According to Mahdi Mattar, chief economist at Shuaa Capital, and himself a Lebanese national, Shuaa is not, for the moment at least, interested in taking advantage of any particular capital-raising or advisory opportunities in Lebanon. Instead, the main purpose of the office, says Mattar, will be to snap up Lebanese banking talent to be exported to Shuaa’s offices elsewhere.
"The office in Beirut will probably be little more than a data centre. The main point of it will be to hire people, and train them up. We’ll use it as a recruitment platform," says Mattar.
Beirut has long been regarded as the banking capital of the Middle East. Part of Lebanon’s success in producing successful financiers springs from the fact that many educated people speak English as well as Arabic and French. The American University of Beirut, which recently announced that it would run an executive MBA course in Kuwait, is often cited as the leading university in the Middle East.
In recent times, Bahrain and Dubai have emerged as the financial hubs of the region. Yet Lebanese professionals still dominate the region’s financial industry, maintaining an important presence in global centres too. Walid Chammah, for example, was born and educated in Lebanon. He became the chief executive of Morgan Stanley International in London earlier this year. Ghassan Abdul Karim, JPMorgan’s CEO for Mena, as well as George Makhoul, Morgan Stanley’s Mena president, are, like Chammah, AUB alumni. HSBC Middle East’s CEO, Youssef Nasr, was also born in Lebanon.
But when Euromoney asks Mahdi Mattar if he is concerned about the effect of a financial brain drain on his country’s economy, he leans back, and shrugs with an air of bemused exasperation. Perhaps, like many Lebanese, he is just enjoying the more stable lifestyle available in such places as Dubai. "We hope to expand the office in Beirut to a proper investment banking business once the security situation has improved," he says.
For the moment, it seems, Beirut’s banking centre will remain the departures hall of its airport. Yet while the likes of Bahrain and Dubai fight for the title of regional financial capital, many people who come to work in these centres might look nostalgically back to the time when Beirut was the Middle East’s capital.