Owner of Aston Villa and large shareholder of Adidas: this is the latest metamorphosis of the richest man in Egypt | Business

Egypt’s richest man, Nassef Sawiris, and the crown jewel of his economic empire, the chemical giant OCI, are once again in transformation. After leading the group, which is listed in the Netherlands, to become one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, Sawiris, who has a net worth of almost 8 billion euros according to Forbes magazine, is considering a radical change in business. He still doesn’t know where it will take him, but the Egyptian billionaire, whose investment portfolio includes the English football club Aston Villa and the sports multinational Adidas, is seeking to once again redefine his future, faithful to the way of doing and understanding business. his family.

One of the most drastic options that the 63-year-old businessman, also a member of the international board of JP Morgan, is considering is to convert everything into banknotes and make his way into other sectors: continue fragmenting his main holding company and sell the parts to become a company of special purpose acquisition, a SPAC. “We are quite open-minded,” he recently acknowledged in an unusual interview with the British newspaper Financial Times (FT). “We always say that we are builders, not owners,” he slipped, in an apparent nod to the business career of his family.

Nassef Sawiris is the youngest son of the late Onsi Sawiris, whose first steps as a construction businessman in Egypt came up against the wave of nationalizations of the socialist government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s. With the rise of his successor, Anwar el Sadat, the architect of Egypt’s policy of opening up to the private sector in the 1970s, Onsi returned to the fray and ended up turning Orascom Construction into one of the country’s largest contractors. The firm continued to prosper in the three decades of former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime, during which the Sawiris always maintained close connections with Cairo’s political elites.

The diversification of the business came in the eighties and nineties at the hands of his three sons, all trained abroad, who assumed control of Orascom and expanded its activities in three sectors: the largest, Naguib, in telecommunications; the middle one, Samih, in tourism; and Nassef, in construction, expanding into the cement industry and emerging markets, first as CEO and then president of the subsidiary Orascom Construction Industries, which was eventually renamed OCI.

In 2008, Orascom sold its cement division to France’s Lafarge for €10.2 billion, which included a subsidiary in Syria that years later pleaded guilty to having paid several million dollars to armed groups, including the Islamic State. to maintain its activity. In the 2008 operation Nassef Sawiris became one of the main shareholders of the French firm and followed its merger in 2015 with the Swiss Holcim to form the largest cement company in the world. Sawiris sold his stakes in 2019.

The Sawiris undertook one of their biggest business reorganizations after the 2011 revolution in Egypt. Under President Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected in an election in 2012, prosecutors imposed a travel ban on Nassef and Onsi Sawiris over a tax evasion case related to the sale of the cement division to Lafarge. Some interpreted the accusation as an attempt by the Islamist government to stoke the liberal opposition or to persecute those believed to have benefited from the widespread corruption of the Mubarak years. The travel ban was lifted in 2013, after a million-dollar payment from OCI.

It was during that period that OCI carried out a share swap with its Dutch parent company, moved to Amsterdam and turned its attention to the chemical sector, especially fertilizers. Shortly before, Naguib Sawiris had liquidated almost all of his assets in Egypt. But it was not until the violent rise to power of the current president, Abdel Fatah al Sisi, in 2013, that the Sawiris once again promised million-dollar investments in the country. Today Orascom is the largest employer in Egypt and is one of the firms that has benefited the most from the Government’s infrastructure megaprojects; although Nassef’s brothers, Naguib – the most politicized – and Samih, have in recent months disapproved of the Government’s management of the deep economic crisis in the country, in a very unusual display of criticism.

Sports investments

In the last decade, Nassef Sawiris has also made his way strongly into the world of sports. In 2015 he acquired, through his family investment company NNS, 6% of Adidas. And in 2018 he teamed up with American billionaire Wesley Edens to form the V Sports holding company and take over 55% of Aston Villa, led by Spanish coach Unai Emery. V Sports also has stakes in the Portuguese Vitória. In 2020, NNS revealed that it also owns a stake in the company that owns the NBA’s New York Knicks and the NHL’s New York Rangers ice hockey team. In his interview with the FT, Sawiris confessed that getting into sports has helped him change his view on the qualities behind success: “You come to the conclusion that attitude and work ethic trump talent at any time.”

For a year now, however, Sawiris’s eyes have been focused on OCI. Its board began a strategic review of its business last March, and as part of its bid to sell assets, the company announced in the span of just three days in December the sale of a fertilizer plant in Iowa and its 50 % in Fertiglobe, the largest fertilizer producer in the Middle East. The operations amounted to more than 3.3 billion euros each. All eyes are now on its methanol and ammonia divisions. And Sawiris has already advanced that “there is more to come.”

His family group NNS also announced in December that it would join the long procession of billionaires who have moved to Abu Dhabi in recent years, in their case from Luxembourg. His intention is to invest in Europe, the Middle East and the US, and find, in his own words, “English law without the English climate.”

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