Everything Must Go at a Princely Sale

It is a display of royal waste and self-indulgence usually kept hidden behind palace walls in this rich and tiny kingdom.

There are gold-plated toilet paper holders and gold-plated wastebaskets. There are marble toilets, crystal chandeliers and monogrammed cutlery. There is a giant bronze rocking horse, a Comanche helicopter flight simulator and a couch shaped like the back end of a Cadillac.

Once owned by Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the brother of the sultan of Brunei, these unusual pieces are among more than 20,000 items being sold off this week in a public auction unlike any event ever staged here.

Hundreds of ordinary Bruneians have come to each of the auction’s first four days to marvel at the excesses of Jefri--and to try to buy something that once belonged to him.

The six-day auction, which ends Thursday, could raise as much as $10 million to help pay a few of the debts of the disgraced prince, who managed to lose an estimated $16 billion of the family’s oil fortune during the 1990s.

Jefri, who owns the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles and once held the post of finance minister in Brunei, now lives in London and Paris on a $300,000 monthly stipend while he fights to keep the luxury hotels and other assets he owns outside Brunei from being seized by his creditors.

Until 1997, when the Asian economic crisis hit and Jefri’s losses became apparent, Sultan Sir Hassanal Bolkiah had been listed as the richest man in the world.

The auction is liquidating the remaining assets of the prince’s Amedeo Development Corp., primarily materials and tools intended for the construction of palaces and luxury hotels.

Among the more unusual items on offer are two Mercedes fire engines and the machinery to operate a bowling alley. There also are simulators for a Formula One racing car and an Airbus A-340.

Most of the items, however, would be of use mainly to someone wanting to build a palace or a luxury hotel. There are 8,500 sheets of marble, thousands of pieces of coveted Asprey china, tons of teak timber cut from the rain forest and dozens of televisions, refrigerators and stoves. There is also enough equipment to open a woodworking shop, a plaster factory, a laundry and several restaurants.

Brunei, situated on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, controls spectacular petroleum reserves in the South China Sea that have made it one of the wealthiest nations per capita.

The sultan has used some of the money to create a generous welfare state for his 330,000 subjects, where medical care and education are paid for and food and housing are subsidized. There is no income tax.

The oil fields also have financed a royal lifestyle of banquets, binges, jet-setting and shopping sprees beyond the imagination of many Bruneians. The sultan’s 1,788-room palace is said to be the largest residence in the world--bigger even than the Vatican. Among his other properties, the sultan owns the Beverly Hills Hotel.

While alcohol is strictly banned for ordinary citizens of the Islamic kingdom, such rules do not seem to apply to Jefri and the other royals, who like to splurge on vintage champagne.

The prince, who has the maximum four wives allowed under Islamic law, gained a reputation as an international playboy.

In 1997, a beauty pageant queen from the United States filed suit against Jefri and the sultan, alleging that she had been lured to Brunei, drugged and held against her will in an attempt to make her a sex slave. The royal brothers argued that they had diplomatic immunity, and they were excused from the suit.

Despite their disagreements over money, the sultan and prince are said to be close and to enjoy many of the same activities, including playing polo.

The family has ruled Brunei for more than 500 years, making it one of the oldest continuously reigning royal families in the world.

The sultans once held sway over large parts of neighboring Malaysia and the Philippines, but Brunei has been whittled away over the centuries to a realm about half the size of Los Angeles County.

Some maintain that the long-standing Bruneian practice of allowing first cousins to marry has weakened the royal gene pool and diminished the sultans’ ability to govern.

Without a century of British assistance and the discovery of oil in the 1920s, the kingdom might have vanished from the map.

Brunei applied to become a British protectorate in 1888 and did not regain its independence until 1984. When Britain pulled out, it left no foundation for elections or democratic decision-making.

For the last 39 years, Brunei has been under a state of emergency. Sections of the constitution are suspended, a free press is banned, and freedom of speech is nonexistent. Bruneians interviewed for this article unanimously declined to be identified by name for fear of retribution.

The sultan receives only favorable coverage in the local press. Tuesday’s newspapers, for example, carried as many as 10 color pictures of him attending a party in honor of his 55th birthday, which was July 15. One of the highlights, the papers reported, came when his majesty consented to cut the birthday cake.

Until Jefri’s financial misdeeds surfaced, the public knew little about the family’s shenanigans. Today, many Bruneians brush aside reports of royal wrongdoing as rumor and hearsay.

“The sultan is good for people,” said a Bruneian happy with his purchase of light fixtures at the auction.

Others believe that the prince is just a scapegoat for the royal family’s blunders and misbehavior. Bruneians, they say, are too comfortable to seek change.

“The public closes one eye because everything is almost free in Brunei,” said a college instructor who bought a freezer at the auction. “Sometimes you feel bad because of their activities, but nobody can do anything about it.”

Backed by oil wealth, the prince and Amedeo Corp. worried little about planning ahead or figuring out what the market would bear.

Today, Brunei is littered with the bankrupt company’s unfinished construction projects. A shopping center, an office high-rise and a dozen luxury apartment towers built by Amedeo stand empty. Construction has been halted on a huge palace the company was building for the prince.

The government took over and completed one of Amedeo’s biggest projects, the opulent Empire Hotel & Country Club, which cost nearly $1 billion to construct.

Even if the hotel was full every night, the cost of building it would not be paid off for generations. So far, the occupancy rate has often been below 10%.

Another of Jefri’s projects was an amusement park that charged no fee for admission or rides. Even so, the park was often nearly empty. It was taken over by the government, which in May began charging a modest admission.

In Los Angeles, Jefri paid an estimated $60 million for the 92-room Bel-Air Hotel in 1995. The hotel lost its coveted five-star rating last year after the Mobil Travel Guide downgraded the property to four stars. A spokeswoman said Tuesday that the hotel is not for sale.

In 1999, Jefri sold a 13,000-square-foot Beverly Hills-area home with city views, waterfall and pool for $9 million.

Until a preview of the auction opened last week, Bruneians had been prohibited from entering Amedeo’s sprawling facilities.

The company’s more than 20,000 employees were hired from overseas--mainly Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines--to prevent Bruneians from learning what their rulers were up to.

“This was a top-secret place,” said a British expatriate who has lived in Brunei for a decade. “They didn’t want anyone to know what was going on in the royal family.”

Many of the bigger items will be sold through privately negotiated deals on the last day of the auction. Most bidders have come from Brunei, but some have come from elsewhere in Southeast Asia and others have placed bids by telephone from the United States and Europe.

“We’ve had a very favorable response,” said Andrew Duckworth, a partner in Smith Hodgkinson International, the British firm brought in to run the sale. “We’ve billed this as a global auction, and that’s what it has proved to be. It has attracted the world’s attention.”

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Times staff writer Jesus Sanchez in Los Angeles contributed to this report.