Iskandar Safa’s farewell to public life could have been a crowning moment. On January 19 President Macron of France toured CMN (Constructions mécaniques de Normandie), the shipyard Safa saved from bankruptcy 32 years ago. A beaming Macron made a speech about doubling the army’s budget. Some of that public money would be going to CMN, a supplier of patrol vessels to the French navy.
However, Safa, just ten days from death, was too weak to welcome the president to Normandy. Instead, the billionaire made his final public appearance in October last year, in an altogether grimmer setting: the High Court in London.
He stood accused of orchestrating a corrupt scheme that brought an entire economy to its knees. The administration of President Nyusi of Mozambique alleged in a landmark civil suit that Safa, a Lebanese-born industrialist, bribed officials, including the finance minister, to secure $2 billion worth of government contracts. Safa was to provide a fleet of fishing and patrol vessels with many of them built at his shipyard in northern France.
When the project’s hidden borrowing was revealed in 2016, the International Monetary Fund deemed Mozambique’s government unreliable and suspended all aid to the impoverished nation. The scandal drove, by one estimate, a further 800,000 Mozambicans into poverty.
During six hours of remote cross-examination at the High Court, Safa assured Mr Justice Robin Knowles that he had never bribed anyone.
Advertisement
For decades, even as leading politicians celebrated Safa, prosecutors suspected that his fortune, estimated by one business magazine at up to €1.5 billion (£1.28 billion), had been fuelled by lavish kickbacks.
His status was particularly ambiguous in his adoptive France, where he received the public support of three presidents, but where criminal charges also forced him into temporary exile. His acquisition in 2015 of a well-read right-wing weekly, Valeurs Actuelles, earned him further influence, as well as opprobrium.
“There are days when I ask myself who I am to France,” Safa once told Le Monde. “A crook or a saviour of industry?”
Iskandar Safa was born into a well-to-do Maronite Christian family in 1955, the first of two sons of Adib Iskandar Safa, the chief of staff to Lebanon’s first president, and Daad Khalil Rizk. The family spoke French, English and Arabic interchangeably.
After attending the Maronite school of Jounieh, just north of Beirut, Safa obtained a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1978. By then, Lebanon’s civil war had been raging for three years. Safa took up arms with the Guardians of the Cedars, a nationalist Christian paramilitary organisation that flouted ceasefires and attacked Palestinian refugee camps. A foreign correspondent reported Safa’s presence during one such attack. Decades later, when asked by an employee at Valeurs Actuelles how he would define his politics, Safa answered: “I am a fighting Christian.”
Advertisement
Though reportedly injured, he survived the war. After obtaining a master’s degree in business administration from the esteemed Insead school of Fontainebleau, France, he worked in the mid-1980s in public works in Saudi Arabia, where his mother’s family were wealthy contractors.
Around that time, Safa also began acting as a middleman for European companies looking to procure lucrative supply contracts, mainly in the Near and Far East. “That’s how I made most of my money, in the 1980s,” he told Le Monde.
His network soon drew the interest of Charles Pasqua, President Chirac’s gruff interior minister. Pasqua called on Safa to help broker the release of French nationals held hostage in Lebanon.
Safa suggested negotiating with the Iranian regime, to which the Shia abductors were loyal. Chirac greeted one freed hostage at an airport outside Paris in late 1987, another two the following year. On both occasions Safa was not in attendance. “I didn’t need to be on the photo,” he later said. The president, meanwhile, declared Safa “a friend of France and Iran”.
The episode made Safa’s name. It also caused his first legal woes. France’s domestic intelligence agency came to suspect Safa of having kept part of the ransom paid by the French state, then over more than a decade of feeding some of it back to a French politician who had also worked on the hostages’ release.
Advertisement
The agency said that Safa, apparently fearing a police raid, destroyed various documents in 2000, and placed some others in a small black suitcase that moved from location to location in December of that year.
Interpol issued an arrest warrant against Safa the following year, on charges related to the diversion of the ransom money. In 2002 charges of corruption and embezzlement in a separate case led to a further Interpol warrant.
There followed several years of exile in Lebanon, which does not extradite its citizens, and in countries where his political connections shielded him from detainment.
Did those countries include France, where the charges originated? On January 31, 2004, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the French defence minister, mingled with French and Emirati officials aboard the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, which was moored off the coast of Abu Dhabi. There as a guest, Safa was not arrested, though by stepping on to the carrier he had entered French territory. Charges were ultimately dropped.
Safa also owned shipyards in the German city of Kiel, the Greek town of Skaramagas, and Abu Dhabi. For a time, Safa seemed eager to rescue the Tyne’s historic Swan Hunter shipyard, but the deal fell through.
Advertisement
His companies supplied the Royal Navy and worked on Germany’s warships and Greece’s conventional submarines. He also supplied Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he courted Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.
Safa is survived by his wife Clara Martínez Thedy, a photographer who in the 2010s was the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to the UAE, and two children, Akram and Alejandro, as well as by his brother and long-time business associate, Akram. The two Akrams are expected to take charge of the family business.
“Sandy”, as his inner circle called him, might be best remembered for his central role in Mozambique’s hidden debt scandal. Mr Justice Knowles’s posthumous judgment will decide that.
Iskandar Safa, shipbuilding and media magnate, was born on April 3, 1955. He died of cancer on January 29, 2024, aged 68