President's cousin quits 'to aid poor'

Syria's most powerful businessman, a confidant and cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, widely reviled among the general population, has announced that he is quitting business and moving to charity work.

The businessman, Rami Makhlouf, a 41-year-old tycoon who has emerged as a lightning rod in the three-month uprising against Mr Assad's rule, is almost synonymous with the excesses of the Syrian leadership.

Offices of his mobile phone company, Syriatel, were burned in protests, and his name was chanted in denunciation in demonstrations.

Though opposition figures doubted the sincerity of the move, announced on Thursday night, even a symbolic gesture may prove important, as Mr Assad faces the gravest challenge to his 11-year rule. For the first time since the uprising began, analysts said, a figure deemed a pillar of the leadership was forced to at least publicly step aside, a startling concession for a tightknit ruling elite bound by family and clan loyalty.

In a news conference carried by the Syrian state news agency, Mr Makhlouf portrayed his move as an act of generosity, though it was unlikely that any such decision could take place without the consent and perhaps the insistence of Mr Assad.

Mr Makhlouf said that he would offer shares of Syriatel, Syria's largest phone company, to the poor and that profits would go, in part, to families of people killed in the uprising.

He said profits from his other endeavours would go to charitable and humanitarian work. He vowed not to enter into any new business that would bring him personal gain.

The move represented a humiliating moment for a man who is shy of the limelight, only rarely grants interviews and is described by detractors as the Assad family's banker or Mr Five Percent.

The ascent of Mr Makhlouf, at the intersection of power and privilege, mirrored the Assad family's consolidation of power in Syria over the past four decades: his father Mohammed, Mr Assad's uncle, was a magnate in his own right, and Rami Makhlouf's brother, Hafez, is the intelligence chief in Damascus.

Mr Makhlouf's supporters praise him for investment in Syria's dilapidated infrastructure, and the sleek offices of Syriatel are a sought-after destination for the urban young and educated. But they are far outnumbered by detractors, who call him a thief, and his unpopularity rivals perhaps only that of Mr Assad's brother, Maher, a feared and reviled figure who commands the military's Republican Guard and the elite Fourth Division.

Mr Makhlouf's influence is so great, and his connection to the leadership so deep, that opposition figures derided the move as propaganda. Others speculated that it was devised to avoid sanctions imposed on him by the European Union, which included him on a list of 13 figures subject to a freeze on assets and a ban on travel to the bloc.

The United States imposed sanctions on him in 2008, accusing him of manipulating the judicial system and using Syrian intelligence to intimidate rivals.

"There is no transparency in his declaration because we don't know what he owns and how much money he has," said Ammar Qurabi, head of the Syrian National Association for Human Rights. "It is a step designed for media consumption only."

But diplomats have said that Mr Assad himself was angered by an interview that Mr Makhlouf gave in May, which offered a rare insight into the thinking of an opaque government. The frank comments amounted to a public relations disaster for a government facing mounting international pressure over a ferocious crackdown that, by activists' count, has left 1,300 dead and more than 10,000 in detention.

In the interview, he said the government would fight to the end in a struggle that could cast the Middle East into turmoil and even war, suggesting that the ruling family equated its survival with the existence of the minority sect that buttressed its power and that viewed the protests not as legitimate demands but as the seeds of civil war.

"If there is no stability here, there's no way there will be stability in Israel," he said in the interview. "No way, and nobody can guarantee what will happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime."

Though Syrian officials quickly distanced themselves from the remarks, saying Mr Makhlouf held no official position in the government, opposition figures and diplomats seized on the remarks as evidence of a government unwilling to change.

In some ways, the remarks were a candid take on a sentiment the government has sought to cultivate since the uprising erupted in March — us or chaos. "They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone," Mr Makhlouf said.