A veteran Omani banker and financier, who contributed his vast banking knowledge and experience towards advancing the banking sector in the Sultanate since the 1970s, passed away recently.
Abdulqader Asqalan, former CEO of Oman Arab Bank, died after a two-year battle with a terminal illness. The late banker once gifted me a biography documenting his banking experience, titled “Abdulqader Asqalan: A Journey of Achievement and Giving”.
The inspirational biography details most of the late banker’s experiences, activities and events during his career that spanned 57 years, starting at just 20 as a banking trainee.
Throughout six decades of continuous hard work and dedication in various departments, he earned top positions in an Arab bank established at a time when foreign financial and banking institutions were in control and were not in favour of seeing an Arab banking institution that competes with them in banking and financial operations.
Through this informative book, the author highlights the major turning points in the late banker’s career, starting from his hometown — the Palestinian city of Nablus —and landing in the Omani capital of Muscat, where he launched his incredible career as a trainee to rise to the top to become a member of Oman Arab Bank’s board of directors, which was previously a branch of Arab Bank.
The author notes how he worked in the city of Nablus for some time before moving to the Yemeni city of Aden during the revolution against the British, then onward to Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE and finally to Oman with his family at the dawn of the Blessed Renaissance led by the Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The year was 1973, when Arab and local banks were non-existent in the Sultanate, apart from the British Bank.
In the introduction, the author details the two events that shaped the late banker’s career.
The first took place in the city of Aden in the 1950s, when the Arab Bank branch found its way amid a sea of internationally-held banks. He made an initiative to offer documentary trusts for Yemeni merchants to import foodstuff when all foreign banks refrained from doing so during the revolution against the British, because they did not wish to increase their external obligations and to halt the revolution from the source, which would have resulted in denying citizens their basic needs.
The second event, which he described as a bold move, was managing to convince the management of the Arab Bank in the Jordanian capital of Amman to grant a $50 million loan to the Omani government to secure some of its obligations towards infrastructure projects implemented in the early 1970s.
The late Asqalan also referred to his banking experience in the Sultanate since September 1973, and events in his life regarding the education of his daughters, along with his work in transforming the Arab Bank that recorded financial losses into a competitive and profitable banking institution.
He also referred to some banking challenges he faced while working in Muscat and how he succeeded in overcoming these through “banking diplomacy”, putting the Arab Bank in the league of Oman’s top successful institutions.
This was achieved through the relationships he built with international companies that want to set up shop in the Sultanate, which helped the bank in offering documentary trusts for some countries, including Japan, and to be part of the Omani economic and banking scene.
The biography also covers many political and economic issues that the author experienced in his banking career in the Sultanate, accompanying the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, President of the State of Palestine, on his official visit to the Sultanate on January 1990, meeting with the Sultan Qaboos and transforming the Arab Bank to a local bank under the name Oman Arab Bank.
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