Rami Makhlouf warns of ‘earthquake’ if he is driven from Syrian business scene
The tycoon cousin of President Bashar Al Assad has warned
Syria’s small but powerful Alawite community it could suffer what he described
as an earthquake without him at its business helm.
In the second month of a public spectacle centring on the
wealth of the inner circle, Rami Makhlouf escalated his verbal response to an
official seizure of his assets.
The authorities are seeking to strip Mr Makhlouf of telecom
operator Syriatel, the country’s largest company, along with the rest of his
empire. Regional bankers say his fortune also comprises shares of vast assets
he manages on behalf of the ruling Assad family through frontmen and business
networks.
In his latest Facebook pronouncement this week, Mr Makhlouf
said that 70 per cent of the shareholder profit of Syriatel went to “acts of
charity” in the past decade.
“Curse me if there will be no divine intervention to stop
this farce and shake the earth from underneath the feet of the oppressors,” Mr
Makhlouf wrote on Facebook on Monday.
“You will be enamoured with his might and majesty,” Mr
Makhlouf said, using religious terminology more familiar to Alawites than to
the country’s Sunni-majority population.
“No one can prevent such deeds from reaching their deserving
recipients,” he said.
The continued, and widely followed, statements by Mr
Makhlouf, ultimately challenging Mr Assad, prompted some political commentators
to suggest he is enjoying de facto Russian protection.
Mr Makhlouf’s father, the oligarch Mohammad Makhlouf, has
been reportedly living in Moscow for several years. Russia intervened
militarily in Syria to prop up the regime in late 2015.
Rami, 50, the maternal cousin of Mr Assad and his brother
Maher Al Assad, has not disclosed where he is. Maher heads the army’s elite
Fourth Mechanised Division, which operates its own intelligence network.
Rami Makhlouf has been singling out the Alawite-dominated
security apparatus for acting against him, under orders from someone he did not
name, although he said he has been the main financier of the same security
operatives seeking his downfall.
Mr Makhlouf said on Monday that “an invisible hand with
super powers that lets some people violate private property and threaten
serious measures” would act against his businesses if he “does not submit”.
He said that in the past month the authorities expanded a
tax dispute with Syriatel, demanding half of the company’s revenue, and that
Syriatel’s managers were pressured through arrests and other means to stop
communicating with him. Some of Mr Makhlouf’s personal assets were also seized.
The billionaire termed the measures being taken against
Syriatel and himself as a “clear violation” of property rights he said were
guaranteed under Syria’s paper constitution.
But Syriatel, which Mr Makhlouf set up two decades ago, is
one of many monopolies he obtained since Bashar Al Assad inherited power in
2000 from his late father, Hafez.
Two prominent members of the intelligentsia, Aref Dalila and
Riad Seif, spoke out at the time Mr Makhlouf and his patronage network were
undermining the rule of law. The authorities jailed the two men for a total of
12 years for “undermining national morale”.
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