Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri. (Credit: NNA.)
BEIRUT — Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has reportedly established a new investment company in Abu Dhabi called Genesis, at the end of May. According to Bloomberg, the firm will focus on artificial intelligence, marking a further strengthening of his ties with the UAE capital.
Hariri's company was said to be designed to invest in the international technology sector, according to financial media reports from anonymous sources, noting that none of Hariri's representatives have agreed to comment on these reports.
Officially named Genesis SPV Ltd, the company was registered at the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), Abu Dhabi's financial center. Saad Hariri is listed as the sole shareholder according to the financial free zone's records. The ADGM is an international financial center with an independent jurisdiction and a specific regulatory framework for financial activities. According to the aforementioned sources, Genesis's projects align with the emirate capital's ambitions to become one of the global leaders in AI. Abu Dhabi is already home to numerous entities that invest heavily in the sector, including the artificial intelligence company G42 and the specialized public investment firm MGX.
These disclosures came nearly three and a half years after Saad Hariri and his party the Future Movement announced their withdrawal from the Lebanese political scene on January 24, 2022, and nearly four months after his pledge before his partisan base to return to politics in Lebanon last February 14 during the commemoration of the assassination of his father, also a former president of the council, in February 2005.
Saad Hariri had then promised that he would be "alongside" the supporters of the Future Movement for the municipals, which ultimately was not the case during the elections held throughout May. The former Prime Minister had since February 2022 made Abu Dhabi his main base and has become one of the influential close associates of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the half-brother of the UAE president, who heads an empire worth 1,500 billion dollars.
Hariri is no stranger to the business world. His Saudi Arabian construction company, Saudi Oger, inherited from his father who founded it in 1978, went bankrupt in 2017. Starting in 2015, the drop in oil prices, halting the kingdom's major construction projects, led to the collapse of the construction giant. Saudi Oger then laid off or stopped paying its 56,000 employees. Thousands of them, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, were literally left to their fate in the company's "life camps," indebted by several billions to the Saudi state.
The announcement in the press of the creation of a new company by Hariri comes as information circulated this week on social networks about the dismissal of several employees of the Maison du Centre in Beirut, headquarters of the Future Movement and residence of the former Prime Minister in the Lebanese capital.
According to internet users, a "large part of Hariri's staff," including "his security team," has been laid off, which some have perceived as a definitive withdrawal of Saad Hariri from Lebanese political life. Contacted by L'Orient Today, a source close to the party stated that these measures were routine, taken due to budgetary issues. "About fifty employees" were laid off, "all household staff," according to this source, which also emphasizes that this decision is "not political" and is exclusively "administrative and routine."
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