Said Khoury

سعيد خوري

Born: Safed, Mandatory Palestine

Domain: Business & Entrepreneurship

Recognition: GLOBAL

Biography

Said Tawfiq Khoury was born on June 6, 1923, in Safed, in a Palestinian Christian family in Mandatory Palestine. The 1948 Nakba forced him and his family into exile in Lebanon when he was twenty-five. In 1952 he joined Hasib Sabbagh and Kamel Abdel Rahman in re-founding and building the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), the partnership that would become the dominant force in Arab construction. Khoury served as the company's operational driving force for decades, overseeing the execution of enormous engineering projects across the Gulf, the broader Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Under his leadership CCC grew into the largest construction company in the Middle East and one of the world's top international contractors, with operations in more than forty countries, a workforce exceeding 100,000, and annual revenues in the billions of dollars. Widely known as the "dean of contractors," Khoury was listed by Forbes as a billionaire and ranked among the richest Arabs in the world. Yet he insisted that CCC was more than a business: by employing tens of thousands of Palestinians and other Arabs and training a professional class in exile, the firm became a vehicle of dignity and economic survival for a displaced nation. Khoury was a committed Palestinian patriot and philanthropist. In his later years he devoted himself to the Bethlehem Development Foundation, funding development, education, healthcare, and cultural projects in Bethlehem and across Palestinian communities, and to scholarships and institutions that supported young Palestinians and preserved their heritage. He died on October 15, 2014, at the age of 91. Together with Hasib Sabbagh, he is remembered as one of the two great architects of Palestinian business achievement in the twentieth century, a man who turned the trauma of dispossession into a globe-spanning enterprise and a legacy of giving.

Why This Person Matters

As the operational builder of Consolidated Contractors Company, he turned Palestinian dispossession into a global engineering empire that employed and elevated tens of thousands of displaced Arabs.