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A recent event illustrates the close ties between the London-based finance company Capital Trust Group (CTG) and the Ethiopian businessman Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi. Last year, CTG accepted a court summons for Al-Amoudi brought to its premises by the bailiff acting for the firm Advalis, which is in conflict with Al-Amoudi in France (see opposite). In fact, Al-Amoudi’s relations with CTG are far more than that of a mere client.
CTG has aided Al-Amoudi in almost all his financial and industrial operations. One of the latest is a joint venture called HikmaCure founded in London in 2013 between Al-Amoudi’s Midroc International Group and the Jordanian pharmaceutics concern Al Hikma Group, in order to sell pharmaceutics in Ethiopia. Bassam Felix Aburdene, one of CTG’s founders with John P. Oswald, rubs shoulders with Al Amoudi on the HikmaCure board. But their collaboration goes much further back: until 2002 Aburdene was the director of Midroc Scandinavia AB and now sits on the boards of a number of Al-Amoudi’s oil companies, including Corral Petroleum Holdings AB, Société anonyme marocaine de l’Industrie du raffinage (Samir) and Preem AB.
Oswald also sits on the boards of these companies, but Aburdene has other ties with Al-Amoudi. He is the manager and partner (with a 1% stake) in the French limited liability companies Les Phéniciennes and Les Gémeaux, of which Al-Amoudi owns the remaining 99%. The former company runs the tycoon’s villa on the French Riviera and the second manages the 17,000 square m (183,000 sq ft) of office space the company owns in a building in the Paris suburb of Pontoise. The city council purchased half of the building in 2006.
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