Yassir Arafat and his senior financial adviser risked about a quarter of the Palestinian Authority's assets by investing more than $200m (€156m) in a single company, a Financial Times investigation has found.

Official assets are usually invested conservatively and, in internal Palestinian discussions, the investments in Orascom Telecom Holdings, the Cairo-based telecoms company, in 2001 and 2002 were criticised as a gamble.