The latest metamorphosis of the richest man in Egypt, Nassef Sawiris: Owner of Aston Villa and shareholder in Adidas

Egypt’s richest man, Nassef Sawiris, and the crown jewel of his economic empire, chemical giant OCI, are once again undergoing a transformation. After piloting the Netherlands-listed group into one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers, Sawiris, who has a net worth of $8.7 billion according to Forbes magazine, is mulling a radical business turnaround. He does not yet know where it will take him, but the Egyptian billionaire, whose investment portfolio includes the English soccer club Aston Villa and the sports multinational Adidas, is looking to redefine his future once again, remaining faithful to his family’s way of doing and understanding business.

One of the more drastic options being considered by the 63-year-old, who is also a member of J.P. Morgan’s international board, is to turn it all into cash and move into other sectors: further fragmenting his main holding company and selling off the parts to become a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). “We’re quite open-minded,” he recently told the Financial Times, in a rare interview. “We always say that we are builders, not holders,” he added, in an apparent nod to his family’s business background.

Sawiris is the youngest son of the late Onsi Sawiris, whose first steps as a construction entrepreneur in Egypt ran into the 1960s nationalization wave of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist-tinged government. 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 eventually turned Orascom Construction into one of the country’s largest contractors. The firm continued to thrive 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 about in the 1980s and 1990s through his three sons, all foreign-educated, who took over Orascom and expanded its activities in three sectors: the eldest, Naguib, in telecommunications; the middle son, Samih, in tourism; and Nassef, in construction, expanding into the cement industry and emerging markets, first as CEO and then chairman of the subsidiary Orascom Construction Industries, which was eventually renamed OCI.

In 2008, Orascom sold its cement division to France’s Lafarge for $12.8 billion, which included a subsidiary in Syria that years later pleaded guilty to having paid several million dollars to armed groups, including Islamic State, to maintain its activity. The deal saw Nassef Sawiris become a major shareholder in the French firm and in 2015 it merged with Switzerland’s Holcim to form the world’s largest cement maker. Sawiris sold his stakes in 2019.

Sawiris undertook one of his biggest business reorganizations after the 2011 revolution in Egypt. During the term of President Mohamed Morsi (2012-13), the first democratically elected leader of Egypt, the Public Prosecutor 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 indictment 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, following a million-dollar payment from OCI.

It was during that period that OCI completed 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 his assets in Egypt. But it was not until the violent rise to power of the current president, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, in 2013 that the Sawiris returned to pledge millions of dollars in investments in the country. Today, Orascom is Egypt’s largest employer and one of the firms that has benefited most from the government’s infrastructure megaprojects although Nassef’s brothers, Naguib — the most politicized — and Samih have in recent months criticized the government’s management of the country’s deep economic crisis, in a very unusual display of dissent.

Sports investments

Over the past decade, Nassef Sawiris has also made a big splash in the world of sports. In 2015 he acquired 6% of Adidas through his family investment company, NNS, and in 2018 he partnered with U.S. billionaire Wesley Edens to form the holding company V Sports, which bought a 55% stake in Premier League club Aston Villa. V Sports also owns stakes in Portuguese soccer team Vitória Setúbal. In 2020, NNS revealed that it also has a stake in the company that owns the NBA’s New York Knicks and the NHL’s New York Rangers. 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 the past year, however, Sawiris has been focused on OCI. Its board initiated 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% stake in Fertiglobe, the Middle East’s largest fertilizer producer. The deals were worth more than $3.5 billion each. All eyes are now on its methanol and ammonia divisions and Sawiris has already stated that “there is more to come.”

NNS also announced in December that it would join the long procession of billionaires who have decamped in recent years to Abu Dhabi, in its case from Luxembourg. Sawiris’ intention is to invest in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S., and to find, in his own words, “English law without the English climate.”

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