Nemir Kirdar, Middle East financier with foot in the west, dies at 83

Nemir Kirdar, an Iraqi expatriate and Middle East financier who founded a private equity firm that once owned Tiffany & Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci and other Western retail trophies, died on June 8 at his home in Cap D’Antibes in the south of France. He was 83.

He had a “long-standing struggle with dementia,” according to a statement from Investcorp, the company he founded in Bahrain in 1982.

Kirdar spent most of his career at Investcorp, which connected oil-rich Arab tycoons and royals with investment opportunities in the West, especially in buying undervalued luxury brands. In this respect, he helped pioneer the global growth of private equity, in an era when American industry giants like KKR and Carlyle Group were being formed.

He “was way ahead of his time,” said Jameel Akhrass, a longtime investment banker in the Middle East, who is now a senior adviser at Perella

Weinberg Partners, a financial firm.

Kirdar made his name in the 1980s and ‘90s by buying well-known companies in the face of skeptical Western investors. Tiffany & Co. was his first big hit.

In 1984, he broke off a family vacation in Spain and flew to New York to salvage an effort to acquire that venerable jeweler. He put together an offer that topped those of other suitors, including, he wrote in a memoir, Donald Trump. The purchase, for $135 million, earned $100 million in profit for Investcorp when it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange three years later.

Kirdar’s later high-profile deals — landing the Italian fashion house Gucci in a protracted but profitable venture as well as Saks Fifth Avenue and Carvel ice cream — “put us on the map, gaining us a lot of recognition internationally,” said Savio Tung, a former chief investment officer of Investcorp and one of Kirdar’s first hires. (He still advises the company.)

Kirdar’s approach to acquisitions was to support existing management with advice and capital rather than to behave like a barbarian at the gate. William Chaney, Tiffany’s chairman, in an interview with The New York Times in 1993, described him as “extremely high principled.”

Not all of Investcorp’s moves were profitable. Color Tile, a retailer of floor and wall coverings, was purchased for $435 million in 1989, a big number in those days; it filed for bankruptcy in 1996.

Nemir Kirdar was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Kirkuk, Iraq, one of five sons of Amin Kirdar and Nuzhet Mohammed Ali Kirdar. His father was a governor of Kirkuk province and a member of Parliament; his mother was a homemaker.

His family was associated with the Hashemite family that held power in Iraq during his youth, and Kirdar had imagined that he would follow a long line of male relatives into high political office. He was occasionally invited to the palace by King Faisal II to play chess or watch the latest Hollywood film.

This comfortable world of the elite vanished when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958 in a bloody coup. At the time, Kirdar was in Istanbul attending Robert College, an American institution, and waiting for the young king’s planned visit to the city; he had promised to teach Kirdar water-skiing.

Seeing no future for himself in Iraq, Kirdar resolved to go to a place “where it was possible to get a fresh start,” he wrote in a memoir, “Need, Respect, Trust” (2013). That turned out to be the United States. He earned a degree in economics from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and joined his family in Phoenix, where he worked as a bank teller for $250 a month.

In 1962, his brother, Nezir, persuaded him to return to Iraq, and Nemir spent the next six years working on a variety of business interests. But in an apparent effort to pressure an American company he represented, security forces arrested and jailed him in 1969 without charge. He was freed after 10 days, but the experience led him to leave Iraq for good.

Kirdar made his way to New York, where he worked as bank trainee while getting an MBA at Fordham University at night. He became an executive at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1974 and helped it tap into the growing wealth in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the 1970s oil boom. He rose quickly at Chase and accompanied the chairman and chief executive, David Rockefeller, on tours of the Persian Gulf region.

Kirdar came to see huge opportunities for newly rich private investors, especially those from influential business families.

“Here in the Gulf was all this oil money with limited options for investment,” he wrote in the memoir. “Our focus would be on nonquoted companies in the West to which the Gulf investor had no access.”

Wanting to run his own show, he left Chase in 1982 to start his own investment firm, initially setting up operations in a suite in Bahrain’s Holiday Inn. He later moved its offices to an old building that he had bought and furnished with walnut paneling and Oriental rugs so that his wealthy clients would feel comfortable.

Kirdar tried to balance his interests among the various countries in the region, catering to private companies rather than the giant funds amassed by governments. He listed Investcorp on the Bahrain Bourse, where it is still traded. He retired in 2015.

Investcorp reports on its website that it has a $31 billion fund — a sizable amount, but a fraction of those maintained by Western investment giants.

Eugene Rogan, director of Oxford’s Middle East Centre, said that Kirdar had taken pride in creating a business that “wasn’t dependent on an individual, a personality or a family.”

He also retained strong “emotional ties” to Iraq, said his daughter Serra Kirdar.

In addition to her, he is survived by his wife, Nada, whom he married in Baghdad in 1967; another daughter, Rena Kirdar Abboud; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Edib and Jamil.