PA Has Billions Of Dollars Invested In Orascom Corporation

2005-04-12

[Excerpt from "Who has the time to hear of hunger in the Gaza Strip?"

By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, 12 April 2005

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=563769& contrassID=2&subContrassID=5 &sbSubContrassID=0 ]

[IMRA - for report on the company: www.corporateinformation.com/ corpinfo.asp?cusip= C220AK160&curconv =840&B1=Convert ]

...While the PA bemoans an increasing shortage of arms and ammunition, or hunger in Gaza, the coffers of the Palestinian Investment Fund are bursting at the seams. And all thanks to a successful investment, or successful gamble, as some say, on the part of Yasser Arafat. In 2002, when the Orascom corporation, owned by Egyptian entrepreneur Sawiris family, ran into trouble, the controversial economic adviser and current member of the Orascom board of directors, persuaded the rais to invest no less than $200 million in the company. At the end of 2002, the corporation's share was trading at less than $2; yesterday, it stood at $71.5 - such that the PA investment is currently estimated in billions of dollars. The biggest brokers in the world have yet to forgive themselves for thumbing their noses at the two Palestinians, who in the throes of a violent struggle with Israel, with the intifada at its peak, and with the PA knocking on the doors of the donor countries, decided to invest a huge sum of money in a company that was going bankrupt.

The economic press is reporting that today, the Sawiris family commands a commercial empire worth more than $12 billion. Its business affairs stretch from America and all the way to Bangladesh and Iraq. The total worth of the companies under its control makes up some 40 percent of the value of the Egyptian share market. Its performance in 2004 was among the best seen on capital markets around the world. The most successful business, the one on which the Palestinians gambled, is the Orascom Telecom Holdings mobile telephone company. Naguib Sawiris, the eldest brother who sits at the top of the corporate ladder, wasn't the first to cotton on to the huge potential, estimated at some $600 million, in mobile telephone users in the Middle East. Before Oslo became a dirty word in Israel, there were those - first and foremost, Stuart Eisenstadt, under-secretary of state for trade in the Clinton administration - who believed that this huge market was Israel's for the picking.

Source: IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis