Walid Harfouch and his brother have been in Kyiv since the beginning, and have done nearly everything, including get involved in the beauty business
Leading up to the Post’s 10th birthday this September, each week we’ll be highlighting members of the local business community who have played leeading roles over the years. This week, we talk to entrepreneur Walid Harfouch.
“Lots of pages of my book were written here in Nouvelle. Passazh inspires me. That’s why I wanted to meet here – although I never get a discount,” jokes Walid Harfouch, the 34-year-old Lebanese entrepreneur who’s long been on the Kyiv scene, as radio station owner, beauty contest impresario, Paparazzi magazine publisher and public relations agency owner.
He drove to the interview in his new red Bentley just two hours before catching a plane to France, where his brother Omar owns a villa where the two like to spend their weekends.
Born in Lebanon to a father who was a writer, ex-diplomat and one-time political prisoner and a mother who worked as a school principal, Harfouch, who knows both French and Arabic, was sent to Paris to study economics at the famous Sorbonne. He hated it.
“I didn’t like to study, so I had to go to a school that was easy to get into,” he explains in his fluent Russian.
But it didn’t last long. In 1990 his older brother Omar, who was studying piano at a conservatory in Moscow, asked him to come to Russia. The Soviet Union had deep ties with Syria, which controlled Lebanon. The pitch was for Harfouch to “do something interesting in life.” Intrigued, the younger brother took off right away.
“It was a bad time to come,” he says. “February, unsmiling custom officers…for the first time in my life, I felt like a criminal. All my life I’d lived in the sun, in Lebanon. I walked out of the airport for one minute and it was minus 20 in Moscow, freezing cold. I went back to the airport and refused to go out and wanted to just fly back. It lasted until my brother talked me out. So we sat down in a Zhiguli and drove away,” he remembers.
Wear those jeans
Moscow was not Harfouch’s end point. Instead, Ukraine was. Omar had been transferred by the authorities to the conservatory in Dnipropetrovsk. From the Moscow airport, the Harfouches set out for the Eastern Ukrainian city; flights from France only went to Moscow in those days.
“We had to wear jeans. They said, ‘if you’re a foreigner you’ve got to wear jeans,’ although my brother never liked jeans,” he remembers. “He became a local star there.”
Especially hard, he adds, was getting used to the cold weather and alien alphabet.
“I could only read the word ‘restoran’ (restaurant) because it had all the Latin letters. I would always walk in and see the place all dark and empty; I didn’t understand what it was until later.”
He spent his first year studying Russian and then entered the journalism program at Dnipropetrovsk State University with the aim of becoming a cameraman. He worked as an intern at the state TV channel.
“It was my first time. I was told to go ‘film spring.’ So I filmed young girls and guys talking to them. My boss was very angry. When he ‘filmed spring’ with another guy it was a May 1 scene, a statue of Lenin stretching his arm, old babushkas climbing the train. Nothing to do with spring,” he laughs.
“Life seemed like you were in a movie studio walking among decorations. The only thing was that no studio has decorations like that. Now, looking back, I realize it was super that we caught this particular period in time.”
The brothers soon started their first business venture: re-selling tape-recorders. Not long after, they broke into show-biz, starting a weekend nightclub at the Dnipropetrovsk planetarium. It became the city’s most popular nightspot. The business entailed some risk, as it inevitably meant contact with local racketeers, but eventually things settled down and, says Harfouch, “we even had new business opportunities open up.”
All that lasted until 1995. That’s when Dnipropetrovsk’s own Leonid Kuchma was elected to Ukraine’s presidency. The Harfouch brothers found many of their acquaintances moving to Kyiv. They did, too.
The UN’s man
Kyiv was still a fairly rough place. There was one pizza place, Nika – across the street from the Lenin statue on Bessarabska Square – that served as a socializing spot for foreigners.
“The prices were unreal but people paid anyway, just for being in a sort of Western place,” Harfouch says.
“In Kyiv, it was a different life,” he says of the year, 1995, in which he and his brother started Super Nova, a pop radio station. “We’d always wanted to do it. Even when we were kids we had our beach radio. We had license number four: there was no competition whatsoever. There were only Radio Rocks and Music Radio. The concept was for young people and for foreigners. We had Americans, French and Brazilian people on the team. That’s when our business became more structured.”
To promote their radio station, the brothers held Super Nova-themed parties in city nightspots. These were a novelty for Kyiv, and very popular.
After a series of such events in 2001-2003 that were dedicated to AIDS awareness, the United Nations in 2004 made Harfouch a Good Will Ambassador on behalf of Ukraine. The honor is unique for a foreigner.
Beauty in business
The brothers’ most profitable during those years was organizing beauty contests in Ukraine on behalf of Elite, the international modeling agency. They set up contests – the so-called Elite Model Look – in Morocco and, in 2000, they organized the final of the contest in Switzerland. The brothers made a nice sum of money. His brother, Harfouch says, made “the best and most beautiful financial deal in life” by buying a big chunk of Elite Model Look shares low and then reselling them later after the contest gained brand recognition.
Using their resources, experience and connections, the Harfouch brothers organized their own beauty contest, called Miss Net, in 2000. Viewers could vote for girls through the Internet or, in some countries, by phone. The contest was seen in 35 countries.
In 2002, the Harfouchs got an offer to conduct their international Miss Net contest in Libya. The country was an international pariah at the time, and wanted to promote itself.
“We set up only one condition: that we’d take 50 international journalists who will live with us and film whatever they want to. We thought it would be the best protection. It turned out that many journalists dreamed of entering the country and interviewing Moammar Qaddafi. That’s how we got CNN to show us 24 times in two days,” he says. “The Libyans did everything trying to be good.”
“That contest jacked up our image and value a lot,” he says, adding that a picture of an emotional Qaddafi with a tearing-up American Miss Net contestant made the covers of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Sunday Mail, and got mentioned in a CNN report. “But the next day, after our return to London, we had American Secret Service officers asking us questions about Qaddafi.”
“At the end they told us that to hire a professional American company to do such public relations for the country would have cost Libya 15-20 million dollars,” Harfouch says with a grin.
These days the Harfouch brothers’ main activity is consulting for businesses who want to enter the Ukrainian market. They also run the Super Nova public relations agency, publish the Paparazzi gossip sheet, and own an interior design studio. The latter is designing Taboo, a cabaret and lounge bar in Premier Palace that will open in September.
The inherited urge
“I have a dream of someday organizing my own studio and doing just photography,” Harfouch says. “Right now my favorite project is my book, which I finished two days ago. It’s called ‘Sex, Murder and a Million,’ and is half fiction and half autobiography. My father is a writer and I’ve always wanted to write. There will be some sensational things, because I write from the beginning of [independent] Ukraine until my friendship with Kateryna Yushchenko and the Orange Revolution. I hope to print it in September. My brother will help to publish it in France. It will be both in French and Russian.” He adds that if the book turns out not to be so good, he’ll stop writing so much.
“Kyiv is my home, France is my air, and Lebanon is my bitter nostalgia,” he says. His family, including his sister and parents, prefers to meet up in France these days, and he visits his motherland very rarely.
“Maybe someday I’ll get a house in Lebanon, just in case.”
