1 week Ago By Ima Ekanem
Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja President-elect, Donald Trump’s incoming Middle East Adviser, MassadBoulos, said to have strong connections with Nigeria, is not a billionaire as previously thought, the New York Times reported yesterday. Boulos who has enjoyed a reputation as a billionaire mogul at the helm of a business that bears his family name, has never sought to correct the wrong impression, the paper said. He has been profiled as a tycoon by the world’s media, telling a reporter in October that his company is worth billions.
Trump has also called him a “highly respected leader in the business world, with extensive experience on the international scene.” The president-elect even lavished what may be his highest praise: a “dealmaker”, the report said. On his Nigerian connection, Boulos is said to hold Lebanese, Nigerian, French and American citizenship.
He married Sarah Boulos, who is also a businesswoman that founded the Society of the Performing Arts in Nigeria and is the owner of Cred International Lagos Island franchise. Together they have four children. In 2022, their son Michael married Tiffany Trump, daughter of the US president-elect.
Still on his connection to Nigeria, after studying in Texas, Boulos went on to build his ‘wealth’ in West Africa. He became the chief executive officer of SCOA Nigeria, previously described as an automotive conglomerate. His ascendancy from businessman to a close confidant of Trump has now landed a diverse portfolio on his desk.
But the NYT report revealed that records show that Boulos has spent the past two decades selling trucks and heavy machinery in Nigeria for a company his father-in-law controls. The company, SCOA Nigeria PLC, made a profit of less than $66,000 last year, corporate filings show, it said. It added that there is no indication in corporate documents that Boulos, a Lebanese-American whose son is married to Mr.
Trump’s daughter Tiffany, is a man of significant wealth as a result of his businesses. Instead, it explained that the truck dealership is valued at about $865,000 at its current share price, with Boulos’s stake, according to securities filings, being worth $1.53.
As for Boulos Enterprises, it said the company that has been called his family business in The Financial Times and elsewhere, a company officer there said, is owned by an unrelated Boulos family. Boulos will advise Trump on one of the world’s most complicated and conflict-wracked regions — a region that he said this week that he has not visited in years. The advisory position does not require Senate approval.
The confusion over Boulos’s background — and his failure for years to clear up misunderstandings until questioned this week by The Times, the report said, raises questions about how thoroughly Trump’s team vetted his nominees. The team was earlier caught by surprise by allegations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth, the pick for defence secretary. Boulos, a Christian from northern Lebanon who emigrated to Texas as a teenager, has risen in prominence since 2018, when his son Michael began dating Tiffany Trump.
This year, Bouloshelped Trump woo Arab-American voters, and in the fall served as a go-between for Trump and the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. In October, The Times asked him about his wealth and business dealings. At the time, Boulos said he did not like to describe himself that way, but that journalists had picked up on the label.
“It’s accurate to describe the company as a multibillion-dollar—?” the reporter followed up. “Yeah,” Boulos replied. “It’s a big company.
Long history,” he said. But in a subsequent interview on Tuesday, Boulos was to have noted that he had only meant to confirm that other news outlets had written — incorrectly — that he runs such a company. In another call, on Wednesday, he said he was referring to his father-in-law’s companies, which he said were collectively worth more than $1 billion, though the company he runs is not, NYT added.
“I’ve never really gone into any details like that about the value,” he said. He confirmed that he has no relationship with Boulos Enterprises. Asked why he had never corrected the record, he said that he made a practice of not commenting on his business.
Boulos has a history of small business ventures. Corporate records in Nigeria tie him to a restaurant, some inactive construction companies and to Tantra Beverages, a now-defunct company that was set up to sell an “erotic drink” that “gives men and women the ultimate stimulating push,” according to its manufacturer. Boulos said an associate runs the restaurant, and that he did not recall the drink venture.
Any significant wealth, he said on Tuesday, comes from the family of his wife, Sarah. Trump has also referred to Boulos as a lawyer and ABC News has reported that he graduated with a law degree from the University of Houston. But the school said it has no record of that.
Instead, he graduated from a separate school, the University of Houston-Downtown, in 1993 with a bachelor of business administration degree. At the Lagos headquarters of the company in Nigeria, NYT reported seeing a few dozen heavy machines and trucks which sat in a lot by a highway, and a handful of staff that sat behind desks inside the office..
