Naguib Sawiris owns stakes in gold mines through his closely held company, La Mancha Resources. The Luxembourg-based entity's investments include stakes in Evolution Mining and Endeavor Mining. He raised more than $4 billion when he sold his stake in telecommunications company Vimpelcom in 2011 and 2012.
Naguib Sawiris's net worth of $5.43B can buy ...
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The majority of Sawiris's fortune is held in cash and closely held assets, most of which come from the sale of his stake in Russian telecommunications company Vimpelcom for almost $4.1 billion in 2011 and 2012. He acquired 20% of Vimpelcom in 2010 as part of a deal to sell most of his telecommunications assets, including Italy's Wind Telecomunicazioni and 51% of Cairo-based Orascom Telecom Holding, for $1.5 billion plus the Vimplecom shares.
He told Bloomberg News in a 2011 interview his profit from the Vimpelcom deal was about $300 million. The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Sawiris controls most of his investments through Luxembourg-based holding vehicles which he's estimated to control with his father, Onsi. Their stakes in the holding companies aren't disclosed. Naguib's share is calculated at 70%, based in part on the ownership structure of another asset owned by the Sawiris family: publicly traded fertilizer company, OCI, which is controlled by Onsi and Naguib's brother, Nassef.
Through an entity called OTMT Acquisition Sarl, Sawiris indirectly owns 37% of publicly traded Orascom Investment Holding, a Cairo-based company formed from the merger between Vimpelcom and Orascom's former parent company, Orascom Telecom Holding. He also owns an estimated 70% of La Mancha Resources, which he acquired in 2012 for $492 million to invest in gold assets. Through La Mancha, he owns stakes in publicly traded gold miners Endeavor Mining, Evolution Mining and Golden Star Resources. In April 2018, he told Bloomberg News that he was one of the largest gold-mining investors in the world.
Manal Abdel-Hamid, a spokesperson at Orascom Investment Holding, declined to comment on the net worth calculation.
Naguib Sawiris was born on June 15, 1954 in Egypt, the oldest of three sons born to Yousiriyya and Onsi Sawiris. His father, the son of a lawyer, founded a construction company in 1950, which became one of Egypt's largest contractors, building roads and waterways along Egypt's upper Nile region. The business was nationalized in 1961 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and renamed El Nasr Civil Works Company.
Frustrated at being reduced to an employee at his own company, Onsi moved to Libya, where he built a new general contracting company. After six years, relations between Libya and Egypt were fraying and Onsi moved back to Egypt where he started anew for the third time, founding Orascom Construction Industries. Through partnerships with international companies working on local projects, Orascom grew to be one of the largest private builders in Egypt by the mid-1990s.
Naguib joined the family business in 1979, after studying at the German Evangelical School of Cairo and earning a Masters in technical administration from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. At Orascom, Naguib helped expand the company's operations into IT and telecommunications. It had split into three separate operating companies by 1990: Orascom Telecom, headed by Naguib, Orascom Development and Hotels, led by middle son Samih, and Orascom Construction Industries, overseen by the youngest, Nassef.
Under Naguib's leadership, Orascom Telecom grew quickly by penetrating markets such as Iraq, Bangladesh and North Korea, that were perceived as too poor and underdeveloped by competitors. Not wanting to limit himself to emerging markets, Naguib sought to invest wherever he saw a deal. He formed Weather Investments in 2005, funded partially with his stake in Orascom Telecom, and led a record $15 billion leveraged buyout of Italy's Wind Telecomunicazioni. Sawiris merged Weather Investments, renamed Wind Telecom, with Russia's Vimpelcom in April 2011, creating the world's sixth-largest mobile telecommunications provider.
Naguib is one of four billionaires in the family, and the only one who has entered politics. He co-founded the Free Egyptians Party (Al Masreyeen Al Ahrrar), in June 2011, in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. Advocating a secular, free-market agenda, the party has opposed Egypt's Islamist parties.
Following the election of President Morsi and facing death threats, Naguib left Egypt with his family in June 2012. He came back to Egypt with his father and eight family members the following May. A Coptic Christian, Sawiris is married with four children. He lives in Cairo.