Contractor focuses on frontier markets

A photograph from June 1999 shows Yassir Arafat smiling as he holds hands with David Haug, Middle East chairman of Enron Corporation, and Palestinian magnate Said Khoury, chairman of Consolidated Contactors Company, as the three signed a deal to build a power plant in Gaza.

A decade later and the Palestinian leader, the power plant and Enron are gone, yet CCC continues to grow. The 57-year-old company is the world’s 16th biggest contractor, according to Engineering News-Record, an industry title. Last year, it tallied $5.5bn in revenues and picked up $6.3bn in new contracts.

Yet the past year has also brought challenges for one of the Middle East’s largest conglomerates. CCC is being pursued in the US and UK courts by Munib al-Masri, another prominent Palestinian businessman, and has seen two of its Lebanese subsidiaries put under administration.