Roger Edward Tamraz (Arabic: روجيه تمرز) is an international banker and venture capital investor who has had an active business career in oil and gas in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the United States since the early 1960s. He is the billionaire chairman of the Dubai, UAE-based petroleum energy firm NetOil. Tamraz is featured in the book See No Evil, which loosely inspired the film Syriana. Early life and education Born 1940 in Cairo, Egypt to an Assyrian family from Lebanon, Tamraz grew up speaking fluent English, French and Arabic. His early schooling was at the prestigious English School in Cairo. He subsequently attended the American University in Cairo, Cambridge University in a Ph.D. programme, and the Institut Européen d’Administration (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France. He received an MBA in 1966 from Harvard Business School, where his classmates included many future leaders in Western and international governments and businesses. Tamraz served for many years as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University in Cairo, where he endowed a number of named scholarships for Egyptian students of exceptional promise. He became a U.S. citizen in 1989. International finance, oil, and gas Tamraz's first notable business enterprise was in 1967, when as an executive of the Wall Street investment bank Kidder, Peabody & Co., he successfully refloated a large Lebanese bank called Intra Bank, which had become insolvent in 1966. The bank had been founded in Beirut in 1951 by Yousef Beidas and three partners as a currency trading house named International Traders. The bank stopped payments on October 14, 1966. The collapse of the bank brought the Lebanese economy to a halt and sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. Intra Bank accounted for 15% of total bank deposits and 38% of all deposits with Lebanese-owned banks. It owned nine other banks, controlled 35 companies and employed 43,000 people at the time of its collapse. The collapse was followed by its restructuring, under a plan known as the “Kidder Peabody Plan,” which was engineered by Tamraz (who served for years as its chairman and chief executive officer), under which the deposit obligations of the old Intra Bank were replaced with shares in a new company named Intra Investment Company (IIC), one of the major sovereign wealth investment companies in the Middle East. The major shareholders of IIC were the Lebanese government, along with the governments of Kuwait, Qatar