Miloud Chaâbi is Africa’s sixth richest man. In 2002, he was elected a member of the Moroccan House of Representatives. And in 2007, he won the parliament election to become the representative of the city of Al-Suwaira. At 82, with a net worth of $3bn, Chaâbi is one of Moroccos’a all-time most prominent public figures.
But Chaâbi was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Neither was his rise to fame meteoric. Indeed, his story is the quintessential rags-to-riches soap opera.
He was schooled in the mosque, as a child — the same stage of life when he began farming and herding goats. By 15, he had racked up enough savings to move from Marrakech to Kenitra, where he started his first construction company in 1948, aged just 19.
Notwithstanding the restriction of trade in Kenitra at the time to the French, Jewish businessmen and affluent Moroccan families, Chaâbi immersed himself in the field, extending his interest to ceramics, and consequently founding his own ceramic company in 1964.
Not long after, he learned enough in the business to begin to dream of owning a large company. A French company refused his offer to become an investor, and this spelt the beginning of its downfall. Chaâbi determinedly sold products at competitive prices until the company eventually collapsed and was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. In 1985, he was the company’s most assured lifeline around, and it reluctantly sold all its properties to him.
This success, till date, is credited as the defining moment for Chaâbi’s professional career because that was when he bought Yeyeena Group, now acclaimed as one of the most powerful groups in Morocco. From then on, he recorded success after success nearly every year.
In 1992, he founded JBC for carton and gyrus, and got a deal for a petrochemical company allotment, SNIP, the following year. He went further to launch ELECTRA for electrical components, cables and television batteries in 1994. Some four years, the talking point was the launch of Al-Salam shopping chain. One year after in 1999, the Riyad Mogador hotel chain was launched.
Perhaps spawned by memories of his humble beginnings, Chaâbi is one of Morocco’s most generous philanthropists and charity workers, and his Miloud Chaâbi Foundation is one of the largest organisations in the Northern African country. He is fondly remembered in education circles for donating 10 per cent of his fortune to the building of the first American university in the Arab country, in conjunction with the University of Maryland, College Park USA.
