Omar Zeidan is one of the best-connected among the established agents of French industry in the Arab world. He is still very active in 2013, steering through projects in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and partnering investments of the Al-Assad clan in Syria. At the same time, he is trying to establish himself in Libya and is continuing to advance his own investment projects in Africa generally. After having been involved over the last few decades in some of the biggest projects launched by France's blue chip companies in the Middle East, he still receives visitors in his office at 99 avenue des Champs-Elysées, above the well-known Le Fouquet's restaurant.
A graduate of Paris's Sciences-Po university and the prestigious INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, Omar Zeidan is a citizen of honour of Canada as well as being a Lebanese national. For more than 40 years, he has been frequenting with the same ease the corridors of the French defence industry and those of the Gulf monarchies and authoritarian regimes of the Near East. He was for a long time an adviser to French naval defence contractor DCN (formerly DCNS), logistics group Geodis and aerospace group EADS but today still shuttles between the capitals of the Persian Gulf states to promote among other things rail projects for Alstom and SNCF International.
Some of his long-standing contacts, like former Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, who died in 2011, are no longer in activity but Omar Zeidan still has precious contacts in Paris, as well as a very good knowledge of the inner workings of the regimes in power in Saudi Arabia, Syria and a number of African countries. He is involved in both business and regional politics. He was Chad's ambassador to UNESCO and founded the Franco-Middle Eastern Association of the Legion of Honour in a region in which he has rendered numerous services to the French diplomatic effort. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1993. As a former agent of the Office Général de l'Air (OGA), the decoration was awarded to him by General Jacques Mitterrand, brother of then French president Francois Mitterrand, who was accompanied by defence minister François Léotard. Then, in 2000, he was made an officer of the Legion of Honour by the then Socialist foreign affairs minister, Hubert Védrine.