Word: orascom
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Naguib Sawiris likes to think of himself as the Middle East's answer to Richard Branson. Last year the Egyptian entrepreneur started operating what is so far Iraq's only mobile-phone network. After just six months, his company, Orascom Telecom, already has more than half a million subscribers there, earning it $95 million before taxes and interest. Like Branson, Sawiris is a music lover - he calls himself a "party animal" - and has a taste for risky ventures. To date, six Orascom engineers and technicians have been kidnapped in Iraq and two of its sites have been shot...
...since divided his empire among his three sons: Naguib, the eldest, took telecommunications; the youngest, Nassef, runs the construction business; and the middle brother, Samih, has a tourism and travel company. Naguib seems to have inherited his father's golden touch. Over the past six years, Cairo-based Orascom Telecom Holding has grown into an increasingly profitable company with more than $2 billion in annual revenue and 14.5 million subscribers in Muslim countries, including Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia...
...sponsorship strategy has yielded a few early successes. For the soccer team, the N.O.C.I. has inked two-year deals with LG Electronics, a South Korean company; Iraqna, a subsidiary of Egyptian conglomerate Orascom; and Bestseller, a Danish apparel company. Each contract is worth between $300,000 and $550,000. The N.O.C.I. has reached out to U.S. companies with less success. A delegation met with Nike and Motorola in April. "It was the pitch from hell," says Hayder al-Fekaiki, director of IraqiSport, a London-based start-up that the N.O.C.I. hired to help negotiate its sponsorship deals. He cited...
...another deal is coming under scrutiny. A senior Pentagon official told TIME that the U.S. is reviewing its decision to grant the mobile license for Baghdad and central Iraq to a consortium led by Egyptian telecom giant Orascom because of its ties to Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire who built his fortune partly through arms deals with the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. Industry sources say Auchi provided Orascom with a $20 million loan to help pay down its $500 million debt. The sources say the loan gave Auchi, who faced French prosecutors earlier this year for his role...