Mansour Ojjeh and his brother Aziz are principals of Luxembourg-based TAG Group Holdings, which they inherited from their father, Akram Ojjeh, upon his death in 1991. Mansour is president and Aziz is vice president. Both are Swiss citizens, were educated in the U.S. and are now in their fifties. TAG is the acronym of Techniques d’Avant Garde.
Akram Ojjeh, who founded TAG in 1975, has been described as “an industrialist and a negotiator.” Born in 1923 in Damascus, Syria (though some reports say Baghdad and others claim he was Saudi Arabian, probably because he was granted citizenship in that country by King Abdul Aziz), Akram Ojjeh went to France in 1940 on a scholarship, eventually obtaining five university degrees. He was awarded the French Legion d’Honneur. His wide-ranging business interests involved, among other things, construction, real estate, resorts and a French regional airline and included companies in the U.S., Europe, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Sudan. He also negotiated the sale of armaments between French companies and Saudi Arabia. According to a 1978 New York Times article, “Mr. Ojjeh dislikes the term ‘arms dealer.’ He comments: ‘After all, we do not buy and sell and stock arms. We are not an agent or an intermediary. We help, in our small way, to sell capital goods and equipment as well as arms.’”
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