Yousef Beidas, the genius of Jerusalem,was the man that Charles De Gaulle wished France could have a personality of his like to be France’sMinister of Finance.Beidas was the first to donate over 1000 Lebanese Lira(pound) to Fatah in its early stages. After the loss of Palestine, he established in Lebanon the biggest financial empire in the middle east. Lebanese politicians and businessmen rallied against him in a story of a great success and a tremendous fall that continues to raise controversy until today.

Ramallah- Palestine Economy Gate| Yousef Beidas was born in Jerusalem in 1912 for the Palestinian author and scholar Khalil Beidas. When he was a young man, he worked in several financial institutions in Palestine, including the British Barclays Bank, and the Arab Bank of which he later became the General Manager.

But the 1948 Nakba forced him to emigrate to Lebanon, the birth country of both his mother and wife. After a short while, he co-founded with four of his friends a currency exchange business in Beirut with a capital of $4000, and began working on exchanging foreign currencies and running them.

Beidas managed to control a big portion of the financial market in Lebanon, and gained the trust of many depositors who wished to invest in their money, especially Palestinians.

In 1951, he established Intra Bank which achieved a huge success. Within only a few years, the bank’s size increased from 5 million L.L  to 700 million L.L, turning into a financial empire that has about 40 branches operating across Lebanon and several other countries including Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, Sierra Leone, France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and the United States.

Beidas also established twin banks to Intra that included 33 branches, 4 banks in Lebanon, 48 companies, in addition to other subsidiaries; such as Beirut Port, Radio Orion, Phoenicia Hotel, the Lebanese TV company,Studio Baalbek, La Ciotat Shipyard in France, and others. Intra’s budget was five times greater than the Lebanese government budget, and it employed 30,000 employees, which was more than what the public sector employed at the time.

In 1966, at the height of prosperity and without any prior warning, Intra Crisis started, which overthrew Beidas’ empire as well as the banking sector in Lebanon, which was experiencing a recovery at that period.

Some consider Beidas’ story an early presage for the Palestinian-Lebanese disputes in the 1970s. Most interpretations of Intra’s collapse attribute it to thefear that politically and financially influential Lebanese families had of this stubborn Palestinian that threatened their thrones. Therefore, they rallied against him and spread false rumors that question the financial status of the bank, and put pressure on some of the customers to withdraw their deposits from it.

On October 10, 1966, crowds began to scramble to the bank’s branches to withdraw their deposits, and the bank ran out of liquid funds in four days. The Lebanese government, which was accused of complicity against Beidas, refused to lend the bank one hundred million L.L to cover this sudden demand, though the assets of the bank were much greater than the customers’ deposits.

In his book “Yousef Beidas: The Intra Empire and Money Sharks in Lebanon” (Dar Al Nahar, 2014), the researcher and academic Kamal Dib went deeply in analyzing Intra crisis, he says: “in addition to the Lebanese racism against Palestinian capital and Palestinian brains, and the conglomerate of enemies in Lebanon, from politicians, bankers, businessmen, and families against Beidas and his empire; global capitalism has fought the banking and financial prosperity in 1960s Lebanon, which was leaded by Beidas”. Dib wrote: “International banks used their influence to fight Intra with the support of western governments; along with the dramatic rise in interest rates in global markets that Intra was incapable of coping with”. Dib also mentions in his book another reason for Intra’s fall, and that is Beidas’ positions in Arab political conflicts, as he was a supporter of Jamal Abdul Nasser and the Nationalists.

The financial crisis in Lebanon in the 1960s was known as Intra Crisis, as Intra was the biggest bank, and it ran 60% of the business in Lebanon before it went into bankruptcy. After the trust in Lebanese banking sector collapsed, most of these business projectsbecame property of the foreign banks.

Beidas was prosecuted in Lebanon, which caused him to flee to several countries to follow-up on the bank issue, searching for liquidity or loans to save the bank. He was arrested in Brazil at the request of Lebanon, and after his release he got Pancreatic cancer. Beidas died on December 1, 1968, and his body was buried in Switzerland.