Forbes Magazine, in its current issue, had this to say about Mr. Rafik Hariri:
“Lebanon’s prime minister has interests stretching from Riyadh to Paris to Houston. Considered a confidant of Saudi royalty and French leader Jacques Chirac, Hariri lets his son, Saad, run Saudi Oger, a $3.15 billion (sales) construction conglomerate. Oger paid $375 million to increase its ownership in Arab Bank in order to keep out interested Arab-American investors. Some of Lebanon’s $29 billion public debt is held by his $625 million diversified financial services company, Groupe Mediterranee. Hariri owns more than 2 million square feet of Houston prime office space. There are rumors that he may build a vacation home on the crown jewel of his US real estate portfolio: the 16-acre Phillips mansion in Washington, DC. (A spokesman denies it).”
Hariri ranked 108 among the richest man in the world, according to Forbes’s 18th annual list of the world’s billionaires. Hariri’s fortune, which Forbes places in the neighborhood of $4.3 billion in 2004, increased from $3.8 billion in 2003, $4 billion in 2002, and $3.1 billion in 2001.
Worldwide, the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, was ranked for the 10th consecutive year as the richest man in the world with an enormous $46.6 billion fortune. Gates was closely followed by Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet, with $42.9 billion. The third richest man in the world, German citizen Karl Albrecht, made his $23 billion fortune as the undisputed supermarket king. Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal was fourth on the list with an estimated $21.5 billion net worth.
This year’s list of 587 billionaires was the longest ever mainly because of rallying stock markets and a strong euro. The combined fortune of all of the world’s billionaires reached an impressive $1,900 billion, jumping by half a trillion dollars. In 2003, the Forbes’ list was only 476 billionaires long. The biggest gainer was Warren Buffet, who easily added $12.4 billion to his net worth mainly because his company’s stock price increased by 50 percent. There were a total of 64 new billionaires, including J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of search engine Google, also appeared on the list this year. In the Middle East, there were a total of 24 billionaires, the richest being Talal. Eight Saudis, including Talal, were on the list, six Turks, five Israelis, two Kuwaitis, two from the United Arab Emirates and of course, Hariri.
In the United States alone there were a total of 277 billionaires. The highest density of billionaires in the US was in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Dallas. Europe has 164 billionaires. Many of them are in Moscow, but other major European cities are well populated by the super-rich. With eight new billionaires Russia now has a total of 25, the third highest concentration of billionaires in the world after the US and Germany. Asia is home to 78 billionaires, most from Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taiwan. In the Americas there are a total of 42 billionaires: 17 Canadians, 10 Mexicans, six Brazilians, three Chileans, two Colombians, two Venezuelans and one Argentinean.
The increase in Hariri’s wealth, while serving as Lebanon’s prime minister, is astonishing, especially that the country’s public debt has increased monumentally under his stewardship and that Hariri has not divested himself from his enormous holdings.