Ahmed Abboud Pasha

Mohamed Ahmed Abboud Pasha (Arabic: محمد أحمد عبود باشا) (1889–1963) was a prominent Egyptian industrialist, engineer and investor.

[2] Born on 2 May 1889 to a middle-class family in Cairo and largely brought up by his mother, Labiba, Abboud Pasha excelled at school, eventually winning an Ottoman Scholarship and electing to study Engineering and Shipbuilding at the University of Glasgow in 1905.

As part of the terms of his scholarship, he worked on the expansion of the network of the Hejaz Railway in Iraq and Palestine, as well as various irrigation projects on the Euphrates.

He created a construction and dredging company in 1924, which originally focused on contract work on government-financed projects such as the heightening and enlarging of the Aswan Dam as well as the Fouadeya Irrigation Canal.

[11] Abboud Pasha is credited with greatly expanding its fleet of ocean liners from six aging vessels to 40 modern ships, including S.S. Mohammed Aly El Kabeer and S.S. Malek Fouad.

[16] He built a swimming pool complex for the players and acquired additional land so that the club’s grounds extended all the way to the Nile Corniche.

[19] In 1974 Egypt's highest court of appeals, in the first judgment of its kind, ruled that the confiscation of private citizens’ property was illegal and that compensation or restitution had to be implemented.

[20] Abboud Pasha was put on a 2-day televised show trial in 1961 in which he was formally charged with illegally selling one of his own ships abroad and working to further British and US interests.

[22] In 1962 Abboud Pasha was allowed to travel to Washington on a special exit visa issued by President Nasser to renegotiate the Exim bank loan of USD 5.5 million that had originally been extended to him personally for his fertiliser plant.

Ahmed Abboud Pasha lived out his final months in exile, and on 28 December 1963 died of heart failure at Claridge’s Hotel in London.