The most outspoken man in Middle Eastern telecoms has to be Saad al Barrak, chairman of Kuwait's Zain group. He is also the most successful. I can only hope that this prompts other industry leaders, who typically speak only in guarded comments if they speak at all, to get out there and shake things up a little more.
Until yesterday, my favourite Barrak moment was when he told reporters that "there will be peace with Israel before there is an independent telecom regulator in Kuwait."
He is certainly not afraid of running his mouth, and he was the highlight of a pretty lively morning at the Arab Advisors telecom conference here in Amman yeterday.
Choice pieces of Barrak wisdom from the morning, after the jump:
On public-private partnerships:
"I don't believe in the public sector, I think it is a socialist
ideology that went away with the Soviet Union. Partnerships with the
public sector are totally ridiculous, we should get rid of them. It is
a poisonous ideaology of the past, and a way where politicians can
tamper with the private sector."
On his largest shareholder, a Kuwaiti government fund:
"I wish they would leave tomorrow, and I am working on this," he
said. "We reduced their board seats from two to one - any government
ownership imposes, by the nature of government, some economic and
political decisions, which are extremely detrimental to the wellbeing
of private enterprise."
After hearing from the head of PalTel (which Zain just acquired),
that some arrivals to David Ben-Gurion airport - which is covered by
PalTel's Jawwal mobile network - complain of receiving a "Jawwal
welcomes you to Palestine" text message:
"It should say Hamas welcomes you to Palestine"
To a German member of the panel, who had earlier mentioned a visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Germany:
"I am very happy to hear that the Pope is on your side. The sheikh is
not on out side - we have two kinds of sheikh, the religious and the
non- religious, and neither are not on our side. So we are fighting a
kind of double-play."
The last two were said as jokes, and grabbed big laughs from the
thousand-strong crowd. That is a sentence I will probably never write
again while describing telecommunications industry conferences, whose
typical level of humour involves jokes about wives and their mobile
bills.