Rami Makhlouf: Tycoon warns of ‘earthquake’ if he is driven from Syrian business scene

An extraordinarily public feud within the Alawite ruling elite of Syria escalates as the saga enters its second month

President Bashar Al Assad upon inheriting power in July 2000, which also marked the rise of his tycoon cousin, Rami Makhlouf. AFP

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”.