Personal Info
- Country of residence: United States
Information
Mohamed Anwar Hadid born 6 November 1948 is a Jordanian-American real estate developer. He is known for building luxury hotels and mansions, mainly in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles and the city of Beverly Hills, California.
Mohamed Anwar Hadid is a Palestinian born in Nazareth in November 1948 to a Muslim family. He is the son of Anwar Mohamed Hadid (15 September 1918 – 12 May 1989) and his wife Khairiah (née Daher; 15 March 1925 – 1 October 2008).Through his mother, he claims descent from Daher Al Omer, prince of Nazareth and the Sheik of Galilee. Hadid has two brothers and five sisters.
Along with his family, he fled Palestine during the 1948 Palestinian exodus (Nakba). In 2015, Hadid said that "We became refugees to Syria and we lost our home in Safad to a Jewish family that we sheltered... Strange thing. That I and my family would do it again."
His father studied at a Jerusalem teachers' college and attended a university[which?] in Syria to study law, before working in land settlement for the British authorities and teaching English at a teachers' college in Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, he moved to Syria and joined the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America. He and his family lived in Damascus, Tunisia, and Greece before moving to Washington, D.C., as Anwar had a job at the VOA headquarters there, when Mohamed was 14, and spent the rest of his career there with VOA and USIA as a writer, editor and translator.
Hadid attended North Carolina State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]
Among his early ventures was a company that exported equipment to the Middle East. He started his career restoring and reselling classic cars in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., before moving to Greece, where he opened a nightclub on an island, and with the profits, started developing real estate back in the United States.
In the 1980s, much of his financial clout came from the SAAR Foundation, a Herndon-based foundation with Saudi roots. The foundation was a 50–50 partner in many of Hadid's ventures.
In the late 1980s, he faced at least 30 lawsuits from creditors and banks claiming he had not fulfilled various financial obligations.He paid $150 million for the Ritz-Carlton hotels in Washington and New York. He also converted a Houston hotel into a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and developed a Ritz-Carlton resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. He outmaneuvered Donald Trump, paying $42.9 million for several choice parcels in Aspen and announcing plans for a 292-room Ritz resort.
In 1992, a settlement was reached in a lawsuit by Riggs Bank against Columbia First Bank Chairman Melvin Lenkin, a Hadid partner in a Washington, D.C., construction project that involved a loan on which Hadid defaulted. Following the settlement Hadid closed his local office, lost his McLean home to foreclosure, and left the Washington area.
He developed Le Belvedere, a mansion in Bel Air, Los Angeles, that sold for $50 million in 2010. In 2012, he developed The Crescent Palace, a 48,000-square-foot home on an acre plot next door to the Beverly Hills Hotel, which he listed for sale at $58 million.
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