Youssef Nada
Encyclopedia
Youssef Moustafa Nada is a noted businessman and Muslim Brotherhood
financial strategist, having recently served as chairman of al Taqwa Bank
, the multinational financial services outfit accused by the US Treasury Department during the Bush administration of financing al Qaeda. Nada himself vehemently denied funding Osama bin Laden
or any other terrorist organization, and in 2006 he sued the Swiss government for restitution of financial losses incurred due to the freezing of his assets and the ensuing investigation by Swiss authorities. Switzerland and Italy lacked sufficient evidence to support its prosecution against Nada and his businesses, let alone a conviction, and have formally requested several times that both the United States and the UN de-list Nada and his businesses from any list relating to al Qaeda, the final being in 2009. The United States finally acquiesced to his removal from the list of the United Nations of individuals tied to Al-Qaida on September 24, 2009, but continues to maintain Nada and his companies status as designated financiers of terrorism pursuant to Executive Order 13224. {See http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/programs/ascii/terror.txt}
At the age of six he enrolled at the Al-Ramliah Elementary School continuing on to the same area’s Middle School and High School.
Several published accounts place him in the employ of German military intelligence during WW II working on a high profile plot to flee the Mufti of Jerusalem from Palestine, however these appear to be based on assertions of French journalist - Richard Labeviere. Nada denies this, as he was only 9 years old in 1940, a time in which he claims not to have ever left the city of Alexandria.
One day at the age of 17, while stepping out of his father’s factory, he stumbled in a serious fight between the workers. The situation was escalating into a violent confrontation and the streets started to gather in a panicking crowd. Then, suddenly, a group of young people all dressed similarly in uniforms pushed the people aside, placed themselves in the middle of the quarrel and readily divided the factions. Youssef Nada recalls these scouts as being able to quickly put all sides at ease and solve the issue without any serious injuries. He was impressed and started to inquire about them. Not many could tell him who they were until he started to mingle with them and found out that they were a group of people calling themselves the “Muslim Brothers”. He began attending all of their meetings and decided to join them soon after. A few years thereafter he was one of the most active members in the group running gatherings with several thousand members.
This started to attract the attention of the local authorities who were under the instructions of the government of Jamal Abdel-Nasser to arrest any known member. In 1952 Youssef Nada was thus arrested and sent to a military concentration camp in the Egyptian desert, a place in which Nasser’s government would, from 1952 to 1954, imprison about 300’000 Brotherhood members.
The jail in the Egyptian desert becomes Nada's "home" for about two years from 1952 to 1954, a "home" where most of his early brotherhood friends were tortured, some to death. The experience leads him to decide to organize himself to leave Egypt for good. After being released he thus decides to return to the University of Alexandria to complete his studies in Agricultural Engineering, and in the mean time starts a milk production facility with a friend who was the son of an Ambassador in Egypt.
Egyptian milk production was going through a very difficult period and it was hard to access milk through the local farmers. At the same time Nada kept in mind that his would be a temporary business and that he would not want to invest in any long term farming arrangement so the group decided to develop milk from dried powder. Within a few months the two were controlling about a third of Alexandria’s milk supply. Their operation though proved unsustainable and the business soon turned into a fiasco with Nada’s financial independence attempts being pushed aside.
At the age of 28, and upon completion of his university studies, Youssef Nada leaves Egypt to Austria with a written permission from the Egyptian government, which, by then, had changed its ways on the Brotherhood. Within a few days from his arrival he finds employment at a local Emmenthal cheese factory in Graz. This is an experience which permits him to learn the chemical process needed for the production of the famous cheese, knowledge which he later put to work by using the facilities of the factory to produce dairies which he would then sell to local university students.
Meanwhile, he was able to obtain the Tunisian citizenship. This was very well respected and gave him the facility to travel anywhere without requiring a visa.
In 1961 a close friend of Nada invited him to Libya where a construction boom was developing. Nada seized on the occasion and started to spend his time between Libya and Austria.
In a matter of a few years he became the largest supplier of cement to the North African country. The activity led him to partner with Cementir, the Italian cement maker, to develop in 1965 the world’s first floating cement silos, two barges named GI-1 and GD-2 able to store bulk cement and loaded with bagging facilities. Cement soon became his main business along with smaller operations in other commodities ranging from steel to agriculturals.
By then though, Nasser's approach to the Brotherhood fell back into one of conflict and Youssef Nada became one of the members wanted by the Egyptians.
In 1969 with Libya's change of rule and because of Qaddhafi's close relationship with Nasser's ideas, Youssef Nada feared being rounded-up to his home country again. As a clandestine, he hid behind a fridge in the captain's room of one of his cement vessels, which was still discharging at Tripoli's port, and ordered the captain to sail. With great danger he managed to escape to Greece, where he was advised that a list had come from Egypt for people to be extradited from Libya and that he was the second name on it.
The experience is a turning point and forces him to decide to run all of his activities permanently from Europe.
The construction boom and the associated cement crisis in North Africa had by then moved to Saudi Arabia which was flooding with petrodollars and had a very small clinker production line in Riyadh not capable of satisfying the slightest part of the country's needs. This was Nada's big moment. With his terminal readily moved from Italy to Jeddah, no one could compete with him logistically and he soon dominated the market, becoming what many newspapers at the time defined as the King of Cement of the Mediterranean, given that his supplies were mainly from Greece's Heracles Cement. By 1973 Nada was trading over 7 million tons of cement per annum.
The silos were then sold by Nada to a consortium made up of Heracles Cement, Titan Cement and Rolaco. The idea was picked up by others and floating terminals today represent a crucial tool in the international trade of cement in areas of great need.
From Saudi Arabia Nada's activities began to shift and became less geographically focused. He landed a supply of cement to the Nigerian government.
, a former president of Algeria
, held a secret meeting at his Switzerland home attended by "major figures in some of the world’s most violent groups." Other attendees the meeting included the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman
and Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
, a leading Lebanese
Shi'ite Muslim scholar. In an interview on al-Jazeera, Nada himself vehemently denied any such thing to have occurred and the well-known hatred between the individuals involved along with their ideological differences makes the feasibility of the occurrence of such meeting very difficult to believe. The London based newspaper is run and owned by members of the Arab governments opposed to the Muslims Brotherhood.
Nada stresses the author's contradictions in that on one side he mentions that the document, in its original form, contains no reference of the Muslim Brotherhood's implication with the content while on the other hand the author still defines it as the Muslims Brotherhood's Secret Project (Project, Video interview with Newsweek ). During the Newsweek video interview referred to herewith, Nada states explicitly that as a politically involved person he received articles, studies and books from sources that were known and unknown to him and which came from all spectrum of anti or pro Islamic circles. Its title, "The Project", does not find any source in the original Arabic text (which can be found in Besson's book) and is entirely the author's invention (as Nada also confirms in his interview below). Furthermore, as the author himself states and as can be seen in the Arabic version of the text inside the book, the document does not have any mentioning of the Muslim Brotherhood; its connection with it hence remains a fully speculative imagination on the author's side (who also mentions as his collaborators The Frontpagemag??).
Nada accuses a circle of co-operating journalists and US government employees made of David Kane, Silvain Besson, Mark Hosenball, Richard Labaviere, Michael Isikoff, Lorenzo Vidino, Douglas Farah, ex-UN official Victor Comras (who was a member of the Security Council Monitoring Group from 2002 to 2004 which was forced to resign for its mistakes).
Other than Switzerland, Italy also had a lengthy investigation of the case, with the file there being closed in 2007 and the Prosecutor stating that the reasons to open the case were more political and agenda driven rather than judicial or suspicions and evidence based. Italian premier newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported on such event. The Swiss mission to the United Nations formally requested Nada be removed from the list, and in 2009, he finally was.
In an interview with Youssef Nada the Muslim Brotherhood comment "Although he was cleared of all alleged charges fabricated by intelligence agencies, Nada returned to the spotlight again after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak referred him along with 39 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders to military tribunal on charges of funding the Moslem brotherhood which is banned by the Egyptian regime. The falsification of the charges contradicts with the facts that Youssef Nada left Egypt 1959 and he is under a UN travel ban in Campione d’Italia (an Italian enclave in Swiss territory ), which equates to a house arrest given the size of the town, and also all of his assets have been frozen all over the world since November 2001 by orders of the UN security council. He is known as the Muslim Brotherhood’s international political foreign emissary."
It is believed that such mission mobilised all the international intelligence agencies against him.
Muslim Brotherhood
The Society of the Muslim Brothers is the world's oldest and one of the largest Islamist parties, and is the largest political opposition organization in many Arab states. It was founded in 1928 in Egypt by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna and by the late 1940s had an...
financial strategist, having recently served as chairman of al Taqwa Bank
Al Taqwa Bank
The Al Taqwa Bank is a financial institution incorporated in 1988. It is based out of The Bahamas, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein...
, the multinational financial services outfit accused by the US Treasury Department during the Bush administration of financing al Qaeda. Nada himself vehemently denied funding Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
or any other terrorist organization, and in 2006 he sued the Swiss government for restitution of financial losses incurred due to the freezing of his assets and the ensuing investigation by Swiss authorities. Switzerland and Italy lacked sufficient evidence to support its prosecution against Nada and his businesses, let alone a conviction, and have formally requested several times that both the United States and the UN de-list Nada and his businesses from any list relating to al Qaeda, the final being in 2009. The United States finally acquiesced to his removal from the list of the United Nations of individuals tied to Al-Qaida on September 24, 2009, but continues to maintain Nada and his companies status as designated financiers of terrorism pursuant to Executive Order 13224. {See http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/programs/ascii/terror.txt}
Early life
Youssef Nada was born on May 17, 1931 in Alexandria, Egypt to Mustafa Ali Nada and Naemah Abulsaood, the fourth child out of eleven. His father Mustafa owned a small farm and a dairy products factory, an activity in which Youssef would be involved during his spare time and which would shape his initial business activities.At the age of six he enrolled at the Al-Ramliah Elementary School continuing on to the same area’s Middle School and High School.
Several published accounts place him in the employ of German military intelligence during WW II working on a high profile plot to flee the Mufti of Jerusalem from Palestine, however these appear to be based on assertions of French journalist - Richard Labeviere. Nada denies this, as he was only 9 years old in 1940, a time in which he claims not to have ever left the city of Alexandria.
One day at the age of 17, while stepping out of his father’s factory, he stumbled in a serious fight between the workers. The situation was escalating into a violent confrontation and the streets started to gather in a panicking crowd. Then, suddenly, a group of young people all dressed similarly in uniforms pushed the people aside, placed themselves in the middle of the quarrel and readily divided the factions. Youssef Nada recalls these scouts as being able to quickly put all sides at ease and solve the issue without any serious injuries. He was impressed and started to inquire about them. Not many could tell him who they were until he started to mingle with them and found out that they were a group of people calling themselves the “Muslim Brothers”. He began attending all of their meetings and decided to join them soon after. A few years thereafter he was one of the most active members in the group running gatherings with several thousand members.
This started to attract the attention of the local authorities who were under the instructions of the government of Jamal Abdel-Nasser to arrest any known member. In 1952 Youssef Nada was thus arrested and sent to a military concentration camp in the Egyptian desert, a place in which Nasser’s government would, from 1952 to 1954, imprison about 300’000 Brotherhood members.
The jail in the Egyptian desert becomes Nada's "home" for about two years from 1952 to 1954, a "home" where most of his early brotherhood friends were tortured, some to death. The experience leads him to decide to organize himself to leave Egypt for good. After being released he thus decides to return to the University of Alexandria to complete his studies in Agricultural Engineering, and in the mean time starts a milk production facility with a friend who was the son of an Ambassador in Egypt.
Egyptian milk production was going through a very difficult period and it was hard to access milk through the local farmers. At the same time Nada kept in mind that his would be a temporary business and that he would not want to invest in any long term farming arrangement so the group decided to develop milk from dried powder. Within a few months the two were controlling about a third of Alexandria’s milk supply. Their operation though proved unsustainable and the business soon turned into a fiasco with Nada’s financial independence attempts being pushed aside.
At the age of 28, and upon completion of his university studies, Youssef Nada leaves Egypt to Austria with a written permission from the Egyptian government, which, by then, had changed its ways on the Brotherhood. Within a few days from his arrival he finds employment at a local Emmenthal cheese factory in Graz. This is an experience which permits him to learn the chemical process needed for the production of the famous cheese, knowledge which he later put to work by using the facilities of the factory to produce dairies which he would then sell to local university students.
Meanwhile, he was able to obtain the Tunisian citizenship. This was very well respected and gave him the facility to travel anywhere without requiring a visa.
In 1961 a close friend of Nada invited him to Libya where a construction boom was developing. Nada seized on the occasion and started to spend his time between Libya and Austria.
In a matter of a few years he became the largest supplier of cement to the North African country. The activity led him to partner with Cementir, the Italian cement maker, to develop in 1965 the world’s first floating cement silos, two barges named GI-1 and GD-2 able to store bulk cement and loaded with bagging facilities. Cement soon became his main business along with smaller operations in other commodities ranging from steel to agriculturals.
By then though, Nasser's approach to the Brotherhood fell back into one of conflict and Youssef Nada became one of the members wanted by the Egyptians.
In 1969 with Libya's change of rule and because of Qaddhafi's close relationship with Nasser's ideas, Youssef Nada feared being rounded-up to his home country again. As a clandestine, he hid behind a fridge in the captain's room of one of his cement vessels, which was still discharging at Tripoli's port, and ordered the captain to sail. With great danger he managed to escape to Greece, where he was advised that a list had come from Egypt for people to be extradited from Libya and that he was the second name on it.
The experience is a turning point and forces him to decide to run all of his activities permanently from Europe.
The construction boom and the associated cement crisis in North Africa had by then moved to Saudi Arabia which was flooding with petrodollars and had a very small clinker production line in Riyadh not capable of satisfying the slightest part of the country's needs. This was Nada's big moment. With his terminal readily moved from Italy to Jeddah, no one could compete with him logistically and he soon dominated the market, becoming what many newspapers at the time defined as the King of Cement of the Mediterranean, given that his supplies were mainly from Greece's Heracles Cement. By 1973 Nada was trading over 7 million tons of cement per annum.
The silos were then sold by Nada to a consortium made up of Heracles Cement, Titan Cement and Rolaco. The idea was picked up by others and floating terminals today represent a crucial tool in the international trade of cement in areas of great need.
From Saudi Arabia Nada's activities began to shift and became less geographically focused. He landed a supply of cement to the Nigerian government.
Meeting in Algeria
A 1986 article in London-based Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Nada, along with Ahmed Ben BellaAhmed Ben Bella
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Bella was a soldier and Algerian revolutionary, who became the first President of Algeria.-Youth:...
, a former president of Algeria
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...
, held a secret meeting at his Switzerland home attended by "major figures in some of the world’s most violent groups." Other attendees the meeting included the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman
Omar Abdel-Rahman
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman , commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United...
and Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadl-Allāh was a prominent Lebanese Twelver Shi'a marja....
, a leading Lebanese
Lebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
Shi'ite Muslim scholar. In an interview on al-Jazeera, Nada himself vehemently denied any such thing to have occurred and the well-known hatred between the individuals involved along with their ideological differences makes the feasibility of the occurrence of such meeting very difficult to believe. The London based newspaper is run and owned by members of the Arab governments opposed to the Muslims Brotherhood.
"The Project"
In a November 2001 raid on offices and residences associated with Youssef Nada, an untitled document, written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, ostensibly outlining a plan to infiltrate and defeat Western countries was found. Later referred to as "The Project" by Swiss-French journalist Sylvain Besson, the content and provenance of the document would become the subject of conflicting media accounts in subsequent years. Though the document contains no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood in its original form, it would be portrayed as a seminal Brotherhood text outlining their plan for Muslims to infiltrate and defeat Western countries.Nada stresses the author's contradictions in that on one side he mentions that the document, in its original form, contains no reference of the Muslim Brotherhood's implication with the content while on the other hand the author still defines it as the Muslims Brotherhood's Secret Project (Project, Video interview with Newsweek ). During the Newsweek video interview referred to herewith, Nada states explicitly that as a politically involved person he received articles, studies and books from sources that were known and unknown to him and which came from all spectrum of anti or pro Islamic circles. Its title, "The Project", does not find any source in the original Arabic text (which can be found in Besson's book) and is entirely the author's invention (as Nada also confirms in his interview below). Furthermore, as the author himself states and as can be seen in the Arabic version of the text inside the book, the document does not have any mentioning of the Muslim Brotherhood; its connection with it hence remains a fully speculative imagination on the author's side (who also mentions as his collaborators The Frontpagemag??).
Nada accuses a circle of co-operating journalists and US government employees made of David Kane, Silvain Besson, Mark Hosenball, Richard Labaviere, Michael Isikoff, Lorenzo Vidino, Douglas Farah, ex-UN official Victor Comras (who was a member of the Security Council Monitoring Group from 2002 to 2004 which was forced to resign for its mistakes).
Swiss and Italian investigation, 2001-2005
In the wake of the November, 2001 raids, Swiss official froze 24 bank accounts associated with Nada, and the Swiss federal prosecutor's office, led by Claude Nicati, began an aggressive inquiry in to the activities of Nada and Taqwa co-director Ali Ghaleb Himmat. Both men repeatedly denied any connection with Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, and ultimately the Federal Court in Bellinzona accepted an appeal for an ultimatum from Nada demanding that charges be explained, or the case dropped. On June 1, 2005 the case was dropped, due to lack of evidence and a subsequent condemnation by the Court to the Prosecutor for opening the file without any specific reason.Other than Switzerland, Italy also had a lengthy investigation of the case, with the file there being closed in 2007 and the Prosecutor stating that the reasons to open the case were more political and agenda driven rather than judicial or suspicions and evidence based. Italian premier newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported on such event. The Swiss mission to the United Nations formally requested Nada be removed from the list, and in 2009, he finally was.
Prosecution in Egypt
In January and February 2007, Egypt announced that it had frozen the assets of dozens of top Muslim Brotherhood figures, and that 40 of them will stand trial in Egypt’s military court. Figures targeted include most of the top leaders of the Al Taqwa Bank in Switzerland, the Muslim Brotherhood bank banned by the US for its alleged ties to al-Qaeda. Of the people tried in absentia only Nada and Ghaleb Himmat were associated to the bank. The Associated Press notes this court is "known for its swift trials and no right of appeal." Indeed, the trials came before the regional elections and were targeted at trying to confine the Muslim Brotherhood given their previous success in parliamentary elections. The Egyptian government fears the brotherhood as it is the only opposition group with real popular support among the Egyptian population. The military trials have not, as of August 22, 2007, resulted in any indictment.In an interview with Youssef Nada the Muslim Brotherhood comment "Although he was cleared of all alleged charges fabricated by intelligence agencies, Nada returned to the spotlight again after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak referred him along with 39 Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders to military tribunal on charges of funding the Moslem brotherhood which is banned by the Egyptian regime. The falsification of the charges contradicts with the facts that Youssef Nada left Egypt 1959 and he is under a UN travel ban in Campione d’Italia (an Italian enclave in Swiss territory ), which equates to a house arrest given the size of the town, and also all of his assets have been frozen all over the world since November 2001 by orders of the UN security council. He is known as the Muslim Brotherhood’s international political foreign emissary."
It is believed that such mission mobilised all the international intelligence agencies against him.