Transparency & Accountability
Shuaibi says Arafat's adviser ran 32 presidential companies before the Fund
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Azmi Shuaibi has spent thirty years auditing Palestinian power. On the Taqarob podcast's episode 230, the anti-corruption veteran opened the ledger of its founding era: in Yasser Arafat's time, he said, "the president had 32 companies," with investments he put at 1.1 billion dollars.
The man who ran them, Shuaibi recounted, was Khaled Salam — the name Mohammed Rashid carried as Arafat's economic adviser. And the story he told the program is of how that private empire was pried out of one man's hands and converted into an official public fund.
From the president's pocket to a public balance sheet#
The conversion Shuaibi described has a name and a date: the Palestine Investment Fund, established in 2003, when reform-era pressure forced the consolidation of the commercial holdings scattered under the presidency into a single audited institution.
Rashid became the fund's first director-general — the manager of the same assets he had run informally. The arrangement did not survive the transition of power.
In 2012, Ramallah's corruption crimes court convicted Rashid in absentia of embezzling 33.5 million dollars alongside two associates, sentencing him to fifteen years at hard labor and a 15-million-dollar fine. Rashid, who has lived abroad since, dismissed the prosecution at the time as politically driven.
The president had 32 companies.
Azmi Shuaibi, on Taqarob's episode 230
The episode's title asks the harder question the numbers leave open: did Abu Ammar look away from the corruption? Shuaibi's answer, across the two-hour conversation with host Ahmad al-Beqawi, is the answer of a man who helped build the oversight institutions that did not exist then — the era's money moved through people, not systems, and the accounting came later or never.
Why his account carries weight#
Shuaibi speaks from inside the file. He advises the board of AMAN, the Palestinian integrity and accountability coalition, on anti-corruption affairs, sits on the board of the Arab Parliamentarians Against Corruption network, and spent three decades pushing the audit institutions the Authority resisted.
His recollections are testimony, not verdict — this paper carries them as the attributed account of a named expert who watched the era from arm's length. But they land on a documented record: the fund exists, the consolidation happened, and the court's judgment against the man who ran the 32 companies stands.
Taqarob, a Palestinian dialogue program presented by al-Beqawi, has built its archive documenting the Palestinian narrative one long conversation at a time. Episode 230 runs on YouTube and the podcast platforms.
