Chapter 55\ Due to the security situation, Intermarkets has moved to Bahrain

Staying at the Phoenicia Hotel, Samir Fares was the only link with our non-Lebanese clients. This meant a great deal to me, as most of my clients were outside of Beirut, including the Ceylon Tea Board, whose commissioner had sent his family back to Sri Lanka, left his Hamra Street office, and moved to Dubai. This is how I became a regular user of the telex machine provided by Samir. My daily drive between Aley and Beirut, with the office riskily hanging on the partition line, made life a daily gamble. Productivity for our clients – especially the international ones – was dropping from one week to the next. Finally, it was the near-death experiences of Ramsay Najjar and Mahmoud Nahas that made our story in Beirut very risky.

One early October morning, when none of the Intermarkets staff were able to make it to office, I called Erwin Guerrovich at home and told him that my clients were asking for me to be present next to them in the Gulf, which was why I was getting ready to leave for Bahrain. Erwin was surprised as I was a married man with a pregnant wife and a young son. He asked me if I was planning to take my family along and I confirmed, explaining that my brother-in-law was a resident of Abu Dhabi, so my wife would be staying with her sister. Erwin instantly mobilized Intermarkets’ contacts to help and asked me to drive to Hamra Street where our official travel agency was located, to collect the tickets, he had booked for me and insisted that I call him as soon as I got to the airport.

Eddie Moutran, with whom I had been in regular contact while preparing for this trip, was at Bahrain Airport to meet us and log in our transit visas. We spent the night in the kind hospitality of Eddie and Andrea Moutran. But that night Eddie and I stayed up very late discussing what needed to be done to spare Intermarkets’ clients the problems of Lebanon. Early the next morning, my son Reda woke us all up saying: “I can see from the balcony, the first sea, but I want you to show me where I should be looking to see the second?” (He was referring to the word ‘Bahrain’, which means the two seas).

I then travelled with the family to Abu Dhabi where my brother-in-law, Nabil Zakhour, had a senior position with the Abu Dhabi Oil Company (ADCO). Nabil, his wife Freeda and their young daughter Marianne made us feel at home from the moment we entered. The ladies had a lot of catching up to do and the kids did not want to stop playing even after sunset. But Nabil and I had no time to waste, since we had to attend to a long list of logistics. After a few days, I returned to Bahrain. It was a Friday, the Gulf weekend. During my short stay, I had agreed to a certain arrangement with Eddie, so that the two of us went to the office when there was no one to disturb us.

1975 was the year when fast overseas communications were done via telex. Eddie sat by the telex machine, and I sat next to him transmitting the message that we had jointly drafted – on my first night in Bahrain – announcing that due to the escalating street fighting in Beirut that had thrown our country into an ugly civil war, the head office of Intermarkets had moved to Bahrain. Adding the explanation that the Beirut office was located on the partition line that split the Lebanese capital into two warring sides, thus preventing our staff from reaching the office since March. The chances were that many of our clients’ messages to the Beirut office were never received or read. So, we requested them to re-send any telexes and letters that had not received a response to us in Bahrain. We also asked those who transferred money to our Beirut bank account, as well as those who were due to settle our invoices and did not know how to do it, to transfer to our Intermarkets Bahrain bank account, whose details we supplied. More importantly, all clients and suppliers were requested to contact me or Eddie for whatever they needed from Intermarkets.

I felt confident doing this because time was of the essence and any more uncertainty could have led to many divorces between Intermarkets and its clients. For companies like Gillette, Johnson & Johnson, Rothmans, and Rowntree Mackintosh, the markets of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman were much more important than their business in Lebanon.

Unlike my Beirut office colleagues, who were only familiar with their own portfolio of clients, I was familiar with all the agency’s clients. This was because most of my colleagues had come to me with their questions at one time or another since I was the most travelled amongst them. I had met most of their clients and travelled with many. I had visited their distributors in the various markets and carried material to and from them. This allowed Eddie and me to feel confident that we would deliver on our promise.

On walking into the office that Monday morning, we heard the telex clicking like a machine gun. It continued this way throughout the week. When questions were asked for which, we did not have answers, we called Samir Fares, Raymond Hanna, Nahi Ghorayeb, Salim Sednaoui, Raymond Accad or Darwish Massoud at their homes in Lebanon, with the help of Bahrain’s Cable & Wireless telephone operator, who developed into a good friend. Soon, we all realized that our decision to move was the right one and it helped Intermarkets to progress and flourish during one of the darkest hours in our country.