NEWS
Meshesha Betemariam arrested on unspecified charges
Indian Ocean Newsletter
September 16, 1995
Al Mesh chairman (and shareholder) Meshesha Betemariam was arrested on unspecified charges on his return from a business trip to Europe and is currently in detention in the Zone 3 police headquarters of the Ethiopian capital after his application for bail on September 5 was turned down. His lawyer claimed that his client was sick and needed hospital treatment but Ethiopia’s chief public prosecutor rejected the plea and was backed by the judge in charge of the dossier. The Al Mesh company belongs in fact to the Ethiopian-Saudi Arabian businessman Mohamed Al Amoudi, who owns the Arab television channel MBC in London and a number of companies in Ethiopia (ION No. 670). The company was planning to inject 80 million birr in an agricultural project near Aissaita in the Afar region of the Awash Valley where it owns a 20,000-hectare cotton plantation. It has also a number of projects (including the construction of a sugar refinery, a joint venture with an Italian investor for a plywood factory, marketing of agricultural produce and livestock breeding for exporting to Gulf countries and Europe) and runs the air taxi firm Aerial Service Enterprise.
Internal differences between Al Mesh and the president of the Afar region killed off the agricultural project, after local inhabitants warming up for the recent regional elections invaded the Al Mesh plantation with the backing of the local authorities on March 24 and destroyed installations. Al Mesh was subsequently accused with having taken over the land without official authorization. It seems that Meshesha Betemariam’s arrest was a follow-up to this conflict.
The arrest of Meshesha Betemariam in Addis Ababa gives this apparently local dispute a national dimension. It hits the head of one of the Al Amoudi companies which is one of Ethiopia’s biggest private investors, and therefore takes on all the characteristics of an unofficial warning by the authorities against the company’s tentacular expansion. The Al Amoudi group is present everywhere: it owns several Ethiopian companies, it built the Addis Ababa
Sheraton, via National Motors Corporation it represents a number of foreign companies including the French firms Michelin and Renault Vehicules Industriels, and it has submitted offers in the Calls for bids in the privatization of several state-owned companies such as soft drink bottlers (US $30 million to take up 75 percent of the capital of the local Pepsi Cola firm and $ 25 million for 75 percent of the capital of the mineral water company Ambo).
A news and opinion journal on Ethiopia
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