Naqvi was founder and CEO of the Abraaj Group, a private equity firm based in Dubai that one sympathetic journalist called “the go-to private equity firm for outreach to Muslim nations.” When President Barack Obama announced “a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries” in his famous Cairo speech in 2009, Abraaj was among the firms chosen to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars. Naqvi was a regular at Davos, a guest at the White House, a recipient of nine-figure checks from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Abraaj’s attraction for Western leaders is summed up in the subtitle of this new book by two Wall Street Journal journalists who helped chronicle the firm’s downfall, The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale. “The market has been the most powerful force the world has ever known for creating opportunity and lifting people out of poverty,” Obama told Muslim business leaders at a summit on entrepreneurship held after his Cairo speech. Naqvi spoke a few minutes later and echoed the same message: The Third World’s problems would be solved not by government but by capitalism. Prosperity was the solution to everything from women’s rights to terrorism.
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