Multimillionaire Mohamed Shakarchi
The founder of the Emirates Gold refinery in Dubai has proved that even the most daunting of professional setbacks can be overcome and long-held dreams can eventually be realised with hard work and a little help from your friends, Hadeel Al Sayegh reports
Mohamed Shakarchi can still remember when, as a boy in the 1940s, he would watch his father buying and selling gold at a street market in Beirut.
Traders from around the Levant would come to the Lebanese capital to deal in strips of gold, nicknamed “french fries”, in coffee shops thick with smoke from nargile pipes.
“Some of the men would be holding rosary beads saying, ‘I buy, I sell, I buy, I sell’ with every flick of the bead,” Mr Shakarchi recalls.
On one occasion, a friend of his father’s placed a US$500,000 (Dh1.8 million) order but failed to pay up. He was never allowed back into the trading group.
It was a valuable lesson for the young Mohamed. In all his dealing in the precious metal, he has always ensured every trade is backed up by orders from clients with ample reserves of the yellow metal or bank guarantees.
“You have to be the most secured person to yourself. I am secured 100 per cent, over the margin and a couple million dollars above it,” he says, taking a long draw on a cigarette, one of about 100 he smokes daily.
Years later, he would rely on this reputation for straight dealing to overcome a false accusation of money laundering.
Mr Shakarchi was born in 1939 in Mosul, northern Iraq, into a prominent merchant family. Mosul was a trading hub in the newly independent nation, which had broken away from Britain seven years earlier.
The family was literally defined by its trade in sugar: shakarchi means “sugar trader” in Arabic. Mr Shakarchi’s father had expanded the family’s sugar empire into other areas including land, cement and cotton.
With an eye on expanding into the gold trade, Mr Shakarchi senior moved the family to Beirut, then the undisputed gold capital of the region. His son left school at the age of 15, and joined the family business that by then served clients in the Gulf, particularly the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland. When the socialist revolution swept Iraq in 1958, the Shakarchi assets were seized by the government, effectively cutting the family’s ties to the home country. Mohamed Shakarchi has never returned.
When Beirut descended into civil war in 1975, father and son moved to Geneva to focus exclusively on the gold and currency trade. The business consisted of purchasing gold scraps from sources in the Middle East and selling them to Swiss finance houses, such as the Swiss Banking Corporation and United Bank of Switzerland, which then turned them into gold bullion.
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Hadeel Al Sayegh 