• The World’s Most Influential Arabs 2011

    Posted date:  April 16, 2011  |  No comment

    Seven years of the Power List, and seven years at the very top for Prince Alwaleed. There is simply no rival in the Arab world to his business achievements over the past 30 years.

    Today, Kingdom Holding Company, of which he owns 95 percent, covers 39 investments in seven sectors. It is the largest foreign investor in the US, with stakes in the likes of NewsCorp, Apple and Citi.

     

     

    1.Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud


    Title: Chairman
    Organization: Kingdom Holding Company
    Residence: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
    Country of citizenship: Saudi Arabia

    Regionally, major players from Samba to Savola all have the KHC stamp on their shareholdings.

    2.Wael Ghonim

    Title: Head of Marketing
    Organization: Google Middle East
    Residence: Dubai, UAE
    Country of citizenship: Egypt

    At the beginning of 2011, Wael Ghonim was an ordinary IT executive — albeit working for arguably the decade’s most prominent firm — living in a comfortable villa in the UAE.

    By mid-February, the bespectacled 30-year-old father of two had become the face of the Egyptian revolution, which resulted in the overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak. How did all this happen?

    Although the Google regional head of marketing was catapulted into the media glare in January, his presence was first noted by Egyptian opposition activists last June, when he set up a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said”, in reference to a young Alexandrian businessman who was beaten to death by local police. To protect his identity, Ghonim took on the online pseudonym Al Shaheed (the Martyr) and invited his Facebook group’s 350,000 members to a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on 25 January. With tens of thousands indicating they would come, the Google executive slipped away from the UAE and flew to Egypt

    3.Mohammed Bin Hammam

    Title: President
    Organization: Asian Football Confederation
    Residence: Doha, Qatar
    Country of citizenship: Qatar

    When Qatar won the World Cup, praise rightly went to the superlative performance put in by the bid team, but much of the credit must also go to Mohammed Bin Hamman.

    The president of the Asian Football Confederation, and a member of FIFA’s executive committee since 1996, Bin Hammam surely ranks as one of the most powerful men in the world’s most popular — and lucrative — sport. He also has no intention of resting on his laurels; in March, Bin Hammam confirmed that he would be standing for the full FIFA presidency, against Sepp Blatter. The Qatari is bidding to become only the fourth president of FIFA in half a century in the June election. He must convince two third of FIFA’s 208 national federations to vote for him. In a thinly veiled criticism of the long-serving Swiss, Bin Hammam said that FIFA needed presidential term limits to introduce “new people, new ideas and new thoughts to push the organisation forward”.

    4.Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum

    Title: Chairman and CEO
    Organization: Emirates Airline
    Residence: Dubai, UAE
    Country of citizenship: UAE

    No-one can argue that Sheikh Ahmed does not have a lot on his plate.

    After running arguably the most successful airline in the world over the last decade or so, the Emirates chairman’s skills are in strong demand as Dubai bids to recover from its property slump. As a result, Sheikh Ahmed took over from Sultan Bin Sulayem as chairman of Dubai World in December, and is thus in charge of finalising the restructuring of the emirate’s most troubled conglomerate. It’s early days yet, but the signs are that the new chairman’s tenure is already having a positive effect on Dubai World.

    5.Mohammed Alabbar

    Title: Chairman
    Organization: Emaar
    Residence: Dubai, UAE
    Country of citizenship: UAE

    There is something of the perpetually youthful about Mohammed Alabbar. Which is remarkable when you consider what it is he does.

    As job titles in the Middle East go, they don’t come much bigger than the Emaar chairman. Sixty companies fall beneath the Emaar banner — all of them big enough to put grey hairs on the head of any leader. Alabbar oversees them all while answering to shareholders, and continually looking for ways to push the brand into Asia and Africa. He’s done it since 1997, so the 48-year-old’s youthful appearance must be testament to some of sort superhuman drive and optimism.

    6.Wadah Khanfar

    Title: Director General
    Organization: Al Jazeera
    Residence: Doha, Qatar
    Country of citizenship: Palestine

    News in the Arab world is a matter of life and death, it is not television,” Wadah Khanfar told Arabian Business in July last year.

    Even Al Jazeera’s charismatic director general could not have foreseen how prescient his words would become. The Qatar-based TV channel has seen its stock rise steeply over the course of the last two months, with its journalists providing outstanding coverage in both Arabic and English to a transfixed planet. From Cairo to Tripoli, Sana’a and Manama, Al Jazeera has been the channel that millions have tuned into to catch the very latest in quick-moving events.

    7.Charles Elachi


    Title: Director
    Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
    Residence: Los Angeles, US
    Country of citizenship: Lebanon

    If there’s one person who has driven mankind’s thirst for knowledge about the other planets in our solar system, that man is probably Charles Elachi.

    NASA’s Deep Space Network, the Mars missions, and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn; these are all conducted — amongst many other space ventures — by California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is headed up by Lebanon-born Elachi.

    Between 1982 and 2000, Elachi was responsible for numerous flight missions, as well as planetary exploration and astrophysics; in 1982, he has even had an asteroid named after him. Elachi’s pioneering work has resulted in three exploration rovers landing on Mars’ surface — marking the first time that a scientific station had been set up on another planet. One of those rovers, Opportunity, is still roaming the planet’s surface today — six years after it first landed.

    8.Nujood Ali

    Title: Child Bride
    Residence: Sana’a, Yemen
    Country of citizenship: Yemen

    In 2008, a ten-year-old made an appearance in a Sana’a court, demanding a divorce from her husband, a man in his 30s.

    Nujood Ali, whose family lived in a suburb of the Yemeni capital, undertook an arranged marriage two months previously, and was regularly beaten by her in-laws and raped by her husband. Ali escaped from her husband’s, and a local lawyer, Shada Nasser, agreed to take on the case, arguing that the marriage violated a Yemeni law that prohibits sex with girls – even if wed – until they are “suitable for sexual intercourse”. After rejecting the judge’s proposal that she should resume living with her husband after a break of up to five years, Ali won her case, the divorce, and in the process became a figurehead against forced marriage in the impoverished country. Later that year, Ali visited the US, where she was honoured by Glamour magazine, alongside Nasser, as one of the “Women of the Year”. Her cause was recognised by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who described her as “one of the bravest women I have ever seen”.

    Ali returned home to Sana’a to live with her family, and has penned an autobiography – I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, co-written with Delphine Minoui, which was released last year. It promptly became a bestseller around the world.

    9.Adib Domingos Jatene

    Title: Doctor
    Residence: Sao Paulo, Brazil
    Country of citizenship: Lebanon

    Adib Jatene continues a long tradition of Arabic doctors that have reached the top of their game. The Brazilian professor is of Lebanese origin, and is universally respected for his role as the founder of the Jatene operation.

    This technique has been described as “one of the greatest contributions to paediatric cardiac surgery in recent times”, and was first performed by Jatene more than 30 years ago to treat transposition of the great arteries (TGA). The treatment revolutionised the way TGA is treated, and dramatically improved the long-term outcomes of children born with the condition.

    Not content with that, Jatene also played a vital role in the development of the first Brazilian pace-maker in 1961, as well as the first Brazilian-made defibrillator — which was made with riveted steel plate as there was no aluminium-welding technology in the country at the time.

    Jatene is one of the founders of the University of Sao Paulo Heart Institute. He later became

    secretary of health for Sao Paulo, and later became full Brazilian health minister under the administrations of presidents Fernando Collor de Mello and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

    10.Khalid Al Falih

    Title: CEO
    Organization: Saudi Aramco
    Residence: Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
    Country of citizenship: Saudi Arabia

    “The world will continue to rely on traditional fossil fuels for most of its energy needs for the coming decades,” Khalid Al Falih told an audience at a congress in Montreal towards the end of last year.
    “In fact, these energy sources — namely coal, oil and natural gas — are expected to account for about four out of every five units of energy that mankind will consume for the foreseeable future.”

    That’s good news for Al Falih, then. As boss of the world’s biggest unlisted company and the world’s largest oil company, he can lay claim to being possibly the most influential energy executive on the planet. With a workforce of around 60,000, crude oil reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil and revenues of $2.16 trillion on 2009, the superlatives just keep on coming for Saudi Aramco. It is also widely believed to be the most profitable company in the world.

     

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