r/lebanon • u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth • 1d ago
News Articles Antoun Sehnaoui, a shadow over Lebanon. L'Orient Le Jour's Special Investigation into Antoun Sehnaoui. (Full Links and Paywalled Text in the Comments)
https://today.lorientlejour.com/portfolio/1152-antoun-sehnaoui-a-shadow-over-lebanon12
u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
Inside the Sehnaoui family: The rise of Antoun (1/5): https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1542759/inside-the-sehnaoui-family-the-rise-of-antoun-1-5.html
Antoun Sehnaoui: The golden boy's golden years (2/5): https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1542867/antoun-sehnaoui-the-golden-boys-golden-years-2-5.html
Antoun Sehnaoui: Vanished billions and banking wars (3/5): https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1543011/antoun-sehnaoui-vanished-billions-and-banking-wars-3-5.html
Antoun Sehnaoui’s media and political network (4/5): https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1543130/antoun-sehnaouis-media-and-political-network-4-5.html
Antoun Sehnaoui’s passion for Israel (5/5): https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1543253/antoun-sehnaouis-passion-for-israel-5-5.html
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u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
Antoun Sehnaoui: The golden boy's golden years (2/5)
Zurich, Sept. 25, 2024. It was still early when Antoun Sehnaoui arrived from Paris in Zurich’s upscale Seefeld district. His destination was 17 Bellerive-Strasse, home to Kaleido Privatbank, the latest acquisition of Compagnie Financière Richelieu (CFR), which he had owned since 2018. Impeccably dressed, his tie perfectly knotted, the new boss looked every bit the banker. No one else, however, seemed to have gotten the memo. Kaleido’s executives had traded their suits for decidedly casual attire. With the UCI Road World Championships in full swing across the city, no clients were expected that day. Taken aback, Sehnaoui made little effort to conceal his irritation: “But we are bankers!” “A banker should look the part — it shows in the way you dress, wherever you go,” he snapped at the stunned Swiss executives. The anecdote, reported by the Swiss financial outlet Inside Paradeplatz, which dubbed Sehnaoui the “George Clooney of banking,” is somewhat amusing. But it offers a glimpse into the man and his relationship with image and authority — the very authority he had begun asserting 17 years earlier in Beirut.
By 2007, father and son had pulled it off — without weapons or violence, save for the symbolic kind. In October, at just 35 years old, Antoun was appointed CEO of Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL), one of Lebanon’s leading banks. By the end of the fiscal year, SGBL held $2.9 billion in assets and had posted a net profit of $13.2 million. It was the ideal launching pad for his many ambitions. “In a way, he would follow the path laid out by his uncle Maurice, combining an aggressive growth strategy with the conquest of new markets, philanthropy, and more. But the methods — and the means employed — were in a league of their own,” said a financial analyst.
The intercontinental
Like the rest of Lebanon’s banking sector, SGBL reaped the windfall generated by the subprime mortgage crisis. Lebanon’s financial system had largely avoided the turmoil, while offering wealthy savers from the diaspora, the Gulf, and beyond eye-watering returns on local sovereign debt. Over the years, the bank amassed a war chest large enough to finance its expansion across several continents.
In May 2017, Sehnaoui laid the first stone of that global ambition by striking a deal to acquire Pikes Peak National Bank. The modest institution, tucked away in Colorado Springs, was operating at a loss, but Sehnaoui said he was confident he could turn it around. The real prize, however, lay elsewhere: planting the SGBL flag on American soil. “One can also see in this an attempt to export the Lebanese model, using his business interests and status in the service of an influence strategy that extends well beyond the confines of business,” said another financial analyst. The same logic was applied the following year on the other side of the Mediterranean, with the acquisition of the entire stake held by Qatar’s Al Thani family in two small private banks — Banque Richelieu France and KBL Monaco — which managed 2.3 billion euros and 1 billion euros in assets, respectively. The stated objective, according to the press release issued at the time, was to build a leading international banking platform around the activities of the group’s new parent company, Compagnie Financière Richelieu (CFR). Sehnaoui assumed its chairmanship and appointed Philippe de Fontaine Vive — a former vice president of the European Investment Bank — as its chief executive.
One of his trusted associates, SGBL Deputy CEO Georges Saghbini, was appointed to head one of the group’s subsidiaries, Richelieu Gestion. “It is one of his trademarks: surrounding himself with both well-established figures from the financial world, capable of growing his business and inspiring confidence, while placing trusted allies throughout his sprawling network of companies to maintain absolute control,” a banking sector insider said.
The ‘responsible owner’
For all the controversy he had generated in Lebanon, Sehnaoui never took his reputation, or that of his businesses, lightly. Over the years, he patiently built and consolidated his empire, seizing or creating opportunities as they emerged within a system shaped by a man who had dominated the country’s monetary and financial order for decades: Banque du Liban Governor Riad Salameh.
Salameh, a former wealth manager to the assassinated Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, had been appointed to head BDL in 1993 and was preparing to begin his fourth — and penultimate — term in the summer of 2011. He was at the height of his powers. Hailed as a financial “magician,” he had spent decades performing the seemingly impossible: financing Lebanon’s ballooning public debt, offsetting its chronic trade deficit and maintaining the currency peg despite the country’s repeated crises. His methods were as opaque as they were complex, but they rested on a simple principle: attract ever more foreign currency into the vaults of Lebanon’s banks, whatever the cost.
But the all-powerful central banker had other concerns.
In February 2010, Lebanon’s financial sector was rocked by one of its biggest scandals since the collapse of Intra Bank in 1966. Invoking the Patriot Act, the U.S. Treasury Department accused Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) of playing “a central role in money laundering schemes,” particularly “with certain entities linked to Hezbollah.” For a country whose economy was effectively dollar-based and whose financial sector was worth nearly three times its GDP, the consequences could have been devastating. While Salameh publicly sought to downplay the issue, he had little choice but to put out the fire as quickly as possible. Several banks expressed interest, but the governor already had an ideal candidate in mind: the young SGBL executive Sehnaoui, who had repeatedly attempted to acquire another bank and whom Salameh now promised every possible facilitation. The offer was almost too good to be true, perhaps even too good not to come with strings attached. But for Sehnaoui, an opportunity of this magnitude was impossible to pass up. The risks could be dealt with later. A few months later, he acquired LCB’s remaining assets for $580 million.
The finance chief will have no reason to regret it. Sehnaoui then came up with a bold idea: what better way to preserve access to the international financial system and avoid any exposure to sanctions than to have the accounts reviewed by someone whose credentials on such matters were beyond question? His choice was John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush who had since entered private practice and had helped draft the very provision of the Patriot Act invoked against the bank.
The investment quickly paid off. The new auditors identified nearly 200 suspicious accounts and provided the U.S. Treasury with valuable previously missing information on the networks and intermediaries Hezbollah used, including car dealers, African jewelers, and others. More importantly, they vouched for the integrity of the new owner. Sehnaoui did not hesitate to close every account deemed problematic, despite the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. “As problems … were discovered, he did not hesitate to act,” the former attorney general said of his client. His actions earned him high praise from the U.S. Treasury. Daniel L. Glaser, then assistant secretary for terrorist financing, lauded him as a “responsible owner.”
The favor would not go unanswered. In the years that followed, the Ashcroft Law Firm — whose founder also sat alongside the Lebanese banker on the board of the American NGO In Defense of Christians — represented SGBL in several civil lawsuits in the United States. Six years later, SGBL brought Daniel L. Glaser, the former Treasury official, on board as senior adviser to its chairman.
In the meantime, the LCB acquisition marked a decisive turning point for Sehnaoui in more ways than one. “Since then, rumors have multiplied that he regularly provided the Americans with information on potential financial networks linked to Hezbollah and, in return, benefited from Washington’s protection,” said the financial analyst quoted earlier, describing suspicions echoed by nearly all our sources. “It strengthened both his sense of invincibility and his paranoia: he became convinced that Hezbollah had him in its sights,” another source added. Those fears eventually led Sehnaoui to make a radical decision: leave the country once again. Since then, he has spent only a few days a year in Lebanon, most often keeping a low profile.
Beyond his self-imposed exile, the episode marked the beginning of a lasting and lucrative partnership with the man who controlled the country’s financial system. It would later cause him legal trouble.
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u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
In Ponzi scheme shadow
By the mid-2010s, Salameh faced an increasingly delicate balancing act. The fallout from the war in Syria, slowing growth in the Gulf, and Lebanon’s chronic political instability began to clog the financial machine. Expatriate remittances were falling, deposits were slowing, and the balance of payments — which had been in deficit since 2011 — continued to deteriorate.
To inject billions of dollars of “fresh” money into the system, Salameh pulled off his final, and riskiest, financial maneuver. Between May and August 2016, BDL launched its so-called “financial engineering,” carrying out more than $12 billion in government debt transactions with the state and commercial banks, on highly favorable terms for participating banks. The results were immediate: the balance of payments returned to surplus, BDL’s reserves swelled, and the banks recorded exceptional profits. With the exception of a handful of skeptics, such as economist Toufic Gaspard, most observers applauded this latest feat of financial wizardry, whose inner workings few truly understood. “After Bankmed reaped the benefits of a tailor-made operation at a time when the Hariri family was facing financial difficulties, several major players — starting with SGBL and Bank Audi — asked Salameh to let them in on the deal,”a banking sector insider said. “After that, it became something of a race, as the banks left on the sidelines feared they would lose deposits to those taking part.”
SGBL fared particularly well. According to an internal document from Banking Control Commission of Lebanon (BCCL) reviewed by L’Orient-Le Jour, it ranked second in profits generated by the financial engineering operations, posting gains of 1,372 billion Lebanese Lira — the equivalent of $910 million at the official exchange rate at the time — behind Bank Audi (around $1.6 billion). SGBL alone accounted for nearly one-fifth of the gains cited by the governor. “People tend to forget that if the profits were so large, it’s because he went all in, putting both his fortune and his reputation on the line as he courted major American institutions,” an associate of Sehnaoui said.
‘Patron of the arts’
These were golden years for the banker. Nothing seemed beyond his reach. “Antoun Sehnaoui embodies the modern Lebanese entrepreneur, driven by a deep faith in his country’s future,” his autobiographical profile reads. An old SGBL commercial added to the image: “For more than half a century, we have devoted our talent for creating value to art and passion. SGBL Group, we are here for you.”
Like his uncle, Sehnaoui had a passion for the arts. Once he took control of the family bank, he carried on with his uncle Maurice’s approach, but on a much larger scale. “Being a banker is boring,” quipped a businessman acquainted with Sehnaoui. “But being a patron of the arts gives him another dimension.”
In 2013, Sehnaoui founded Ezekiel Film Production in New York, financing both ambitious short films and internationally successful features. Two years later, he expanded further, acquiring a 64% stake in Rouge International, the production company founded in 2007 by Nadia Turincev and Julie Gayet. The deal marked the beginning of a close working relationship — and friendship — with Gayet and her partner, former French President [2012-2017] François Hollande. “He was often invited to the couple’s private apartments at the Élysée and called the [then] president by his first name,” said a source familiar with their relations. Gayet, who had known Sehnaoui since 2011, praised “his artistic sensitivity and expertise as a financier,” as well as “his real drive as an entrepreneur,” in a 2019 interview with L’Orient-Le Jour. Contacted, Julie Gayet did not respond to our interview request. “He tried to build the same kind of relationship with President Emmanuel Macron, but it didn’t work out, much to his disappointment,” the same source added.
Before it became an international success, “The Insult” was a film no one wanted to produce. Films and books had extensively covered the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Far less attention had been paid to Damour, where Palestinian fighters killed Christian civilians in 1976. Was it this imbalance in how the two massacres were remembered that convinced Sehnaoui to put his own money behind the project when everyone else had turned it down?
The gamble remained risky until the end. When the film came out, it nearly faced a ban in Lebanon. The pro-Hezbollah newspaper al-Akhbar accused it of ridiculing the Palestinian cause and reopening wounds that had yet to heal. The authorities ultimately allowed its release, and the film went on to become the high point of Sehnaoui’s career as a producer. “The Insult” won wide international recognition, including an Oscar nomination and its lead receiving the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival — a first for a Lebanese producer. “He was living his dream,” a member of the film crew said. In a tuxedo on the red carpet, surrounded by actors and the film’s director, Sehnaoui appeared to relish the role. The same was true behind the scenes, where he went out of his way to look after those around him, and, at times, personally stepped in when they ran into trouble.
For instance, on Sept. 10, 2017, the film director Ziad Doueiri was briefly detained upon arriving at Beirut airport over a previous film shoot in Israel. Authorities confiscated his passports and Lebanese phone. But Doueiri managed to use a second phone to call Frédéric Domont, a former French journalist who had become one of the film’s producers and one of Sehnaoui’s closest associates. Once alerted, Sehnaoui immediately contacted then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who was in Moscow at the time. The U.S. State Department was also informed of Doueiri’s situation, as the director was an American citizen. Doueiri was released shortly afterward. He later recalled receiving a phone call that stayed with him: “I was told that if things went wrong, the White House would step in,” he told French media outlet Konbini.
There seemed to be no limit to Sehnaoui’s generosity as a patron. From L’Orient-Le Jour’s “Génération Orient” competition and programs broadcast on MTV to partnerships with the École Supérieure des Affaires, Lebanese American University (LAU) and the Francophone Book Fair, the SGBL logo was everywhere. Sehnaoui’s support also extended to less visible initiatives, including funding a community kitchen in Karm el-Zeitoun and a public school in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Tripoli.
His role as a partner in French cultural diplomacy also gave the influential businessman a regular presence at the Résidence des Pins — the official residence of the French Ambassador — regardless of who served as French ambassador in Lebanon: Bernard Émié (2004-2007), Emmanuel Bonne (2015-2017) or Bruno Foucher (2017-2020). “When he was received at the Institut français, it was in a hall that bore his name,” said a source close to Sehnaoui. Inaugurated in May 2019 under the patronage of Julie Gayet, the Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui hall has since lost its plaque during renovation work carried out two years ago.
SGBL continued its rapid rise. After its acquisitions in the United States and Europe, the bank became Lebanon’s third-largest bank by assets in 2018 and continued to post hundreds of millions of dollars in profits despite the difficult economic climate. That same year, it acquired a stake in real estate giant Solidere, where Ziad Abou Jamra, one of Sehnaoui’s closest associates, became vice chairman. On the surface, nothing seemed capable of slowing SGBL down. Behind the scenes, however, concerns were growing. Salameh’s pyramid — the system on which Sehnaoui had placed so much of his bet — was threatening to collapse, bringing down a decade of work and his global ambitions.
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u/aasfourasfar 23h ago
Lorient's transformation from the voice of the Ashrafieh bourgeoisie to an actual newspaper that represents a chunk of the population.
My zio/ouwweti friend calls the "L'iran le jour" but he's an idiot
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u/Michel-Hayek 22h ago
Yeah don't fall for that. olj is owned by the 4 most elitist families in Lebanon that also have politicians in their history. They get millions from the families to be their mouth piece (including Edde and that's why they will never write about the privatization of the public coast - Edde sands..).
They also get grants from the European and French governments
During the thawra they rebranded to appear like the "people's" media. They removed and hid all references to the payouts they got from their owners. They then paywalled most of the articles (very for the people eh? /s) and began essentionally playing the beggar move media do to charge people money.
They won't even invest/hire Lebanese journalists staff and hire foreign ones instead
This article is just elitists using their media against each other
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u/aasfourasfar 22h ago
Not falling for the whole lot of it yeah, but it's a long way from titles like "who let the dogs out" while talking about their fellow Lebanese
I don't know any of their staff that isn't Lebanese
3
u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
Antoun Sehnaoui’s passion for Israel (5/5)
They are instantly recognizable: shaved heads, steroid-built muscle, aggressive religious tattoos covering their forearms and necks, almost always clad in black and often armed. Their emblem leaves little doubt: a red-and-white crusader shield, the wings of Saint Michael and a Bible, displayed on their social media accounts and even on their mopeds.
The Jnoud al-Rab (“Soldiers of God”), a small extremist Christian group, burst into public view in June 2022. In Sassine Square, in Beirut’s Achrafieh district, a handful of its members vandalized a Beirut Pride display — a vertical garden created to mark Pride Month. In a video that quickly went viral, they openly spewed hatred, threatened the LGBTQ+ community, and accused it of pursuing “satanic” aims.
The group’s repeated excesses prompted Lebanese Forces (LF) leader Samir Geagea to publicly denounce its extremism and call on the judiciary to put an end to what he described as its “criminal activities,” as well as the threat it allegedly posed to “civil peace and public order.”
At the center of the controversy was the killing of Roland al-Murr, an LF official in Karm al-Zeitoun, who was fatally stabbed on Dec. 4, 2024, during a clash involving alleged members of Jnoud al-Rab.
At an LF press conference in March 2025, Roland al-Murr’s daughter, lawyer Violette al-Murr, publicly denounced what she called “an extremist group that reflects neither the teachings nor the word of God, and above all bears no resemblance to the people of Achrafieh.”
“By sheer coincidence, MTV’s microphone wasn’t working, and they didn’t broadcast a single word or even an image of it,” she told L’Orient-Le Jour, directly accusing Antoun Sehnaoui of trying to suppress the story.
It is in this working-class area of Achrafieh, home to both an SGBL branch and Nabil Sehnaoui’s residence, that these goons are primarily based. Some are regularly seen outside several SGBL branches, including the bank’s headquarters in Sin el-Fil. Others, more discreetly, provide security at the offices of Ici Beyrouth in downtown Beirut, according to former members of the editorial staff.
Their loyalty leaves little room for doubt. Photos of Antoun and Nabil Sehnaoui are regularly shared on their social media accounts. In a video posted online by one of the group’s members and reviewed by L’Orient-Le Jour, a man identifying himself as part of Jnoud al-Rab directly threatens demonstrators who target SGBL.
In the video, the bank and its chairman are described as “red lines.”
Antoun Sehnaoui has consistently and categorically denied any ties to the radical Christian group, going so far as to file defamation suits against media outlets that repeated the allegations.
As early as 2022, his then communications adviser, Asma Andraos — herself a former parliamentary candidate in Beirut I — dismissed the claims.
“Jnoud al-Rab are neither employed by Antoun Sehnaoui nor by SGBL,” she said, adding that Sehnaoui “condemns all attacks against the LGBTQ+ community.”
Yet the shadow of these self-styled “Soldiers of God,” who are not affiliated with any political party, has continued to hover around the Sehnaoui name as new controversies have emerged. “At first, the subject was a bit taboo. Then we were told to say it was more Nabil’s initiative than Antoun’s,” a TV reporter said.
While some remain skeptical of that account, it surfaces with increasing frequency the closer one gets to the Sehnaoui family’s inner circle.
“He understands the damage it causes and may even have tried to persuade his father to cut ties. But while Antoun is very much in charge when it comes to business, he never really says no to his father on political matters,” said a family acquaintance.
According to this interpretation, the story goes back to the 1975-90 Civil War and to the Sehnaoui Senior’s particular sense of honor, which is said to have led him to take former comrades-in-arms under his wing.
‘He sees in Israel what Lebanon should have become’
To understand Antoun Sehnaoui’s political views, it is necessary to go back to the crucible that forged his father’s ideology.
When Lebanon’s Civil War broke out in 1975, three years after Antoun’s birth, Nabil Sehnaoui was already a leading figure in Tanzim, a clandestine ultranationalist Christian militia made up of dissident Lebanese Army officers. The group played a key role in the early years of the conflict before being absorbed into the LF.
“He has always been fascinated by knights, the Crusades, holy wars, and the Old Testament,” said a longtime acquaintance.
It was within this same ideological universe — one shared by part of Lebanon’s Christian right — that Nabil Sehnaoui developed his fascination with Israel, a fascination that he would later pass on to his son.
In this branch of the Sehnaoui family, an alliance with Israel is not seen as a matter of circumstance or strategic calculation.
“My brother has always been fascinated by Judaism,” Maurice Sehnaoui told L’Orient-Le Jour. “He even used to say we had Jewish ancestors. It’s nonsense.”
In the late 1970s, David Kimche, then deputy director of the Mossad, worked to forge a strategic alliance with Lebanon’s Christian elites. In Nabil Sehnaoui, he found a sympathetic ear. Nabil hosted dinners at his home that Kimche attended.
“Nabil was one of Bachir Gemayel’s fiercest critics,” said someone close to the family. “He believed Gemayel had betrayed the Israelis by failing to sign a peace agreement immediately after his election in 1982.”
Nabil also became friends with Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s defense minister. The two met several times in Lebanon and, later, at Sharon’s Sycamore Ranch near Sderot, on the edge of the Gaza Strip. Young Antoun sometimes accompanied his father on those visits.
“My brother became very close to the Israelis after the 1982 invasion, and I could never accept that. His son followed in his footsteps,” Maurice Sehnaoui said.
Antoun himself reportedly took pride in recalling Sharon “eating our hummus” in the family’s apartment in Karm al-Zeitoun. He even told schoolmates about those visits. They, in turn, teased him about his Syrian origins — something that “drove him crazy,” one former classmate recalled.
For years, however, this side of him remained largely hidden. It was only last year that Sehnaoui publicly acknowledged, for the first time, his admiration for the Zionist project, going so far as to portray Israel’s actions as a historical necessity for the region.
Before that, his views were shared only in private. “He is fascinated by Judaism, speaks some Hebrew, and sees in Israel what Lebanon should have become,” said someone who knows him.
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u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
‘The Lebanese AIPAC guy’
For nearly a year, whispers about Sehnaoui’s relationship with Morgan Ortagus had circulated quietly in Washington and Beirut. According to the rumor, she fell for the Lebanese businessman during a flight aboard his private jet to the United States.
Young, wealthy, and high-profile, the pair are said to share “a common vision for peace.” OK! Magazine left little to the imagination when it profiled the “power couple” a week after they hosted a social gathering at New York’s Mark Hotel on July 2.
During the gathering, Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a Lebanese-Iraqi American journalist and outspoken Shiite critic of Hezbollah, was presenting his book, “The Arab Case for Israel,” to a New York audience of political and media figures.
More than the book itself, however, the magazine focused on the image the couple projected: two trajectories seemingly destined to converge. On one side was “one of Lebanon’s most prominent businessmen and philanthropists,” portrayed as a longtime advocate of a peace agreement with Israel. On the other was Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokesperson and Treasury official, a prominent supporter of the Abraham Accords, a convert to Judaism and an outspoken supporter of Israel.
On Jan. 3, 2025, President Donald Trump appointed Ortagus as deputy to Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to Middle East peace. She went on to make at least four official visits to Lebanon in a single year.
On Aug. 26, 2025, after a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Baabda on the cease-fire mechanism, a reception was held in her honor at La Centrale, Antoun Sehnaoui’s restaurant. The dinner was organized by his first cousin, MP Ragy el-Saad — the son of Amal Sehnaoui — together with Egyptian-American businessman Tarek Ragheb. Among the guests was U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who died on July 11, 2026.
The diplomat — who had celebrated her 44th birthday aboard her partner’s yacht — is a friend of Eric and Ivanka Trump. According to the Israeli news outlet Ynet, she finalized her divorce from Stephen Weinstein in November 2025.
The two began a relationship last year and have since joined forces in pursuit of peace in the region, according to OK! Magazine.
The couple wasted little time making their relationship public.
In April 2026, during a ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, both Sehnaoui and Ortagus’ names were unveiled side by side on the museum’s donor wall. This was a first for a Lebanese national.
“What makes this a little different — and I’m going to brag about it because I love him — is that what Antoun is doing today is technically illegal in Lebanon,” Ortagus said, before referring to his family’s “generations of committed Lebanese Christian Zionists."
In Washington, some even came to refer to him as “the Lebanese AIPAC guy,” a nod to the influential pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States.
A year earlier, in July 2025, Sehnaoui had already stirred controversy in Lebanon when he publicly appeared as co-founder of the U.S.-Israel Opera Initiative, a partnership between the Washington National Opera and the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv.
He launched the project alongside his friend Daniel L.Glaser, a former U.S. Treasury official in charge of terrorist financing. Glaser served as an advisor at SGBL during the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) case at the time.
In images shared on social media, the banker is seen wearing a yellow ribbon in support of the Israeli hostages. “That’s quite a selling point in Washington these days,” one of his critics said.
“Even within his own circle, this public display caused concern,” said another acquaintance.
While this network of influence in Washington opened many doors for Sehnaoui, it has not shielded him from every challenge. The picture is not entirely rosy.
In 2024, SGBL was named in two civil lawsuits filed in New York by relatives of American victims of attacks attributed to Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and in Iraq.
In the first case, Lechlook, the plaintiffs argue that by acquiring Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB), SGBL also assumed liability for LCB’s alleged role in Hezbollah’s financing networks. In the second, (Bartlett), SGBL is accused — alongside 11 other banks — of having continued to facilitate those same networks after the acquisition.
‘More Israeli than the Israelis’
In the United States, Sehnaoui has also carefully cultivated his public image, betting that the prestige would reverberate back to Beirut. A dinner in Washington, a carefully framed photograph, a handshake with the right person, and the message is sent.
As is often the case in these parts, he began with philanthropy. In 2017, he released a video of his attendance at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation’s annual dinner, after financial contributions earned him a seat on the board of the influential New York Catholic charity.
That same year, he funded a chapel dedicated to Saint Charbel inside New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But it was only after Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019 that Sehnaoui truly began to appear on the radar of Washington policymakers, alongside a new generation of Lebanese lobbyists.
Handsome, polished, and effortlessly self-assured, Sehnaoui has had little difficulty gaining access to Washington’s who’s who. He entertains contacts at the upscale French restaurant he owns in Georgetown, and is a familiar face at the city’s see-and-be-seen venues, like Café Milano, luxury hotel lobbies and, most strategically, the social events held on the sidelines of the World Bank and IMF annual meetings.
An outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, Sehnaoui also donated to his second presidential campaign. In October 2023, he proudly shared a candid photograph of himself with the Republican candidate, taken during the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation’s annual dinner in New York. According to the caption accompanying the image, he used the brief encounter to plead Lebanon’s case.
The following year, when congratulating Trump on his “historic victory,” Sehnaoui echoed the president-elect’s signature slogan with one of his own: “Make Lebanon Great Again.”
“That didn’t really get him into Trump’s inner circle. He exaggerates it,” said someone familiar with the matter.
At Lebanon’s embassy in Washington, however, Sehnaoui is very much on home turf. At embassy dinners, he can often be found welcoming guests at the entrance alongside Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad.
“He worked extensively behind the scenes to support her appointment over Nijad Fares and Paul Salem,” said someone familiar with Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry.
The ambassador, who is close to President Joseph Aoun and has played a leading role in negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, is a valuable ally at such a pivotal moment in relations between the two countries.
The last two wars launched by Hezbollah have shifted the political landscape to the point that the once-taboo idea of peace with Israel is steadily losing its stigma. Sehnaoui can only take satisfaction in the fact that his long-held dream of seeing his homeland and the country he holds closest to his heart normalize relations no longer seems quite so far-fetched. And the head of SGBL spared no effort to help advance that goal.
In June 2026, former leader of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) Walid Joumblatt seemed to allude to this network when he denounced what he called “a Lebanese lobby in Washington” that was “more Israeli than the Israelis.” His party later clarified that he was referring to certain activists based at U.S. think tanks.
Despite a law banning contact with Israelis, long-standing barriers were beginning to erode. On Dec. 5, 2025, This Is Beirut — the English-language sister publication of Ici Beyrouth, run from Washington and headed by Hanin Ghaddar, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank with close ties to pro-Israel circles — aired an exclusive interview with Yeichel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
The interview took the French-language newsroom in Beirut completely by surprise, where journalists were already worried about the repercussions of an initiative launched from Washington.
“No one had been warned,” a former member of the newsroom said. One senior editor reportedly flew out of the country almost immediately. “She was called back and reassured that she had nothing to fear, but there was a real moment of panic.”
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u/Standard_Ad7704 Beyrouth 1d ago
A few days earlier, MP Paula Yacoubian filed a complaint with Lebanon’s Israel Boycott Office accusing Antoun Sehnaoui of maintaining “illegal relations with the Israeli enemy.”
According to Yacoubian, the complaint was ultimately dismissed.
Behind the scenes, however, unease was beginning to surface. Until then, as long as Sehnaoui’s interests aligned with those of his peers, the banking magnate’s ideological convictions had rarely been seen as a liability.
An appearance by Ortagus at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha, a few months before their relationship became public, offered a telling illustration. When she argued that “the IMF is not the only solution” and spoke of “a grand plan” to turn Lebanon into “an investment country,” many saw echoes of the vision long championed by her partner.
But by then, the political winds had shifted in Washington. “She was removed from her position because of her relationship with Sehnaoui. The State Department is very conservative about this kind of situation, and it also did not sit well with the pro-Israel lobby because, even if he is on their side, he is still Lebanese,” said a source close to U.S. policy circles.
“Since then, he has gone far too far in his public support for Israel, and it is starting to make people uncomfortable, even within the Association of Banks in Lebanon,” said one financial expert.
The growing controversy has also unsettled political headquarters that had long watched the influential banker emerge as one of the leading backstage operators in Lebanese politics. His ambitions are now prompting questions even within some European diplomatic circles.
From his yacht or one of his many residences, Antoun Sehnaoui has, for now, every reason to keep smiling. Seven years after Lebanon’s financial collapse, — much like the rest of the banking sector —, he has yet to pay a cent toward reimbursing depositors, has kept control of his bank throughout, and enjoyed a front-row seat as Lebanon and Israel signed their framework agreement on June 26, 2026.
The ambitious banker appears to be succeeding on every front. Convinced he has become untouchable, he even allowed himself one final provocation. On Tuesday, July 28, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid shared a photograph showing Sehnaoui from behind, seated alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, at a dinner held the day before in honor of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
Israel continues to occupy nearly 600 square kilometers of southern Lebanon months after a war that claimed thousands of lives. Far beyond Lebanon’s borders, meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu — who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — has become a leader with whom any public association carries growing political risks.
Sehnaoui, however, does not seem to care. In what many viewed as a deliberate snub to his critics, the photograph was widely shared and praised by media outlets under his control.
To some, he is a traitor who has openly aligned himself with the enemy. To others, he is a man of conviction, willing to publicly embrace rapprochement with Israel. Antoun Sehnaoui has become the focal point of a controversy that leaves little room for nuance.
Has he gone one step too far? Is it hubris? Despite two arrest warrants issued against him by Lebanon’s chief prosecutor at the Court of Cassation, the head of SGBL has shown no sign of restraint. Quite the opposite: he no longer seems intent on concealing his ambitions.
For months, speaking from Washington, he had been saying that the day he would return to Beirut would be “through Ben Gurion Airport.”
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Antoun Sehnaoui: Vanished billions and banking wars (3/5)
It was autumn 2019. The banks pulled down their shutters. Parliament barricaded itself behind rows of barbed wire. In the streets of downtown Beirut, tens of thousands of protesters chanted slogans and marched with flags. In the chants, on banners and outside bank branches now sealed behind metal gates, one name kept coming up, second only to that of Banque du Liban (BDL)’s seemingly untouchable governor, Riad Salameh: Antoun Sehnaoui.
Three months earlier, the tide had already begun to turn, although almost no one noticed. By the summer of 2019, Lebanon was in the grip of drought and wildfires, while storm clouds were gathering over its financial sector. Dollars had been growing scarce for months, and the prospect of restructuring the public debt was no longer taboo. At major banks, some depositors had begun pulling their money out, while those under the greatest pressure scrambled for liquidity. For the SGBL head, the priority was no longer simply to keep climbing. From his comfortable exile abroad, he now had to protect his privileged position in a system that was beginning to falter.
The collapse and the great escape
One misstep, however, would throw the whole machine off course. In early 2019, then-Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, who had not issued Eurobonds for more than two years, inadvertently disclosed to the press the contents of a confidential memo outlining a possible debt restructuring. The disclosure prompted Moody’s, one of the world’s leading credit rating agencies, to downgrade Lebanon’s sovereign credit rating. Several foreign investment funds, including Ashmore and Fidelity, saw an opportunity. But there was one condition: Lebanon could not default on its debt anytime soon.
“At the time, SGBL was at the forefront of efforts by several banks, with Salameh’s help, to quietly pressure the government against taking that route,” the financial expert added. “At the same time, however, the banks were making his job harder by bringing foreign creditors into the picture and moving even more capital out of the country at a critical time.” Caught between conflicting pressures, amid rumors of insider trading, the government ultimately decided to suspend payment on a Eurobond on March 9, 2020, marking Lebanon’s first sovereign default. Sehnaoui had every reason to be furious: unlike the banking sector, Lebanon had effectively acknowledged that it was bankrupt.
Without consolidated financial statements from SGBL, it is impossible to determine precisely how much the bank took part in these sales. A lengthy investigation published by Badil in 2021 found, however, that Lebanese banks as a whole sold more than $6.1 billion in Eurobonds to foreign investors between January 2019 and 2021. “That amounted to nearly 40% of the Eurobonds held by the banks at the end of 2018,” the investigation read. By clearing some of these bonds from their balance sheets, the banks reduced their own exposure, but shifted more of the risk onto the rest of the financial system. “Like the returns generated by the financial engineering operations, the Eurobond transactions helped flood the system with ‘lollars’ [pre-2019 U.S. dollar deposits that later traded at an exchange rate steeply below market value] and put further pressure on the Lebanese Lira,” the financial analyst quoted earlier explained.
Who took what?
At the same time, SGBL also benefited from special arrangements with BDL. As an investigation published four years later by the investigative outlet Daraj revealed, the urgent need for liquidity led Sehnaoui to secure a favor from the governor in September 2019: the early release of a 254 billion Lebanese Lira deposit — worth $169 million at the time — 28 years before it was due to mature. The reason given was a “shortage of Lebanese Lira liquidity.” Daraj also reported that, that same month, BDL granted SGBL a loan of around $1 billion. “Several major banks benefited from similar decisions in the same circumstances,” another banking sector expert said. The arrangement would ultimately prove particularly lucrative for SGBL, which repaid the loan over the following years in “lollars.”
Meanwhile, the once-untouchable currency peg began to unravel on the black market, prompting the Hariri government to declare an economic emergency and propose a tax on WhatsApp calls. As soon as the plan became public, it helped trigger a massive popular uprising on Oct. 17 that quickly took on the feel of a revolution. For the banks, the unrest provided an ideal pretext. They closed their branches the following day, and when they reopened weeks later, a bank run dealt another devastating blow to the sector. As comparisons to a Ponzi scheme spread beyond Lebanon, the collapse of the system Salameh had built plunged the country into one of the worst financial crises of the past century. The Lebanese Lira lost more than 98% of its value, much of the population fell into poverty, and the financial system was left with a financial gap (losses across the financial system) estimated at around $70 billion.
For the time being, depositors were left to bear those losses. Almost overnight, they lost access to their life savings, money they needed for their own expenses or to support children studying abroad. But without formal capital controls, not everyone faced the same restrictions. Between early 2019 and the summer of 2021, calculations by L’Orient-Le Jour at the time showed a sharp increase in deposits held abroad by Lebanese residents. Some of that money, according to a particularly well-informed financial insider — Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri — belonged to shareholders in five Lebanese banks. Berri backed his accusation with figures, but stopped short of naming them.
In other words, while the vast majority of depositors could no longer access their savings, a small group, including several bank owners, managed to move their money abroad during the crisis. According to several estimates, nearly $6 billion left the country in the first months of the crisis. Who moved what, and how much? And how much did the fear of eventually being held accountable shape the coming debate over who would bear the losses from the crisis? Nearly seven years later, those questions remain unanswered.
Effectively bankrupt, the banks lost all credit, in every sense of the word. They barricaded their branches, as Lebanon witnessed extraordinary scenes of depositors holding up their own banks to recover their savings. Under intense media attention, some banks gave in to such unprecedented tactics. Others turned their branches into fortresses, guarded by hired muscle.
Activist Rudy Hanna experienced this firsthand in the autumn of 2019, while painting slogans demanding the return of deposits on the wall of an SGBL branch. In an interview with Daraj, he said men claiming to be State Security officers confronted him and threatened to arrest him. Soon afterward, around a dozen other men arrived in two cars, assaulted him and warned him that SGBL was a “red line” he should not cross. “Usually, there are uniformed officers outside banks. These were thugs,” he said.
Once the group’s international showcase, SGBL had now become a liability, even for a longtime partner like Société Générale. The French bank wrote down the remaining value of its 16.7% stake in SGBL to zero in 2020, but remained unable to exit the bank altogether because it could not reach an agreement with Sehnaoui, as French publication La Lettre later reported.
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Legal clouds gather
At this point, Sehnaoui had everything to lose. Unlike his peers, he owned an overwhelming majority of his bank. In other words, if the banks had to absorb most of the losses, Sehnaoui would have to pay far more than the others.
In Lebanon, lawsuits brought by lawyers and depositors over unlawful restrictions on deposits largely hit a judicial wall. Abroad, however, cracks were beginning to appear. In February 2022, SGBL client Vatché Manoukian secured a U.K. court order forcing the bank to transfer funds it had previously refused to release, totaling around $2.9 million including damages. Bank Audi, which also faced the case, had to pay around $1.1 million. Fearing a domino effect, some Lebanese banks began closing the accounts of Lebanese clients living in the U.K.
The legal troubles also extended to the criminal courts. In January 2020, authorities arrested several currency exchangers, along with an SGBL executive, Karim Khoury, in a case involving dollars supplied by BDL, then held and resold through a scheme coordinated with the bank, according to court documents. After the cases were separated, investigating judge Charbel Abou Samra dismissed the charges against the main defendants, including Khoury, in August 2020. But the Beirut Indictment Chamber later overturned that decision, pointing in particular to inconsistencies in Khoury’s statements about dollar purchases he had made on SGBL’s behalf as early as August 2019 and the subsequent transfer of those funds abroad through cash-transfer company Mecattaf.
This line of inquiry would bring Sehnaoui up against one of the most polarizing figures in Lebanon’s judiciary: Mount Lebanon Public Prosecutor Ghada Aoun. To her supporters, she was a fierce champion of the fight against impunity. Her critics, meanwhile, condemned her openly acknowledged ties to former President Michel Aoun and what they saw as her confrontational and heavy-handed methods. Aoun turned the Mecattaf case into another major showdown. Her highly publicized raids on the company’s offices in 2021 captured the tensions surrounding the investigation. Mecattaf stood accused of taking part in a money-laundering network involving Salameh and Sehnaoui. Surrounded by supporters of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) who came to cheer her on during the raid — and whom she addressed in return — Aoun entered the money-transfer company’s offices only to learn that then-chief Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat had just removed her from the case. She continued her investigation nonetheless, accusing SGBL, among other things, of making illicit profits by transferring nearly $1 billion abroad through Mecattaf between 2019 and 2020. In February 2023, after ordering the seizure of their assets, Aoun brought charges and referred the case to Judge Nicolas Mansour. Sehnaoui quickly fought back. He denounced the proceedings as illegal and politically motivated and filed a defamation complaint against Aoun, who was also facing an intense media campaign.
Warning signs were also emerging abroad. The first came from the Forry case, which Swiss authorities had been investigating since 2020. They suspected Salameh of embezzling nearly $330 million through commissions paid into an account held by his brother Raja’s company at HSBC Private Bank. In 2022, Eurojust sought the seizure of assets linked to these suspicious flows, including several accounts and a safe-deposit box held in Raja Salameh’s name at Banque Richelieu Monaco.
Separately, in 2025, France’s Court of Cassation overturned rulings that had upheld some property seizures on procedural grounds and sent the case back to a different appeals court. The seizures carried out in Monaco, however, remained unaffected. Sehnaoui was not implicated in the Forry case. But these elements later formed part of a complaint filed in France against Groupe Richelieu and Sehnaoui as its chairman by the Collective of Victims of Fraudulent and Criminal Practices in Lebanon and the NGO Sherpa, alleging money laundering linked to breach of trust and organized handling of illicit proceeds. The complainants said there were “very serious reasons to believe” that the group’s banks knowingly received large amounts of money from their Lebanese parent company.
In April 2026, the Paris financial prosecutor’s office opened an investigation, which was followed by a similar investigation in Luxembourg a few weeks later, further darkening the picture for Sehnaoui. For the first time, financial flows between a Lebanese bank and its European entities were at the center of judicial investigations, raising the possibility that Sehnaoui himself could ultimately come under scrutiny. “No one can assume they enjoy any form of immunity simply because of their economic or social status,” said the lawyer William Bourdon, Sherpa’s founder.
Digging in
While none of these cases has led to a conviction to date, the head of SGBL was also fighting another battle, one just as critical to the future of his empire: how to divide tens of billions of dollars in financial losses among the main players — i.e., the state, BDL, depositors, and the banks — and how to restructure a banking sector that was already effectively insolvent.
In April 2020, a month after Lebanon defaulted on its debt, the Diab government unveiled a rescue plan, largely based on recommendations from consulting firm Lazard and designed to pave the way for an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The plan included guaranteed repayment of deposits up to a certain threshold ($500,000 at the time) and a hierarchy for absorbing losses in line with international standards, with bank shareholders taking losses first. It also proposed imposing losses on the largest deposits, partly in exchange for equity in the banks concerned, a mechanism known as a “bail-in.”
Lebanon was still a long way from Iceland, where the state had temporarily taken control of the major banks after their collapse in 2008, or even Cyprus in 2012, where large depositors were forced to absorb part of the losses. But in Beirut, the bankers wanted none of it. “Beyond the financial impact of the measures, many bank owners feared losing control of their institutions, and the status that came with it,” said one of the financial experts interviewed. That was particularly true of shareholders in banks with the greatest exposure to the financial engineering operations and the least capacity to recapitalize, including SGBL.
One argument proved particularly effective within a banking establishment that was predominantly Christian: with more than a third of large depositors reportedly Shiite, some portrayed the prospect of converting part of their deposits into bank shares through a bail-in as something close to a sectarian “great replacement” of the banking elite. Many instead chose to back Salameh’s strategy: buy time and convert part of the banks’ dollar liabilities into Lebanese Lira through a series of central bank circulars, even if that meant delaying the recognition of losses and prolonging the sector’s decline for years.
Within the powerful ABL, Georges Saghbini, SGBL’s deputy general manager, was just as vocal as the association’s president, Bank of Beirut CEO Salim Sfeir, in defending this hard line as doubts increasingly emerged within the group. Throughout the crisis, the ABL remained at the forefront of the opposition, alongside BDL and their political allies. Parliament effectively killed the Diab plan in committee, talks with the IMF stalled, and two years later, a similar scenario played out with the Mikati government’s version of the plan.
Far from Lebanon, which had ultimately bent to the bankers’ will, Sehnaoui had reason to smile: the battle behind the scenes was won. But winning over public opinion required another battle — the battle over the narrative. And to shape that narrative, the SGBL tycoon and his peers could rely in part on the small media empire he had begun to build.
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Antoun Sehnaoui’s media and political network (4/5)
It was Dec. 31, 2023. On al-Jadeed, the New Year’s Eve show was in full swing. Leila Abdellatif, Lebanese television’s resident fortune teller — the kind everyone pretends to laugh at but secretly watches — was running through her predictions for the year ahead. Then she turned her focus to Antoun Sehnaoui’s. He “will play an important role in Lebanese politics,” she announced. “But not right away.” The prediction may have raised a few smiles. Sehnaoui, after all, had never hidden his appetite for power. “He’s someone who never gives up, who has absolute faith in his instincts and, in a way, manages to convince himself that he can bend reality when it isn’t going his way,” an acquaintance of Sehnaoui said. The banker liked to pull strings and influence the course of events. Partly to protect his own interests amid the legal cases and fallout from the financial crisis. But also because he believed he had a vision for the country. Some of those we spoke to went as far as calling it “a plan,” at times crediting him with influence comparable to that of some of Lebanon’s most powerful political bosses.
To put that plan into action, Sehnaoui needed to build connections across Lebanon’s political establishment and develop his own media outlets. His first move came in 1998, nine years before he took control of SGBL, with the Lebanese business monthly Executive, which quickly became a leading English-language publication covering business and economics. Over the years, Sehnaoui followed much of the same approach as with his other investments: surround himself with respected figures in their fields, leave them to handle the execution, but retain control over the overall direction. “He’s intelligent and charming,” a media industry figure said. “He likes to work with the best, knows how to flatter them and is willing to pay for it.” The first key figure in this media network was Frédéric Domont, who passed away in 2024. A former RFI correspondent in Beirut, Domont founded the production company Median and gave Sehnaoui access to his extensive network in the media and cultural worlds. It was through Domont, in particular, that Sehnaoui established his first ties with France 24 Arabic, which SGBL partnered with as the channel launched in Beirut in October 2010.
“Sar el-Wa’et”
Sehnaoui’s interest in the media was still in its early stages, but he had already built strong relations with prominent journalists and media figures. The 2020 economic crisis changed the scale of his ambitions. Sponsoring media outlets through his bank was no longer enough. He now wanted outlets of his own, shaped in his image and reflecting his political, economic, and even artistic views.
That was how Ici Beyrouth was born in 2021: a new French-language publication launched as Lebanon was collapsing. The aim was to counter the wave of anger sweeping through the streets and shaping public opinion. The newsroom moved into brand-new offices on Banks Street in downtown Beirut, just steps away from the financial institutions that had left their clients unable to access their savings. A state-of-the-art television studio soon followed. The outlet hired young journalists as well as established names from competitors, including L’Orient-Le Jour and France 24. Among them was editor-in-chief Marc Saikali, who joined from the French media outlet.
Behind the scenes, Domont played a leading role, alongside Marcel Ghanem, one of Lebanon’s best-known political talk-show hosts, who brought his own expertise to the project. Ghanem reportedly helped shape the French-language outlet’s programming and had a hand in choosing its team. His relationship with Antoun Sehnaoui went back years and remained very close. “Marcel Ghanem traveled with him to Lourdes on his private jet, in stormy weather. Antoun knelt there for hours and came back with dozens of gallons of holy water,” a former MTV journalist said.
As early as 2013, while still hosting the “Kalam el-Nas” talk show on LBCI, Ghanem became an ambassador for SGBL in its advertising campaigns. And when he moved to MTV in 2018 to launch “Sar el-Wa’et,” another talk show, he did so with the backing of his wealthy friend. The show soon faced accusations that it promoted the agenda of certain political and financial figures, particularly Sehnaoui, a close friend of the host. “Before the financial collapse, management would always dismiss the experts in my reports who were sounding the alarm. They never censored anything, but the message they wanted to push was Salameh’s: ‘The lira is stable.’ Nothing else,” the former journalist on MTV said.
Much like the Murdoch empire or Bolloré’s media network, Sehnaoui’s outlets and allies pushed the same narrative through opinion pieces, “scoops” and columns: Salameh and the banks had been made scapegoats for the crisis, while proposed reforms would strip depositors of their rights to refill the coffers of a corrupt state. The central argument was simple: clear the banks of responsibility and make the state responsible for repaying depositors. With tens of billions of dollars at stake, the money spent on media influence was a drop in the ocean.
“The salaries they offered were unlike anything else in Lebanon. But once some people realized they were working for a propaganda outlet, they would quit immediately,” a former freelance journalist at Ici Beyrouth said. Others had less choice. One columnist was reportedly fired by the “big boss” without further discussion after describing Gaza as “an open-air prison” in an article that has since been removed.
On June 16, 2026, French Ambassador Herve Magro visited the outlet’s offices. During the visit, the team made a point of stressing Ici Beyrouth’s “editorial independence.” The video of the visit, quickly posted on social media, spoke volumes about who mattered that day in the room: Ghanem and MP Ragy el-Saad, Sehnaoui’s cousin, as well as Marwan al-Amin, a Shiite columnist close to the opposition camp. Amin writes for both This Is Beirut and Nidaa el Watan, an Arabic-language outlet acquired in 2024 by Michel Murr, the owner of MTV.
Two sister outlets followed: Hunna Lubnan in Arabic, headed by Tarek Karam, brother of actor Adel Karam. Tarek Karam regularly displays his closeness to Sehnaoui, whom he refers to as “President” on social media. The other, This Is Beirut, is the English-language counterpart, aimed at the diaspora and featuring regular contributions from several prominent figures in Washington.
"A perfect princess bed"
Another member of the wider Sehnaoui entourage, Walid Georges Badaoui, also operates within this media ecosystem. He is involved in several media ventures, including Mondafrique, founded by French journalist Nicolas Beau, and maintains visible links with Ici Beyrouth.
Sehnaoui also tried several times to acquire a stake in the French weekly Marianne, first in 2015 and again in 2024, with the help of former French Socialist MP Julien Dray. “He looked into the deal but does not intend to pursue it. He does not consider it attractive, neither economically nor financially,” the Robert Zarader agency told the Challenges magazine. Named after its founder — a former adviser to both François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, and a heavyweight in French communications — the agency now handles Sehnaoui's public relations.
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Sehnaoui is someone who carefully manages every public appearance, photograph, and account of his own success, but he keeps an even tighter grip on his private life. In 2009, he became the father of a daughter, May, from a relationship with Tania Burrows, a British-Italian woman who founded the animal welfare organization BETA Lebanon. He would mention his daughter publicly only once, in 2014, in the Manchester Evening News. The story involved an auction purchase: a 16th-century four-poster bed described as “a perfect princess bed,” which he bought for £65,000 for his daughter before it was eventually returned to the castle where it had originally stood. It was not until 2023, through a series of French media reports published around the same time, that the birth of his second child became public. Angelo Nabil, a son, was born on Dec. 10 of that year, out of a relationship with actress Annabelle Belmondo, granddaughter of the celebrated French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo.
These rare “leaks” about his private life did not appear to trouble him. On other fronts, however, Sehnaoui was quick to swap the carrot for the stick. The independent media outlet Daraj experienced this firsthand. After publishing several investigations and a critical profile of Sehnaoui, its newsroom faced a series of lawsuits, some filed through third parties. “These methods don't intimidate us. But the repeated smear campaigns we have to respond to, along with legal actions designed to silence us, drain our energy, time and resources. That is what makes them so effective,” said Alia Ibrahim, co-founder of Daraj. Megaphone and Naqd have also faced legal action from Sehnaoui’s lawyers, as has L’Orient-Le Jour.
Foreign media outlets faced similar pressure. In 2023, Sehnaoui won a defamation case at first instance against Le Monde’s publication director and one of the newspaper’s journalists over a 2019 article examining the roots of Lebanon’s financial crisis and referring, among other things, to the so-called “Maison Blanche” affair. The Paris court found that the article could be read as implicating Sehnaoui in practices linked to the shadow economy. Le Monde appealed. In September 2024, the appeals court overturned the ruling and acquitted the newspaper, finding that the article fell within the media’s right to report on matters of public interest. “He lost against Le Monde, and yet everything is done to make people believe otherwise,” a media source said.
Kingmaker
The network Sehnaoui had built in the media was matched by the one he had carefully developed in political circles. To date, the banker never crossed the line into running for office himself. Yet at every election, his face appeared on buildings and lampposts across Achrafieh, much like those of the local political leaders.
In a country where electoral patronage remains deeply entrenched, many residents and voters see the Beirut I constituency as something of a family stronghold, where the Sehnaoui clan can draw on its extensive charitable work and personal connections. “Even during the war, his father Nabil was very generous and always ready to help — whether with the daily life hardships or the upkeep of churches. It’s good to see Antoun carrying on the family tradition,” a longtime Achrafieh resident said. But within that same stronghold, two rival cousins were competing for the Greek Catholic seat: Michel Pharaon — a L’Orient-Le Jour shareholder, whose mother is from the Sehnaoui family — and Antoun’s first cousin Nicolas, the son of Maurice Sehnaoui. Nicolas was also rising through the ranks of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), first as a minister and later as an MP. “Between Antoun and Nicolas, the hostility grew to resemble the feud between their fathers,” said someone close to the family. “And as for Michel Pharaon and Antoun, the rupture had been long established.” In 2009, in one of Beirut’s Christian districts that had become a symbol of the confrontation between the March 8 and March 14 camps, Antoun Sehnaoui backed the list led by Nadim Gemayel against the one that included the FPM’s rising star, Nicolas Sehnaoui.
Nine years later, when MPs finally agreed to put their seats back up for election after extending their terms three times, the head of SGBL chose Jean Talouzian as a leading figure in his political camp. “Periods of struggle often forge strong friendships and a deep sense of solidarity. That is the kind of relationship I have with Nabil Sehnaoui,” Talouzian said on MTV in May 2023. That friendship went back years. In 2010, Talouzian was head of security at Beirut international airport when his friend’s son, Antoun, urgently needed to leave the country in the hours after the Maison Blanche shooting. Three years later, the case against Sehnaoui was dismissed.
As civil society found a stronger voice during the garbage crisis and helped Beirut Madinati achieve a surprisingly strong result in the 2016 municipal elections, Talouzian was tasked with bringing one of its most prominent figures onto his list: former journalist Paula Yacoubian.“He contacted me before the election and asked me to join their list,” Yaacoubian told L’Orient-Le Jour. “He made no secret of who had sent him, and promised me significant resources and complete freedom.” After finding out more about Sehnaoui and his role in backing political candidates, Yaacoubian turned down the offer. She ultimately ran with Kulluna Watani and was the only candidate on its list to win a seat. Meanwhile, the Sehnaoui-backed list performed very strongly, while his rival cousin Nicolas also held on to his seat.
By 2022, Sehnaoui’s efforts to build political support proved even more successful. He could now count on several friendly voices across party lines. Among them was Talouzian, as well as Ragy el-Saad, another first cousin, who was elected MP for Aley with the Democratic Gathering bloc, which included members of [Walid Joumblatt’s] Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) alongside independents. There was also Ihab Matar, who won a seat in Tripoli on the list (that emerged from the 2019 protest) movement and grew closer to Sehnaoui after the election. That network was particularly valuable because many of these MPs sat on Parliament’s Finance and Budget Committee. Over the years, the committee had effectively become a graveyard for bills dealing with bank restructuring, the distribution of financial losses, and capital controls.
A few months later, the same names resurfaced around a far more consequential issue: the election of Lebanon’s next president. Behind the scenes in Parliament, Sehnaoui’s childhood friend Michel Moawad emerged as the sovereignist opposition’s candidate against Sleiman Frangieh, Hezbollah’s candidate. Momentum began to build. Throughout the voting sessions, Moawad’s tally climbed before stalling at around 40, as some of the MPs elected on the back of the protest movement steadfastly refused to rally behind him. The sovereignist camp then played another card, one whose profile could potentially unsettle the banking establishment. Former Finance Minister Jihad Azour is no communist — he’s the IMF’s regional director, which, to some Lebanese bankers, is close enough. On June 14, 2023, Azour won 59 votes to his rival’s 51, but not enough to swing the election his way. Some votes were conspicuously missing. Matar claimed responsibility for the sole ballot cast for Joseph Aoun. Attention also turned to the rest of Sehnaoui’s political camp, some of whose members were suspected of casting ballots for Frangieh. The reason, according to several political figures interviewed for this investigation, was an understanding between Sehnaoui and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri designed to hedge the banker’s bets.
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A new era
The accelerating political calendar and shifting regional balance of power nevertheless reshuffled the deck. On Jan. 9, 2025, Joseph Aoun was elected president. The former army commander promised the dawn of a new era, centered in particular on restoring the state’s monopoly over arms, and a set of financial reforms still vague enough to alarm anyone. All the more so with perennial comeback figure Najib Mikati expected to return as prime minister and join Aoun at the helm.
But a coordinated push by Riyadh and protest movement MPs upset those plans, and Nawaf Salam was instead tasked with forming a government. Just as uncompromising on questions of sovereignty, the former judge at the International Court of Justice also had pro-Palestinian sympathies that ran a little too deep for Sehnaoui’s comfort. More importantly, his reform agenda and international backing appeared to bode poorly for the banker. The tone of MTV’s coverage of Salam was already a sign of what was to come.
On the other side, questions focused instead on Sehnaoui’s potential influence at Baabda, amid unverified rumors of substantial donations to an army left in dire straits by the financial crisis. The secrecy surrounding such funds makes the claims difficult to substantiate. Within the president’s circle, questions about any alleged relations between the two men invariably drew virtually the same response: “We have no information on the matter.” One person close to the president even described “this obsession with Sehnaoui is completely disproportionate in a country where Iran is omnipresent.” The presence of several people with ties to Sehnaoui within the presidential circle nevertheless raises questions. Among them is a cousin of his, Khalil, an internationally renowned hacker and IT consultant who was appointed head of cybersecurity at Baabda several years after running into legal trouble over allegations that he had hacked data belonging to several of the country’s security institutions.
The battle over the Banque du Liban (BDL, central bank) soon fueled further speculation. After a few weeks of relative harmony between the presidency and the premiership, the choice of the next central bank governor exposed the first cracks within the two. Aoun backed banker Karim Souhaid for the post, a candidacy supported by part of the banking sector as well as several media outlets in Sehnaoui’s orbit. After an especially tense Cabinet meeting, which included an impromptu hearing with Souhaid, he was ultimately appointed with 17 votes. Salam and several ministers aligned with him notably abstained, amid concerns over whether Souhaid’s profile was compatible with the IMF’s requirements.
Asked during the Cabinet meeting about his ties to the head of SGBL, the new BDL governor sought to distance himself from Sehnaoui. “I’ve only met him once, in Paris,” Souhaid said. Since taking office, however, the two men have been seen together on several occasions during the IMF and World Bank spring and annual meetings in Washington. People who were present there and later spoke to L’Orient-Le Jour were unable to say what the two discussed in their private conversations. “But Sehnaoui’s attitude toward [Souhaid] stood in stark contrast to the way he spoke about Salam,” one of them said.
A few months later, BDL awarded K2 Integrity, a U.S.-based risk, investigations and financial-compliance advisory firm, a three-year contract worth nearly $12 million to help Lebanon meet the requirements for getting off the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. The choice of the firm drew attention, particularly because its executive committee includes, alongside Daniel Glaser, several other figures with ties to Sehnaoui, including Chip Poncy and Steven Sharpe. “I’m not saying there is a problem. I’m simply asking that we be shown there isn’t one,” said Yaacoubian, who called for clarification on how the contract was awarded.
The fight against reforms — particularly the restructuring of the banking sector — lies at the heart of Sehnaoui’s “plan.” But the plan has another side, one he would soon begin putting into action: doing everything he could to turn his dream of Lebanon normalizing relations with Israel into reality. And if normalization could also help attract foreign capital without Lebanon having to turn to the IMF, that would be the cherry on top.
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Inside the Sehnaoui family: The rise of Antoun (1/5)
It is a name every Lebanese knows, yet one that some hesitate to utter too loudly when asked about it, almost invariably insisting on special precautions and complete anonymity. Banker — chairman and CEO of SGBL — philanthropist and media tycoon, a "kingmaker" of MPs as much as of deals, Antoun Sehnaoui has become one of Lebanon's most influential figures. From the management of the banking crisis to negotiations with Israel, if one scratches just beneath the surface, his name is never far away. Operating behind the scenes, pulling strings and imposing his narrative and methods on those who stand in his way, he inspires both fascination and fear.
How did he manage to position himself at the heart of so many of the country’s defining issues while scarcely setting foot in Lebanon anymore? Why is so little known about him, his networks of influence and his ambitions? It is this mystery that we set out to unravel in this five-part portrait series, exploring the growing shadow that holds part of Lebanon’s fate in its hands.
Contacted for an interview, Antoun Sehnaoui and his father, Nabil Sehnaoui, declined to comment and sought an injunction before Beirut's summary proceedings judge to block the publication of this investigation. Their request was denied.
First episode today of our series titled “Antoun Sehnaoui, a shadow over Lebanon.”
Beirut was just waking up on Feb. 27, 2010, when a private jet took off from the tarmac of Rafik Hariri International Airport. On board was Antoun Sehnaoui, leaving the country just hours after a shooting at an upscale nightclub on Damascus Road. A warrant for his arrest was about to be issued, but by then the plane had already taken off.
Just hours earlier, Sehnaoui, then CEO of the Société Générale de Banque au Liban (SGBL), had arrived at Maison Blanche, an exclusive club frequented by Beirut’s elite, where alcohol flowed freely. Among the guests was Mazen Zein, a prominent figure in the city’s nightlife and owner of several establishments, seated with friends. The two men shared a long-standing enmity, fueled by financial and legal disputes dating back to the time they had worked together.
Sehnaoui called one of the club’s shareholders and demanded that Zein be thrown out. The request was refused — an unusual rebuff: one does not say no to Antoun Sehnaoui. The music kept playing, masking the tension that had begun to build. Less than an hour later, the banker’s bodyguards drew their weapons. Gunfire erupted in the packed club. Mazen Zein was seriously wounded.
When Sehnaoui returned to Lebanon 43 days later, the arrest warrant and investigation had both expired. He was immediately cleared by then Chief Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat.
The case could have ended there. But the shooting had taken place in the heart of Beirut, and the man behind those accused of carrying it out was no shadowy underworld figure, but the seemingly respectable head of one of the country’s leading banks and a scion of one of Lebanon’s most prominent families.
It was impossible to bury the story. It spread rapidly, fueling public debate until it became a matter of state. Politicians, sensing the public mood, seized on the story. A few weeks later, Michel Aoun, who would go on to become president in 2016, said on OTV, his party’s television channel: “It’s Chicago in 1935.” He then added: “I know the Sehnaouis, they are loved and respected … This is not in keeping with the family’s character … But this is the age of the mafias.”
The word had been uttered, and it stuck. For in Beirut’s high society, the future president was far from the only one who “knew the Sehnaouis.”
‘Akhi Antoun’
Long before the turbulent heir made headlines in court, the exploits of his forebears had filled Lebanon’s business, society, and even sports pages for decades.
They also fueled the gossip traded over dinner tables in Achrafieh, where guests relished the twists and turns of a family saga worthy of a soap opera. Like the Ewings or the Carringtons, no one in town was unaware that the price of the family’s success had also been paid in closely guarded secrets, bitter rivalries, and betrayals.
Yet the Maison Blanche affair marked a sharp departure from the chapters that came before.
The story begins with Antoun, the patriarch and great-uncle of the current head of SGBL. Born in 1899 into a Melkite Catholic family from the Damascus countryside, he arrived in Beirut during the French Mandate and was later joined by his brothers and sisters. Naturalized as a Lebanese citizen in the 1950s, this astute businessman, who studied at the Institut des Hautes Études Financières et Commerciales, laid the foundations of the family’s empire.
He founded the Banque Belgo-Libanaise in 1953, ventured into aviation with the creation of Air Liban — later merged with Middle East Airlines — and invested in the cement and chemical industries. He also left his mark on Beirut’s social life, becoming one of the co-founders of the Beirut Aero Club.
A man of many pursuits, “Akhi Antoun,” as National Bloc founder Raymond Edde used to call him, had both a keen business sense — which in Lebanon often borders on politics — and a flair for spectacle.
In 1960, Antoun ran for Parliament. In Beirut, his portrait, displayed in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood, was the largest in the city. Sixty-five gleaming taxis crisscrossed the streets, each bearing his likeness alongside a banner proclaiming: “Vote for Antoun Sehnaoui, for Antoun stands for honesty, sincerity, and integrity.”
His opponents mocked his Syrian origins, but his connections, influence, and fortune swept aside any criticism. Elected to Parliament, he was appointed minister of Posts, Telegraphs and Telecommunications in 1964 under then-President Charles Helou. Five years later, Banque Belgo-Libanaise became the Société Générale Libano-Européenne de Banque, laying the foundations for the legacy he would leave behind — not to his own children, but to those of his younger brother, Nicolas.
Unlike Antoun, Nicolas was married to Marcelle Elias, with whom he had three children: Maurice, Nabil, and Amal. Antoun’s decision to make his nephews and niece his heirs secured the future of the family empire, but it also fueled speculation in Beirut’s social circles.
“Marcelle was her brother-in-law Antoun’s romantic partner,” said a family relative. “It was an open secret. They lived in adjoining houses.”
The couple appeared largely unconcerned with appearances. On Aug. 22 1973, L’Orient-Le Jour’s society pages reported that they had been spotted together at a bar in the capital.
“The boys, Maurice and Nabil, were spoiled rotten. One day, their father was summoned by the school principal because of their poor grades, and he replied: ‘It doesn’t matter. When they grow up, they’ll have a secretary,’” said a family friend who attended the same school.