Arcadi Gaydamak

"Gaydamak" redirects here. For Ukrainian haidamaks, see Haidamaka.

Arcadi Gaydamak

Arcadi Aleksandrovich Gaydamak, (Hebrew: ארקדי אלכסנדרוביץ' גאידמק; Russian: Аркадий Александрович Гайдамак; born 1952 in Moscow, USSR) is a Russian-Israeli billionaire businessman.

Gaydamak is also a French citizen, having lived mainly in France from 1973 until his return to Israel in 2000. He possesses a Canadian passport and a diplomatic Angolan passport.

He was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honour by the French Republic. He is the owner of the Israeli football club Beitar Jerusalem. In February 2007 he announced the establishment of an Israeli social movement, Social Justice, which became a political party in July 2007.. He ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Jerusalem in the November 2008 elections, winning about 3.6% of the votes. In the second half of 2008 he got out of many of his investments in Israel.

Biography

Arcadi Gaydamak at a press conference

Arcadi Gaydamak was born in 1952 in Moscow, capital of the former USSR. At the age of 20, Gaydamak was one of the first Jews to emigrate to Israel from Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union and receive Israeli citizenship.

He lived in Kibbutz Beit HaShita, and learned Hebrew at an Ulpan. He was later employed as a sailor by the Israeli national shipping company ZIM, and disembarked from one of its ships in France in 1973. He lived in France until the age of 48 and returned to Israel in 2000.

Career

After Gaydamak settled in France, lacking an academic education, he began his early career working as a gardener and a bricklayer. In 1976, Gaydamak opened a translation bureau near Paris, servicing Soviet commercial delegations visiting France and made contacts at a number of French companies. By 1982, Gaydamak Translations was a highly successful business, and he opened a branch in Canada. During that period he commenced international business, in import and export. After the collapse of the USSR, he built up ties in Russia and Kazakhstan to further his business and sequentially formed various business organizations across Europe.

It is believed that a large portion of his wealth came from selling weapons to Angola with disregard to the international embargo barring anyone from doing such. He was awarded with several honorary rewards from the French government, including the prestigious Order of the Legion of Honour for obtaining the release of two French pilots from the Bosnian Serb government during the War in Bosnia.

During the 1990s, Gaydamak made significant donations to Jewish and Israeli causes, including the Association for the Welfare of Soldiers in Israel.

Gaydamak left France after many years, after an international arrest warrant was issued for him in connection with Angolagate, an arms-dealing scandal. He is wanted on two charges; illegal arms dealing with Angola, and tax evasion. He was tried in absentia in France, found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison. France has unsuccessfully attempted to obtain his extradition from Israel, but this has been declined by the Israeli judiciary on the grounds that the factual allegations could not be considered as an offense under the laws of the extraditing country (in this case, Israel) at the time that they were allegedly committed, this being an international prerequisite of extradition, and that other alleged offenses, such as fiscal ones, are not extraditable by nature.

Sport clubs and media ownership

In July 10 2005 Gaydamak announced his entry into the sports business and became the sponsor of the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team. About a month later he decided to donate $400,000 to the Israeli Arab Bnei Sakhnin football club. On the same day Gaydamak also announced the purchase of 55% of the ownership of Beitar Jerusalem, and two days later he announced the acquisition of full ownership of the team. Gaydamak is the patron of several Jewish charities, and is president of the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia (KEROOR), Russia's oldest religious Jewish umbrella group. In the summer of 2008, Arcadi appeared to claim that it was him, not his son Alexandre, who was the owner of Portsmouth F.C. - but this was refuted in statements by both the club itself and the Premier League.

In March 2006 he announced his offer to buy the French newspaper France Soir via his company Moscow News. He had purchased the Russian Moskovskie Novosti newspaper in 2004, fired some senior journalists, and changed the paper's mandate to a firmly pro-government one, appointing a pro-Putin journalist as editor in chief. This was widely viewed as hostile to free speech and raised questions about Gaydamak's possible ties to the Kremlin.

In June 2007, it was reported that Gaydamak agreed to buy the non-kosher supermarket chain Tiv Taam. Furthermore, it his was reported that he planned to close the stores on Shabbat and either turn the chain into a kosher one or avoid selling pork products. However, a few days later the deal fell through and the result was one of the many lawsuits involving Gaydamak's businesses in Israel

In July 2009, Gayamak claimed that he would not be the owner of Beitar Jerusalem anymore and decided to give the seat to Itzik Kornfein and to Goma Aguair. He stated that Kornfein will handle with buying and selling players and balancing the money, while Aguair will finance the club.

Donations

Gaydamak has donated to many Israeli organizations, of which some are charities and have religious characteristics. He has donated to Magen David Adom, Hatzolah and many others.

Gaydamak also pledged $50 million to the Jewish Agency for Israel, but withdrew the offer when the Jewish Agency was warned about money laundering allegations. He ended up donating $10 million.

During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict Gaydamak constructed a tent-village on the beach of Nitzanim, that hosted thousands of families who fled the rocket ridden North and had otherwise no place and means to go to. Gaydamak's contributions totaled $15 million (about $500,000 a day) and earned him considerable praise among some Israelis, although they were viewed by others as a populist act.

In November 2006, he funded a one-week long vacation in Eilat for hundreds of Sderot residents, who have been under constant Palestinian rocket attack for the past seven years..

Angola illegal arms trade and conviction

In 2009 together with French magnate Pierre Falcone he was convicted in organizing illegal weapons trade in Angola (tanks, helicopters and artillery pieces ) during the civil war 1993-1998 to a total amount of 790 million USD. He was sentenced in their absence to six years in prison.

Politics

On February 20, 2007 Gaydamak announced he would found a party based solely on socio-economic issues. The next day he announced its name, Social Justice.

Although Gaydamak has said the organization would initially be established as a social movement, he noted that it could become a political party at any time, "based on the circumstances." In the past he has stated that the movement does not seek ultimate power for itself, but will run in tandem with Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, hoping to pick up votes from former Likud members alienated by Netanyahu's financial policies.

In late 2007 it became apparent that the party intended to run candidates for mayor and council members in tens of Israeli municipalities and local authorities in the 2008 municipal elections.

Gaydamak himself ran for Mayor of Jerusalem in the November 2008 election and lost, getting only 3.6% of the votes and the "Social Justice" party getting no seats on the city council. During the campaign Gaydamak courted the East Jerusalem Palestinian vote, who had boycotted the elections since the 1990s. Gaydamak approached the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, Palestinian political figures and media, and came away with as close to an endorsement as one could hope for. That apparently did not help him. In interviews following his defeat Gaydamak denounced Beitar Jerusalem's followers for their lack of support in the elections.

Gaydamak's politics are what he labels as outreach, encompassing very differing segments of Israeli society. Although this outreach has boundaries, as attested in an August 2008 speech where Gaydamak told an audience that he is prepared to die to prevent the Jerusalem gay pride parade from taking place again .

The social justice party did not register for participation in the Israeli legislative election, 2009 and Gaydamak indicated in interviews that he lost interest in Israeli politics following his defeat in the mayoral elections.