Edmond Safra

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Edmond Jacob Safra , also Raphael Edmond Ezra Safra , ( Arabic ادموند يعقوب صفرا; * August 6, 1931 in Alayh near Beirut , Lebanon ; † December 3, 1999 in Monte Carlo , Monaco ) was a Lebanese-Brazilian banker and multi-billionaire .

Life

Safra was one of nine children and the second-born son of Jacob and Esther Safra. Both came from a family of oriental Jews from Aleppo who, as gold traders and moneylenders, were traditionally involved in financing the caravan trade between their hometown and Beirut , Constantinople and Alexandria .

Safra's father Jacob opened the Jacob E. Safra Bank in Beirut in 1920. Edmond Safra's mother died when he was nine years old, and at 16 he started working in his father's bank, where he was mainly involved in precious metals and foreign exchange trading.

As a representative of his father's bank in Beirut, Safra opened a trading company in Milan before the family settled in Brazil in 1952. In 1955 Safra and his father founded a bank in São Paulo there .

While his younger brothers Joseph and Moise continued to do business in Brazil, Safra founded the Trade Development Bank in Geneva in 1956 and the Republic National Bank of New York in 1966 , which with 80 branches became the bank with the third-largest branch network in the New York region after Citibank and Chase became Manhattan . 1973 followed the establishment of a holding company , the Republic New York Corporation (Republic).

In 1969, shortly after the death of her second husband, he met the Brazilian widow Lily Monteverde . The 35-year-old new multimillionaire had just become the sole heir to Ponto Frio , one of Brazil's largest retail chains, and moved to London to escape inheritance disputes, and Safra became her wealth advisor. Soon after, they started a relationship. At first, Safra did not comply with her wish to marry, as his family of Sephardic origin was against marriage to an Ashkenazi Jewish woman . In 1976 - in the meantime Lily Monteverde had a brief third marriage behind him - he finally took her as his wife.

In 1983 he sold the Trade Development Bank for more than 550 million US dollars to American Express (Amex). With the establishment of Safra Republic Holdings SA in 1988 Safra is said to have acted against a non-competition clause agreed in the course of the sale. In return, Amex management hired private investigators to prove the breach of contract to Safra. This was subsequently repeatedly publicly associated with dubious criminal transactions, whereupon Safra tried similar means to expose Amex as the mastermind behind the campaign, which ultimately succeeded. The various allegations and rumors against or about him were ultimately not confirmed. This resulted in a lawsuit that Safra won. In 1989, Amex publicly apologized for the apparently initiated smear campaign and paid $ 8 million in compensation to charity.

In 1996, Safra and Bill Browder founded Hermitage Capital Management , which at times was Russia's largest foreign investor and later made headlines in connection with the Sergei Leonidowitsch Magnitsky affair .

Villa Leopolda , former Safra estate in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d'Azur

At the end of 1999 Safra, who wanted to sell his bank and the holdings to the major bank HSBC , was in controversial sales negotiations with the latter. Even before it was finished, he was killed in a fire on December 3rd of that year under mysterious circumstances in his penthouse in Monte Carlo .

In the early 1990s, his net worth was estimated at $ 2.5 billion. Since shortly before his death he had written a new will to the detriment of his older brothers, with which he made his wife practically the sole beneficiary, Lily Safra inherited most of it. A few weeks later, the deal with HSBC was sealed and almost 3 billion US dollars were added from the sales proceeds.

Safra was buried in a Geneva synagogue on December 6, 1999 in nearby Veyrier after a major funeral service . He lived in Geneva, New York, in the Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera and in Monaco. Safra's marriage was childless, but he has four stepchildren from his wife's first marriage. Safra's nephew Edmond is married to the daughter of his cousin, the art dealer David Nahmad , whose ancestors were also bankers in Aleppo.

Circumstances of death

With Parkinson's disease progressing , Safra needed nursing services. One of his nurses, the American Ted Maher, initially testified that two strangers had robbed Safra's penthouse in Monte Carlo . They stabbed him and he passed out. Conscious again, he alerted Safra and the second nurse and left the penthouse to call the porter for help. The two masked attackers, who would initially have disappeared, would probably have started the fire afterwards. A few days later, however, he confessed to having committed the arson himself. He said he wanted to “save” Safra, who was very concerned about his personal safety and was described as increasingly paranoid in the last years of his life, in order to increase his reputation with his family. The fire finally got unintentionally out of control. As a result, Safra died together with another nurse who was with him from the effects of smoke development . Maher was sentenced to imprisonment by a Monaco court in 2002 and released in 2007, whereupon he retracted his confession.

In addition to Maher's contradicting statements, the media discussed circumstances in connection with the deaths years later: It was only three hours after the first emergency call that the two victims were found dead from a bathroom of the penthouse in which they had allegedly barricaded themselves. Although the living area was completely video-monitored, there should have been no recordings of the crime scene at the time in question. Safra's bodyguards were not on site, nor did his wife, who was also in the penthouse and ultimately unharmed, come to his aid.

The penthouse hit the headlines again in September 2010 when the brothers Christian and Nick Candy sold the property "as one of the most expensive apartments" for 199 million British pounds (around 240 million euros) to an unnamed investor from the Middle East .

Charity from Safra and his widow

During her lifetime, Safra supported a variety of educational, religious, medical, cultural and humanitarian organizations and projects around the world. Among other things, he donated to charities and communities of Sephardic Jews. The Edmond J. Safra Philanthropy Foundation , founded by Safra himself, has continued his work in his memory ever since.

Synagogues

Faithful to his Jewish faith, he believed it was important to build new synagogues and maintain existing ones in places where a Jewish community could thrive . Synagogues around the world bearing his father's name testify to his commitment. Many of these were built in the world's major Jewish centers, but he also helped build synagogues in smaller communities such as Manila and Kinshasa . He made the construction of the first synagogue in Madrid possible for 500 years and supported the renovation and expansion of synagogues in Amsterdam , Istanbul , Naples , Budapest , Rhodes and Vienna . He saved the oldest synagogue in France at Clermont-Ferrand from destruction by buying it for the community and helped expand the synagogue in Cannes and the synagogue Beth El in Paris . He also helped restore synagogues in many small French towns such as Evian , Annemasse, and elsewhere. Safra supported a number of synagogues in Israel. The tombs of Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Shimon ben Jochai were particularly important to Edmond Safra, and he was without a doubt the most generous supporter of these places of pilgrimage. For many years he prayed on the eve of Shavuot , the day his father died, until sunrise at Rabbi Meir's tomb.

medicine

During his lifetime, Safra donated millions of dollars to the medical treatment of the sick. Hospitals around the world such as the Hôpital Cantonal de Genève, the Hôpitaux de France, and numerous facilities in the United States have benefited from Safra's generosity. He is one of the founders of the Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paolo, which is now one of the largest and most respected medical centers in South America. In Israel, he initiated the construction of the ultra-modern Edmond and Lily Safra Children's Hospital in Tel Hashomer .

In the field of medical research, he has provided extensive support to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and a number of centers in France, the United States and other countries dealing with certain diseases. He founded the Edmond and Lily Safra-Chair for research into breast cancer at the University of Tulane.

education

Safra believed that in the modern world, higher education is essential for all young people, even if he never went to university himself. He provided teaching grants to tens of thousands of students in need through the International Sephardic Education Foundation (ISEF). An institution he and his wife started in 1977 to support deserving Israeli students. ISEF scholarship recipients excelled in all subjects around the world.

Safra also helped the universities directly, often by sponsoring chairs and certain programs (e.g., Jewish studies). For example, he endowed the Jacob E. Safra Chair in Jewish History and Sephardic Culture at Harvard University , and provided substantial funding for the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Chair in Latin American Studies. Also at Harvard, he provided grants for ethics research, which have now been expanded to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics with donations of several million euros from the foundation run by his widow .

At the Wharton School of Business , he founded the Jacob E. Safra Chair in International Banking and the Safra Business Research Center.

He was a major patron of the American University in Beirut . The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva University (to which he had founded the Jacob E. Safra Institute of Sephardic Studies) awarded him an honorary doctorate for the continued support of these facilities.

With regard to the education of younger children, Edmond Safra was particularly interested in schools in the cities in which he lived. For example, he founded the École Girsa , the first and largest Jewish school in Geneva. He was very proud of the establishment of the Beit Yaacov School in Bat Yam , which is one of the best schools in Israel. He was also one of the most important founders of yeshivot (religious schools in which young men are trained as rabbis, teachers of Judaism and judges) and sponsored numerous such institutions around the world.

Honors

Edmond J. Safra has been recognized worldwide for his philanthropy. The French government appointed him Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier ( Knight ) of the Legion of Honor , the Grand Duke of Luxembourg as Commandeur de l'Ordre de Mérite and the Brazilian government as Commandeur de l'Ordre de Rio Branco.

literature

  • Bryan Burrough, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra , HarperCollins, New York 1992. ISBN 0-06-016759-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Edmond Safras family tree . From farhi.org, accessed May 25, 2016
  2. ^ Edmond Jacob Safra - Swiss banker and philanthropist , entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica on britannica.com, accessed on May 25, 2016
  3. ↑ a b Family tree Esther Teira Safras . From farhi.org, accessed May 29, 2016
  4. ↑ Anderson Antunes: Moise Safra, Brazilian Billionaire Banker, Dead At 79 . June 15, 2014 on forbes.com
  5. ↑ Jacob Safras family tree . From farhi.org, accessed May 25, 2016
  6. ^ A b History of Republic New York Corporation . Retrieved May 28, 2016 from referenceforbusiness.com
  7. ^ The origins of a family of bankers ( Memento from May 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved May 25, 2016 from safra.com
  8. ^ Edmond J. Safra . From edmondjsafra.org, accessed May 25, 2016
  9. ^ Brazilian Jewish philanthropist Moise Safra passes away . Retrieved May 25, 2016 from worldjewishcongress.org
  10. ↑ a b Dafna Izenberg: The billionaire's widow . On July 29, 2010 on macleans.ca
  11. ^ A b Dominick Dunne: Death in Monaco . December 1st, 2000 on vanityfair.com
  12. ↑ Johannes Willms: The rich widow . On March 4, 2010 on sueddeutsche.de ( Memento from January 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Joël van der Reijden: "La Nebuleuse": Supranational network tied to child abuse networks, Iran Contra, cocaine cartels and the BCCI's "Black Network" . On September 30, 2010 on isgp.nl
  14. ↑ Leah Nathan's Spiro: What Did Robinson Know, And When Did He Know It? . June 1, 1992 on bloomberg.com
  15. ↑ a b c d e Andrew Anthony: The strange case of Edmond Safra . On October 29, 2000 on theguardian.com
  16. ^ T. Rees Shapiro: Harry L. Freeman, American Express executive embroiled in investigation, dies at 79 . June 17, 2011 on washingtonpost.com
  17. ↑ $ 200 billion - is Putin the richest person in the world? . On February 17, 2015 on stern.de
  18. ^ Rupert Wright: Safra's murder casts shadow over HSBC deal . On December 5, 1999 on independent.co.uk
  19. ↑ Speculation about Safra Murder: Was the Russian Mafia at Work? . On December 3, 1999 on spiegel.de
  20. ↑ a b c Sara James: Billionaire's mysterious death in Monte Carlo . March 23, 2008 on nbcnews.com
  21. ↑ Paul Tharp: SAFRA FAMILY FEUD - SISTERS, WIFE IN COURT OVER $ 60 MILLION . November 2, 2001 on nypost.com
  22. ^ Jon Henley: Feud that led to billionaire's death . On December 7, 1999 on theguardian.com
  23. ^ Catherine Cochard: Helly Nahmad, les dessous glauques du commerce de l'art . On December 10, 2014 on letemps.ch
  24. ↑ Martin Halusa: Agonizing death in a golden cage . On December 7, 1999 on welt.de
  25. ^ Mark David: The Candy Brothers Do It Again . On September 11, 2010 on variety.com
  26. ^ Edmond J. Safra Foundation , page in English, accessed on July 23, 2019
  27. ^ Website of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics . At ethics.harvard.edu, accessed May 25, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Safra, Edmond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Safra, Edmond Jacob (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lebanese banker
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Alayh (place)
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1999
Place of death Monte Carlo