Roger Tamraz

Born 1940 in Cairo, Egypt to an Assyrian family from Lebanon with roots in the Syrian Jazira region and the adjacent Mosul region of Iraq. His mother, Margaret Dayoub, was Syrian. Tamraz grew up speaking fluent English, French and Arabic. His early schooling was at the prestigious English School in Cairo. He subsequently attended the American University in Cairo, Cambridge University in a Ph.D. programme, and the Institut Européen d’Administration (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France. He received an MBA in 1966 from Harvard Business School, where his classmates included many future leaders in Western and international governments and businesses.

Tamraz served for many years as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University in Cairo, where he endowed a number of named scholarships for Egyptian students of exceptional promise. He became a U.S. citizen in 1989.

Tamraz was involved in United States congressional hearings on campaign finance in 1997-1998 after giving $300,000 to the Bill Clinton campaign, which he admitted was to gain greater access. Tamraz was said to have pitched the White House on a pipeline proposal. The pipeline would have run through Armenia and Turkey in Central Asia, and the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, but ran into resistance from Heydar Aliyev.

In 1997, Tamraz was detained by the Republic of Georgia on a warrant from INTERPOL for embezzlement of $200 million. The charges originated from the Lebanese government and were pertaining to the collapse of the Al Mashreq Bank in 1989. Tamraz was not extradited or detained by the US, despite the warrant, but was briefly considered an international fugitive, though he stated he was "allowed to travel freely throughout the world." Tamraz was also charged with "bank fraud, conflict of interest and abuse of trust" in France in 1997. Tamraz denied the charges, calling them fabricated, and stated that they stemmed from politics in Lebanon. Tamraz has asserted that an auditor, "the Lebanese court-appointed investigator," and "C.I.A. agents" had declared him innocent.