Emirati business leader Khalaf Al Habtoor, who this week scrapped investment plans in Lebanon on safety grounds, said he had abandoned a media venture in Beirut after a death threat last year.
Mr Al Habtoor, founder and chairman of Al Habtoor Group, told Reuters he was threatened with being “slaughtered and killed”.
The remarks made on social media from an anonymous account prompted him to file a lawsuit, which he won in a Lebanese court, he said.
“I have been threatened, not threatened only with a slap or something. If that was the case it doesn’t matter, but I was threatened to be slaughtered and killed,” he said, speaking by Zoom from a hotel he owns in Budapest.
Mr Al Habtoor on Tuesday confirmed he was cancelling all plans in Lebanon, only days after he announced his intention to invest in a large-scale project there.
He said he took the decision “due to lack of security and stability and the lack of any horizon for improvement in the near future”, in Lebanon, in a message on social media platform X.
He also plans to sell all his properties and investments in Lebanon. Mr Al Habtoor also said along with his family and his group's managers, he would refrain from travelling there.
“These decisions were not taken in a vacuum, but rather came as a result of careful study and in-depth monitoring of the situation there,” he said.
As of January last year, the Habtoor Group's investments in Lebanon amounted to about $1 billion. These investments covered sectors including funds placed within the Lebanese banking system, luxury hotels affiliated with Hilton Hotels and Resorts, a shopping mall, a 100,000-square-metre leisure destination called Habtoor Land and other property ventures.
In January, Lebanon’s Parliament elected army chief Joseph Aoun as President − ending a power vacuum that began in 2022.
Mr Aoun nominated Nawaf Salam as the new Prime Minister and entrusted him with the responsibility to form a new government. Both men are seen as being apart from Lebanon's entrenched ruling classes, who are accused of mismanaging the country. Neither candidate was favoured by Hezbollah, which previously dominated Lebanese politics.
Lebanon's economy struggled after the government defaulted on about $31 billion of eurobonds in March 2020, with its currency sinking more than 90 per cent against the dollar on the black market.
The conflict with Israel last year led to a further deterioration of its economy, with physical damages and economic losses due to the conflict estimated at $8.5 billion, according to a World Bank report in November.
Asked whether he would reconsider his decision on further investment in the country, Mr Al Habtoor said if it could offer safety and protection, then “definitely I will go back”.