Yousef Beidas (Arabic: يوسف بيدس, also transliterated Yusif Bedas, Yusef Baydas, Yousif Beydas) (December 1912 – 28 November 1968) was a banker born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese Beirut-born mother.
One of the outcomes of the Israeli-Arab war in Palestine in 1948, and the concomitant flight of huge numbers of Palestinians, was that Haifa lost its status as the commercial centre of the Mashriq or Arab countries east of Egypt, and the role was picked up by Beirut.
Lebanese traders were happy to lay out the red carpet for people they otherwise regarded as "two -bit Palestinians" for the capital and talent that could bring to the local economy.
[8] At the time, Beirut's financial importance was enhanced in the wake of the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956, which weakened Cairo's function as a beachhead for European investment in the Arab world,[9] the tight bank secrecy rules and absence of exchange controls in the Lebanese banking system made the country a refuge for capital flight, petrodollars and hot money from Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
[1] His group also had an extensive repository of real estate holdings in major cities, 40 branches across the globe, prime property investments in a 27-story skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in New York near the Rockefeller Center,[1] Beidas's bank also controlled a shipyard in Marseille,[12] the Londonderry Hotel in Park Lane and a section of the Champs-Élysées.
[14] Beidas' rise to a key player in Lebanon's economy aroused business enmities among the country's elites, for whom banking was a traditional and closed family-based monopoly.
[15][16] As early as 1962 (16 April) the then President of Lebanon, the Maronite Fuad Chehab, concerned about what he perceived to be the "obscure powers" of international finance extending, though Beidas's companies, their tentacles into the Lebanese economy, sounded out General Pierre Rondot about the possibility of fighting against Beidas's interests in order to weaken his influence.
[14] In the early 60s, the Emir of Kuwait, Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah, who was holidaying at the time in the mountain resort of Aley demanded to see the 5 million dollars he had deposited with Intra.
Much of Beidas' Intra Bank money was tied up in non-liquid real estate properties, and, with a sudden jump in Eurobank interest rates on dollar deposits when the US government took measures to curb domestic inflation,[19] a crisis ensued.
[21] Irregularities were later discovered, -- none of them abnormal within Lebanon's banking system[15]—such as loans to directors exceeding what was legally permissible, and dividend payments to Intra companies that were losing money.
[2] One observer in his recollections states that, nonetheless, the value of Intra's fixed assets, with extensive foreign property abroad, exceeded its financial liabilities.
[22] At this critical juncture, Saudi Arabia decided to withdraw its deposits from Beirut, causing a panic and a run on Intra's capital, beginning on 9 October.
Many European bankers and the International Monetary Fund were to disagree, saying that a small loan from Lebanon's Central Bank would have enabled Intra to ride out the crisis without strain.
[2] Arab trust in the Lebanese banking system vanished, and investors thereafter preferred to place their funds in Zürich, London and New York.
Some pinpoint its cause on a coalition of Western powers, oil-rich Arab countries, the Israeli Defense establishment, and Lebanese oligarchs.
[29] Najib Alamuddin wrote in his autobiography The Flying Sheikh: I am convinced the affair was the beginning of the disintegration of Lebanon and its old type of Lebanese government – a system corrupt in style and morals that had plagued Lebanon since independence and finally plunged the nation into a civil war that threatened its very survival as an independent state.