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  • New Zealand Listener

    SAIF HAVEN

    Sep 19, 2021 7 minutes
    by PETER McKENZIE

    Jim Boult has met everyone from Tom Cruise to former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. But his strangest brush with the rich and powerful came in 2009, when a senior government figure asked Boult – at that time the chief executive of Christchurch Airport and now the Mayor of Queenstown – to meet two Middle Eastern men with a very specific request.

    Boult says the men explained that every year they went on a New Year’s trip to a new place with an old university friend. This year, the friend had chosen Queenstown. There was a problem, however: “The person is coming in their own private jet – but it’s too big to land in Queenstown.”

    “That pricked my ears up,” says Boult. “There aren’t many private jets in the world bigger than A320s or 737s.”

    The plane turned out to be a four-engine Airbus A340 complete with a hot tub and cinema. The old university friend? Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, favourite son of brutal Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

    The head of airport security eyed the box and asked, “What have you got in the box, Jim?” Boult joked,

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