Said Khoury (No. 9)

	Net Worth	7.20 bn
	Age	90
	Source of Wealth	Consolidated Contractors International Company
	Marital Status	Married & 3 sons

 
Khoury was born in 1923 in Safad, Palestine, to a wealthy landowner father who held fishing rights for the Sea of Galilee. Khoury returned to Safad after graduating in 1946 to start his own construction company but was forced to leave in May 1948, when hostilities broke out.

Said Khoury is renowned as much for his business acumen as his passionate support of the Palestinain cause. He chairs the Palestinian Businessmen’s Association, he’s governor of Arab Monetary Fund and he’s a major shareholder in the Arab Palestinian Investment Company. But of course none of this would have been possible without his enormous commercial success. With cousin Hasib Sabbagh, in 1952 he founded Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC), one of the first Arab construction companies.

The company sees sales of $4bn a year and manages projects in 40 countries, with a focus on Middle East and North Africa. Born in Safad, Palestine, Khoury moved to Lebanon in 1948 after the Arab-Israeli war and got his first job helping to build Tripoli Airport. He is now based in Athens. CCC has built landmark projects in everything from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison (built in 1969, before the ascent of Saddam Hussein to the presidency of the country), to the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC.

The company has undertaken major projects in Azerbaijan, Turkey, Africa and the Gulf. The success of CCC is rooted in the early 1960s, with Sabbagh and Khoury securing a contract related to oil pipe storage facilities for the Iraq Petroleum Company, which entailed working with the Bechtel Group, the world’s largest construction company. That deal cemented a long and lasting relationship between CCC and Bechtel and it defined CCC’s scale of operations across the world.