The contract had been negotiated down to the last comma. It covered the sale of 18 Boeing 767s-"A big deal," as Seddik Belyamani, Boeing's legendary salesman, puts it. talking quietly on a recent Saturday in the comfortable Bellevue Club in a Seattle suburb. "We were staying across the street from the airline. At noon we walk over, saying that we'll sign and be back for lunch at one o'clock." In the airline's boardroom, all appeared to be going swimmingly: "I pick up my pen- it's a nice Boeing pen, the guy from contracts makes sure that the ink works- and I sav, 'Shall we go?' The chairman says yes, so I sign, and I move the contract to him to sign." That was when the chief financial officer said: "Just a minute, Mr. Chairman." The chairman put his pen down. "That pen was down for eight hours," Belyamani says. The airline didn't have a commitment from its bankers to finance the deal, the CFO told the chairman. "We want Boeing to give us an out, or commit to financing the airplanes themselves," Belyamani recalls the CFO saying. "I put my pen down and said 'We are not going to give you an out. We just cannot do that.'"
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