Assad Defect
His reception may depend on who’s in charge.
A Damascus native, he left Syria as a youth to study engineering before returning in the 1960s to take over his family’s second-generation paper business, now called Vimpex. As recently as April 2011, he also served as chairman of Syria’s Cham Holding, a sprawling conglomerate controlled by Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf. It was for that association Kuzbari found himself slapped with U.S. sanctions on May 18 of that year. He was removed from the list after it was deemed there was no legal merit, his lawyer said.
For the hard-line opposition, "defecting from the regime isn’t good enough, you have to publicly state you’re against them," said al-Kattan at St. Andrews, whose Centre for Syrian Studies is partly funded by Asfari’s foundation. "He hasn’t made any public statement, with or against the regime.”
Zaabi, a civil engineer by training, comes from Daraa, the city where Assad’s quashing of a demonstration triggered the war. He left Syria in 1988 for a job in the United Arab Emirates that included a house, a car and 2,000 dirhams ($540) a month.
Three years later, he started his own business, building small structures with shops on the first floor and housing units on the second before growing into a company that includes real estate, contracting, hospitality, industry and education units. Zaabi’s empire is now valued at more than $750 million by the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, though he said his net worth easily exceeds $1 billion.
In an interview at his Samaya Hotel in Dubai on May 11, Zaabi said it won’t be enough just for the war to stop for Syrian magnates to return. There should be a transparent government in place and rule of law to reassure them, he said. Then the priority is education and health care for the millions of children who have gone without proper schooling and tens of thousands have some kind of disability from the war.
"Those who were 10 when the conflict began are now 15 and some of them have seen nothing but murder and blood around them," said Zaabi. "What can we expect from them? How can we deal with them?"