Forbes Middle East released their list of the world’s richest Arabs in 2016 headed by Prine AlWaleed Bin Talal (17.3 Billion) and 7 unsurprising names from Lebanese made it to the list this year.

12. Najib Mikati, 2.5 Billion
12. Taha Mikati, 2.5 Billion
15. Bahaa Hariri, 2.2 Billion
23. Robert Mouawad & family, 1.5 Billion
25. Saad Hariri, 1.4 Billion
31. Ayman Hariri, 1.2 Billion
32. Fahd Hariri, 1.2 Billion

With these figures, Lebanon turned out to be the country with highest number of billionaires per capita in the Arab world.

But for some reason I always have a hard time believing that these lists report the exact number of billionaires in Lebanon and the other countries simply because we lack transparency here in our region. The Mubarak family of Egypt for example never made it to any “Richest Arabs” list, and we only knew about their billions after they were overthrown.

In our case, we have politicians who have been active for more than 30 and 40 years now like Berri and Joumblat, and I highly doubt these two have not been able to make a couple billions throughout their long years of “serving” the nation.. so yeah there’s definitely more to add to that Forbes list.