Nemir Kirdar
Pioneering Iraqi-born asset manager whose company Investcorp once owned Tiffany and Gucci
NEMIR KIRDAR, who has died aged 83, was an Iraqi-born banker who lived in London and built a global company managing the assets of the world’s wealthy. A childhood friend of the former King Faisal II of Iraq, Kirdar came from a long line of politicians and had expected to go into politics himself. But shortly after the king was murdered in July 1958, paving the way, eventually, for the rise of the Ba’ath party of Saddam Hussain, Kirdar left for the United States.
He went on to found Investcorp, an asset management company that made fortunes for Kirdar and his investors by restructuring blue-chip household names like Tiffany, Gucci and Saks Fifth Avenue. By the time of his death he was reckoned to be worth $1.4 billion.
Kirdar was a banker of the old school who embodied respect for the rules and for his clients. Invariably dressed in a dark suit with a fob and highly polished lace-up shoes, he handled clients graciously. His expertise was in developing “alternative assets” such as hedge funds and property to win them above average returns.
Kirdar’s career in banking was eased by the patronage of David Rockefeller, the owner of Chase Manhattan Bank, which Kirdar joined as a lending officer in 1974. When Kirdar developed a plan to build an offshore and onshore commercial banking and investment business in the Middle East, Rockefeller took him on annual trips to visit the region’s rulers and wealthy, subsequently appointing him head of the bank’s operations in the Persian Gulf.
As a result Kirdar built up a formidable list of contacts who helped him to launch his own bank, and in March 1982 the Arabian Investment Banking Corporation, as it was then known, was launched out of a room in the Holiday Inn in Bahrain. The fully-subscribed share register contained the names of many small shareholders from across the region rather than a single large owner.
The markets started to notice Investcorp in 1984, when it acquired Tiffany and Co, a deal from which it made $100m. Its public offering in Bahrain was oversubscribed 1,403 times, a regional record.
It went on to deliver shareholders strong returns, showing its only loss at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Today the company has assets under management of some $31 billion. Kirdar started to take a back seat and pull out of executive duties in 2014 and stepped down from the chairmanship in 2017.
Nemir Amin Kirdar was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, on October 28 1936. His greatgrandfather had been the mayor of Kirkuk under the Ottoman Empire and his grandfather had been the member of parliament for the city in Istanbul. Nemir’s maternal grandfather was also a member of parliament.
When modern Iraq was formed in 1921, the new monarch, King Faisal I, a family friend, wrote to Kirdar’s grandfather asking him to return from Istanbul to assist in the formation of a government. Kirdar’s father and older brother also became members of the Iraqi parliament.
The assassination of King Faisal II in 1958, however, came as a huge shock to Kirdar, who spoke affectionately of his country’s monarchy all his life. Once he had completed a degree at Robert College, Istanbul, Kirdar joined his family in Arizona, where he became a $250-a-month teller at the First National Bank of Arizona. However his progress was impeded by colleagues who, he said, regarded him as a “foreigner with a funny name”.
Encouraged by his brother Nazir, in the 1960s he returned to Iraq under the mistaken impression that the political situation was improving, and set up a small investment business. On his way home for lunch one day, however, he was picked up by the police and thrown into a windowless cell with 30 or 40 other prisoners. He remained there for 12 days and, apart from provisions brought in by his wife, went without food and water. No charges were brought and he was never told why he had been detained.
After his release he fled once more to the
US. In the early 1970s he worked in South East Asia and Japan for Allied Bank International.
A profile of Kirdar described him as a man of “winning charm”: “The moment a guest or client arrives at the firm’s richly panelled Brook Street town house in London, Kirdar begins to exude a warmth and sincerity that suggests a friendship of several years’ standing.”
He could, however, be impatient with people who did not keep their promises. He heard that Maurizio Gucci, the spendthrift grandson of Guccio Gucci, founder of the Italian fashion company, in which Investcorp bought a 50 per cent stake in 1988, was pledging his own shares in the company as security for a bank loan, contrary to an agreement under which they had to be offered to Investcorp first. Kirdar could “feel his blood boil”, as he wrote later: “Such disrespect … My first act was to form a team to defeat Maurizio Gucci.”
He did so, and in 1993 Investcorp increased its stake in Gucci to 100 per cent after buying out Maurizio’s remaining shares. By 1995, posting strong profits, Investcorp took Gucci public, and by the time the company sold off its remaining shares in 1996, it had earned some $2.1billion on an initial investment of $246 million.
In later years Kirdar became a noted philanthropist, sponsoring educational institutions including Georgetown University in Washington, St Antony’s College, Oxford, and institutions in the Gulf.
Politics remained a private passion. He became a great friend of Margaret Thatcher, who opened Investcorp’s Grosvenor Street London HQ in 1984, and later became close to Tony Blair and Labour’s former chief fundraiser Lord Levy. He wrote widely on Iraq and the Middle East. His book Rebuilding Iraq: Saving a Broken Nation (2010) was a call for communal and religious reconciliation.
Kirdar is survived by his wife Nada and by two daughters.
Nemir Kirdar, born October 28 1936, died June 8 2020