Youssef Nada

Youssef Moustafa Ali Nada (يوسف مصطفى علي ندا; born 17 May 1931, in Egypt) is a noted businessman and Muslim Brotherhood financial strategist.

Nada is most famous for raising successful European human rights legal cases to defend himself against accusations of terrorism by the United States.

The U.S. accusations, made directly after the 9/11 attacks, resulted in his placement on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 terror blacklist.

Youssef Nada was born on 17 May 1931 in Alexandria, Egypt.

In his late teens, Nada became affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the late 1950s, Nada moved to Europe, settling in Austria, and began working with a cheese factory in Graz.

Between 1952 and 1954, Nada was imprisoned with 300,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in a desert-based Egyptian military concentration camp.

Many persons imprisoned in this camp were tortured as a result of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's famous campaign against the group.

After his release, Nada returned to University in Alexandria and began a business with a friend, producing milk.

During the 1960s, the Egyptian government fell back into conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Nada became one of the members wanted by the Egyptians.

This led to Nada settling permanently in Europe.

In 1961, a close friend of Nada's invited him to Libya where a construction boom was developing.

Nada seized on the occasion and started to spend his time between Libya and Austria.

In a matter of a few years he became the largest supplier of cement to the North African country.

The activity led him to partner with Cementir, the Italian cement maker, to develop in 1965 the world's first floating cement silos, two barges named GI-1 and GD-2 able to store bulk cement and loaded with bagging facilities.

Cement soon became his main business along with smaller operations in other commodities ranging from steel to agricultural materials.

Nada had tremendous business success in his ventures with Saudi Arabia, Libya and eventually, the Nigerian government.

A 1986 article in London-based Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Nada, along with Ahmed Ben Bella, a former president of Algeria, held a secret meeting at his Switzerland home attended by "major figures in some of the world’s most violent groups."

In 2001, Nada, former chairman of al Taqwa Bank, was placed on the UN terror list by the US Treasury Department.

Nada was alleged to have financed activities of al Qaeda, charges Nada vehemently denied.

The U.S. accusation was made applicable under the UN terror-listing program and affected his life in Switzerland, notably his assets, reputation, honor, and ability to move freely.

By 2001, the time of the accusations for which he became famous, Nada was a resident of Italy.

He lived in Campione, a small Italian 'enclave' adjacent to the Swiss canton of Ticino.

The road to enter his property, and home, crossed through Switzerland.

This is why his being banned from Swiss territory placed him in a state of virtual house arrest for a number of years.

It explains why the Swiss SECO made it legal entanglements with the Swiss government inevitable.

In 2006, he sued the Swiss government for restitution of financial losses due to the Swiss investigation.

Between 2007–2009, Nada's ordeal featured heavily in a report by Swiss Senator and former Prosecutor Dick Marty on behalf of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Mr Marty's report assessed the UN's terror-blacklisting procedures against international rule of law standards - along with those for a similar blacklist run by the European Union - and concluded that both were "completely arbitrary" and violated human rights.

In 2008, Nada raised a case against Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, also a body of the Council of Europe.

Nada has a son Hazim Nada, born in Silver Spring, Maryland, who founded a commodities-trading business in 2008 to support his studies.

He became victim of a UAE funded smear campaign by a Geneva-based private intelligence firm named Alp Services of Mario Brero, exposed in a March 2023 article in the New Yorker.

Allegations that his business was a cover for a Muslim Brotherhood cell by a journalist Sylvain Besson and Africa Intelligence prompted World-Check to flag him, so banks stopped to service him and eventually destroyed his business.

By 2009, both the Swiss and Italian investigations of Nada were dropped as no evidence was found to support the U.S. accusations.

Both Switzerland and Italy petitioned the UN Terrorism Committee to remove Nada's name from the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 blacklist, at the objection of the United States.

The U.S. finally acquiesced to his removal on 24 September 2009, but retained Nada on the domestic U.S. Treasury list under Executive Order 13224 until 25 February 2015 when it also removed his name from its own sanctions list.

On 12 September 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Nada, citing that Nada's human rights had been violated, in the context of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In this ruling the government of Switzerland was ordered to pay Nada 30,000 Euros in damages, for their treatment of him as a person placed — with no evidence of guilt — on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 terror blacklist by the United States.

While the United States refused to disclose evidence of Nada's guilt, claiming that the evidence was classified, it removed his name from all its lists silently with little fanfare in 2015.