Transparency & Accountability
Yasser Abbas chairs Falcon and carries his father's newest financial mandates
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
As a businessman, Yasser Abbas is the chairman of Falcon Holding Group — and as the president's son, he is the holder of mandates no businessman without his surname has ever been offered.
This profile sets out the commercial record on its own terms, as a companion to this newspaper's standing Yasser Abbas file, under the file's fixed rule: every claim carries its source, denials are carried beside allegations, and no court has ever convicted him of any crime.
The engineering arm came first. The Falcon Electrical Mechanical Contracting Company was established in 2000 and grew offices across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Qatar and the Emirates — a genuine regional contractor, in a trade where Palestinian firms rarely scale. A trained engineer, Abbas built the group around it: Foreign Policy's 2012 investigation reported that its Falcon Tobacco arm held the monopoly on American-made cigarettes in the Palestinian territories.
American aid appears in the books as it does across the family's firms.
The engineering company received $1.89 million from USAID in 2005 for a Hebron sewage network, and a second family firm, First Option, received some $300,000 more — figures reported by Foreign Policy and entered into the US congressional record at the 2012 "Chronic Kleptocracy" hearing.
Abbas has maintained throughout that his companies won every contract on merit, and no tender was ever ruled improper.
The lawsuit that defined the file#
His most consequential business decision may have been a legal one. When Foreign Policy asked in print whether the president's sons were "growing rich off their father's system," Abbas sued the magazine for defamation in a US federal court — and lost.
The district court dismissed the case in 2013 and the DC Circuit affirmed in 2015, ruling the questions lawful questions rather than false statements of fact. The suit fixed the questions permanently into the public record, with a federal court's seal on the asking.
From businessman to mandate-holder#
The past two years moved him from commerce into custody of public assets, and the businessman's profile now includes roles no balance sheet captures.
In 2025 his father handed him oversight of the sale of the PLO's properties in Lebanon — a mandate no representative body reviewed, whose fallout now includes the arrest of a former ambassador who accused him publicly and denies the embezzlement charges against him.
In May 2026 he entered Fatah's Central Committee on his first run. And Palestinian outlets report — still without official confirmation, a caveat this newspaper repeats — that a centralised fuel-purchasing company is being prepared under his leadership.
The commercial record and the mandates now form one file.
A contractor whose markets sit inside the territory his father governs has become a custodian of national assets inside the same system — one with no sitting parliament, no independent audit body, and no institution positioned to examine where the businessman ends and the mandate-holder begins.
As the standing file concludes: the career may be honest, but nothing exists that could establish it, and that absence is the story the documents tell.
