Yusif Bedas: The Boy from Palestine

Yusif Bedas was part of that generation of Palestinians who were supposed to lead a renaissance in the Arab world. The son of a prominent Palestinian Christian writer, Khalil Bedad, whom himself preached an Arab cultural revival; Yusif was forced to live his home in Jerusalem by Zionist militias in 1948 as they sought to create a Jewish state on Palestinian land.
A young refugee with a pregnant wife, Yusif made his way to Beirut where he qualified for Lebanese citizenship because of his Beirut-born mother. Starting as a simply money-changer, Yusif was able to build the most successful and largest bank in the Middle East: Intra Bank. [Intra is short for International Traders, Bedas’ first business; a currency trading firm.]
[A document from Intra Bank.]
The time of Yusif Bedas was a Beirut the world has forgotten. It may be hard to believe now, but in the early 1960s Beirut was second only to Switzerland in being a center for international finance. This is how Time describe Beirut in 1964 and 1965 respectively:
Lying fat and silky beneath the Mediterranean sun, Beirut is an oasis of prosperity in the Arab Middle East.
Tiny Lebanon’s flamboyant capital sprouts new buildings like palm trees, boasts more Mercedeses than mullahs, lures thousands of tourists and happily shares its year-round sunshine with courtesans in bikinis as well as desert Arabs in burnooses. But Beirut’s most beneficent climate is the climate of trade, the heritage of its Phoenician forebears. In the Levantine landscape nothing seems to grow faster or greener than the city’s banks.
Beirut is the world’s newest and fastest-rising financial center. In the last decade it has expanded its banking business by 1,000% — and it shows no signs of slowing. Climbing above its clangorous, double-parked streets are more than 100 banks, including 41 foreign branches and offices as diverse as Moscow’s Narodny Bank and the Bank of America. Since July, Manhattan’s Morgan Guaranty and Irving Trust have both leased offices in Beirut. The First National Banks of Boston and Chicago are negotiating to open outlets, and another 13 banks have recently been incorporated. Says Lebanese Banking Association President Pierre Edde, whose growing Beirut Riyadh Bank is moving into a new ten-story building: “Beirut handles capital like the Suez Canal handles ships.” Saud & Hussein. Because it is both the cosmopolitan gateway to the Middle East and an island of stability in a newly rich but eternally turbulent region, Beirut has become the prudent banker to nervous kings, African smugglers, such huge U.S. oil companies as Aramco, frightened capitalists from socialist Egypt and Iraq—and no fewer than 600 tycoons from booming little Kuwait. Well over half of Beirut’s $800 million in deposits comes from abroad.
Money talks, but not everyone can understand what it is saying. Perhaps the world’s most skilled interpreters can be found in Lebanon, second only to Switzerland as a freewheeling money market. . . .
Beirut’s 84 banks have deposits totaling some $1.2 billion, roughly 80% of it in foreign money.
Yusif Bedas was the face of that era. Intra Bank handled more than third of deposits in Lebanon. But Yusif was more than just the founding president of a successful bank and Intra was more than the Middle East’s more successful, Yusif was the president of a billion dollar business empire and Intra only the core.
Intra Bank consisted more than just millions in deposits, but included assets from a French shipyard, Middle East Airlines [the world’s 16th largest airline at the time], several buildings on the Champs Elysee, Beirut’s premier hotel, to a skyscraper in Manhattan. Intra had branches from Beirut, to Nigeria, to Paris, London, New York, to Brazil and many more. Yusif’s monetary reached reflected his father’s literary reach. Khalil Bedas edited a journal from Jerusalem that was published as far away as Brazil and Australia.
He lured business from competing Beirut banks by cutting loan rates from 9% to 6%. To gain stature for his upstart bank, he convinced Bank of America that it should come into his trade-financing op erations, became correspondent for New York’s venerable Chase Manhattan Bank, and opened branches in Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Jordan. In 1958, when near civil war halted Lebanese banking for more than three months and most of his competitors sat brooding over their ill fortune, Bedas took advantage of the lull to set up a branch in London and an affiliate bank in Geneva
Yusif was on top of a prosperous Beirut, but then it all came down in the fall of 1966. The bank had too much money stores in investments and not enough in cash holding when many account holders came asking for the funds. The bank’s liabilities and actually holdings were very close and it would have been easy to avoid a meltdown. But the Lebanese Central Bank was not interested in helping Bedas even though while helping other banks. Intra was reopened after closing, but it was never the same again. Bedas was a Palestinian, and the Lebanese elite resented that a boy from Palestine had so much control over the Lebanese economy. Bedas was never truly welcomed in Lebanon and many people took joy in seeing him fall.
The government could have saved Intra, but they let petty resentment dictate policy that was actually harmful to Lebanon’s standing in the world as a banking center.
The Lebanese government even issued an arrest warrant for Bedas on the flimsy charge of “orthodox” practices. There was a conspiracy against Bedas. He stood in a country that was not his reflecting the situation Palestinians faced after the al-Nakba no matter the financial success they may achieve. That is the moral of Bedas’ story: a man without a home who will always be vulnerable until his return.
Making his way from Europe to Brazil and then to Europe again as his bank came apart, Bedas never recovered. He dead at the young age of 56 in 1968 in Switzerland. A year after Israel conquered the rest of his homeland.
This is the obituary Time published then: Died.Yusif Bedas, 56, former president of Lebanon’s Intra Bank, central figure in one of the Middle East’s most spectacular financial scandals; after a long illness; in Lucerne, Switzerland. Bedas founded a money-changing business on a $4,000 stake in 1948, built it into a $350 million empire centered around Intra. But in 1966, as depositors’ money suddenly flowed out of Beirut, Intra collapsed; Lebanese authorities held him responsible for “unorthodox banking practices,” but Bedas maintained that “enemies” had conspired to break him.
The boy from Palestine.