DION’S LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN BORROWS HEAVILY FROM LITTLE-KNOWN INVESTOR
Juliet O’Neill, Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa Citizen
July 2 2007
Mamdouh Stefanos is the largest lender to Stephane Dion’s Liberal
leadership campaign.
OTTAWA – Nine days after the Liberals were defeated last year and
Paul Martin announced he was stepping aside as party leader, Stephane
Dion had a $200,000 loan from Montreal constituent Mamdouh Stefanos
in the bag.
"I volunteered," says Stefanos. "I told him, ‘Whatever you need,
you can have it from me.’"
Dion would borrow another $150,000 from him for his leadership
campaign, making Stefanos the biggest of eight lenders to what was
then a long-shot candidate to replace Martin.
His $350,000 was half of the total $705,000 loans that Dion arranged in
order to augment the $953,396 he raised in donations from individuals
for a campaign that ended up costing him nearly $1.7 million.
Most of Dion’s other lenders, including such high-profile businessmen
as Stephen Bronfman of Montreal, Rod Bryden of Ottawa, and Marc de
la Bruyere of Edmonton, are well known in Liberal circles and to the
local public.
But when Stefanos’s name was disclosed to Elections Canada, the Liberal
documents erroneously spelled it "Stephanos," and prompted a question
that lingers on political blog sites: "Who is Mamdouh Stephanos?"
The Egyptian-born investor is a 50-year-old family man with a low
profile and a generous streak. "I invest and when I win, I give,"
he said in an interview. "I keep what I need, that’s all."
Examples of his investments range from the 2005 purchase and sale
within a year of Quebec’s largest eyewear chain, Farhat Lunetterie,
and current investments in Montreal’s award-winning Green Cafe.
He has incorporated numbered companies that he says will emerge soon
with names and products, one company supplying biometric cards and
another commercializing a patent on an environmentally friendly engine.
Stefanos said his conversations with Dion have revolved around his
excitement over commercializing environment-related patents, rather
than politics.
"I follow politics but I don’t get involved," he said. Asked if he
is confident Dion can repay the loan within the time limit set by
law, Stefanos replied, "I think, yes." But he was not clear about
the deadline, asking if it is six months from now when, in fact,
it is a year.
He pulled ID from his wallet to prove the correct spelling of his name,
shrugging off an error that has happened before. When the Armenian
Diocese of Canada honoured him last year with a medal for a $400,000
donation to help build a new church in Montreal, he says the banner at
the ceremony also misspelled his name as Stephanos, an error that was
repeated in an Armenian church newsletter. That report of his "princely
donation" is one of the very few references to him on the Internet.
Stefanos’s donation to the Armenian diocese, even though he is
not Armenian and does not belong to that diocese, was made on a
similar basis as his contribution to Dion’s campaign: as a gesture
of friendship and faith in an individual.
His friend, Bishop Bagrat Galstanian, the Canadian head of the Armenian
diocese, describes Stefanos as a "modest, humble" man of faith.
Stefanos belongs to a Coptic Catholic church, Notre Dame d’Egypte,
where he was bestowed in 2004 with a high honour from the Pope. The
award, the order of St. Gregory the Great, is granted for exceptional
service to the church, community and country.
It is mostly at church-related functions in Dion’s
Saint-Laurent-Cartierville riding that Stefanos came to know the
party leader when he was an MP and cabinet minister in the former
governments of Martin and Jean Chretien before him.
Stefanos regards Dion as "honest and straightforward" – the two
qualities he requires in friendship.
"When he has a target, he follows slowly, slowly, and he gets his
target," Stefanos said of Dion. "That’s the way I do business. That’s
the way I have grown up in my family. I respect these kind of people."
While he says he is not involved in politics, he follows politics and
counts some politicians as friends – Dion and the late Montreal Senator
Shirley Maheu among them. Some friends wrote a letter to then-prime
minister Chretien, urging Stefanos be considered for the Senate, he
says with obvious delight. But, Stefanos adds, "I’m not dreaming to
be a senator and I’m not dreaming to be a garbage collector either,
you know."
Stefanos says Dion is independent and that’s one of the reasons he
believes he makes a good leader. "Nobody can go back to him and say,
‘I helped you to be prime minister, I helped you to be the leader of
the Liberal party.’"
Stefanos also shrugs off rumours he has close contact with one of
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, an
artist who runs a charity and is considered heir apparent to the
presidency. Stefanos said he has never met the son personally but
has, along with other Canadian business people, attempted to foster
trade links with Libya after then-prime minister Martin’s visit to
Gadhafi in 2004. Martin was among a string of foreign leaders who
visited Libya when Gadhafi’s relations with the West thawed after he
renounced terrorism and his chemical weapons program.
Stefanos, who recently returned from a three-month trip to the Gulf
region, seeking out investment opportunities in such things as hotels
and condominiums, says he believes Canadian business is far too shy
about international trade and business opportunities.
He also believes Canada does not fully welcome the talents of
immigrants, a belief based on his personal experience. He came to
Canada in 1991 when his father in Cairo told him to get out of his
hair for six months.
He did not fall in love at once with Montreal, but he did fall in love
with a Quebecois woman and settled down, after the kind of rough start
that many immigrants face. Today, the couple have a 12-year-old son
"who loves being Canadian and Egyptian."
Stefanos’s Egyptian credentials as an architect were not accepted
in Canada when he arrived. The only way he could get a contract
was to get a Canadian architect firm to sign it and put him down as
an employee. He wanted it to be the other way around. He found it
insulting, unfair and frustrating.
"I said, ‘Are you crazy? My contact, my business, I give it to somebody
and work as an employee? Forget it. I’m doing my business alone.’ And
that’s what I did."
"Egypt is not the desert, Canada is," he says now, referring to the
bureaucratic barriers to immigrants with professional credentials.
Stefanos says his first business in Canada was a personnel placement
agency. Many investments later, he says his family lives a comfortable
life and has established a private foundation to channel funds to
community social causes and churches.
Not all his investments pay, of course. He was one of the people who
lost money when the National Press Club in Ottawa recently declared
bankruptcy. But he says he doesn’t know how much he spent or lost on
the club and it’s not important. He did come to Ottawa to collect some
press club memorabilia for his collection of Canadian history books,
artifacts and art.
He describes his loan to Dion’s campaign as an act of personal
confidence. "What if nobody believed in me one day, I was not going
to be as I am," he said.