Antoun Sehnaoui's media and political web. (Credit: Illustration L'Orient-Le Jour/Moussa Maalouf)
It was Dec. 31, 2023. On al-Jadeed, the New Year’s Eve show was in full swing. Leila Abdellatif, Lebanese television’s resident fortune teller — the kind everyone pretends to laugh at but secretly watches — was running through her predictions for the year ahead. Then she turned her focus to Antoun Sehnaoui’s. He “will play an important role in Lebanese politics,” she announced. “But not right away.” The prediction may have raised a few smiles. Sehnaoui, after all, had never hidden his appetite for power. “He’s someone who never gives up, who has absolute faith in his instincts and, in a way, manages to convince himself that he can bend reality when it isn’t going his way,” an acquaintance of Sehnaoui said. The banker liked to pull strings and influence the course of events. Partly to protect his own interests amid the legal cases and...
It was Dec. 31, 2023. On al-Jadeed, the New Year’s Eve show was in full swing. Leila Abdellatif, Lebanese television’s resident fortune teller — the kind everyone pretends to laugh at but secretly watches — was running through her predictions for the year ahead. Then she turned her focus to Antoun Sehnaoui’s. He “will play an important role in Lebanese politics,” she announced. “But not right away.” The prediction may have raised a few smiles. Sehnaoui, after all, had never hidden his appetite for power. “He’s someone who never gives up, who has absolute faith in his instincts and, in a way, manages to convince himself that he can bend reality when it isn’t going his way,” an acquaintance of Sehnaoui said. The banker liked to pull strings and influence the course of events. Partly to protect his own interests...