paper to give credence to the claim against Jameel and that the Sunday Times had never sought to maintain that Jameel had financially supported Bin Laden or that he had helped fund the training of the Sept. 11 terrorists.