Transparency & Accountability
Tareq Abbas runs advertising firms inside the system his father heads
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Of the Palestinian president's two sons, Tareq Abbas is the quieter one. His brother Yasser carries mandates, a Fatah seat and a standing file in this newspaper; Tareq has built his career in a softer trade — advertising, communications and retail — and given the public record one unforgettable sentence.
This profile assembles what the record shows about the businessman, with the same rule the family file always carries: documents speak, gaps are named, and no court has convicted him of anything.
His base is Sky Advertising, the Ramallah agency he chairs. Sky's corporate profile and reporting on the family's interests describe a firm that grew into the territory's leading advertising, public-relations and events house — and made its chairman president of the Palestinian Advertising Association, the industry body of the market he leads.
The agency sits inside a larger structure. Sky is part of the Arab Palestinian Investment Company — APIC — the Ramallah-based conglomerate whose distribution, food and retail arms reach most Palestinian households.
Tareq Abbas serves in APIC's corporate leadership and joined its board, and reporting in 2016 put his shareholding in the company at about a million dollars. He is also vice chairman of the Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers company, the group's retail-property arm.
The contracts and the question#
American aid money appears in his ledger as it does in his brother's. In 2006, Sky Advertising received a $659,600 USAID contract — for a campaign, Reuters later reported, meant to improve Palestinian attitudes toward American assistance. The same reporting tied more than $2 million in US-supported work to the two brothers' firms together.
None of it was hidden and none of it was ruled unlawful. The family's lawyer, Karim Shehadeh, denied that the sons' parentage played any role in the awards, saying the companies won their work on merit.
The structural question — whether any market is fully open when one competitor's father heads the government, its regulators and its licensing — is the file's question, not a finding against any contract.
The 2012 congressional hearing that pressed it convicted no one; reporting cited in that record described Tareq as a multimillionaire with property in Amman, Beirut and London.
The sentence he is remembered for#
Tareq Abbas's most public act was not commercial. In 2016 he told The New York Times that a lifetime of watching the two-state project stall had moved him to favor a single state with equal rights — and put it in nine words: "If you don't want to give me independence, at least give me civil rights."
The sentence travelled because of who said it. The son of the president whose office exists to deliver the two-state solution had concluded, publicly, that his generation might live to see neither state nor vote. Al Jazeera's opinion pages debated the remark and the privilege behind it — a businessman insulated from the daily occupation his sentence described, said critics; an honest register of a movement's dead end, said others.
He has held to the quieter lane since. No Fatah candidacy, no mandate over public assets, no formal office in his father's system — the contrast with his brother is the shape of his public life.
What the record shows is a career in the market's soft-power trades, conducted entirely inside the political economy his father presides over; what no institution has ever examined is what that proximity was worth. As with the rest of the family file, the absence of any body able to ask is itself the finding.
