Nemir Kirdar

Nemir Kirdar, an Iraqi expatriate and Middle East financier who founded a private equity firm that once owned Tiffany and Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, Gucci and other Western retail trophies, died on June 8 2020 at his home in Cap D’Antibes in the south of France. He was 83. He had a “longstanding struggle with dementia,” according to a statement from Investcorp, the company he founded in Bahrain in 1982. Mr. Kirdar spent most of his career at Investcorp, which connected oil-rich Arab tycoons and royals with investment opportunities in the West. He helped pioneer the global growth of private equity, in an era when American industry giants like KKR and Carlyle Group were being formed. Nemir Kirdar was born on October 28, 1936, in Kirkuk, Iraq, one of five sons of Amin Kirdar and Nuzhet Mohammed Ali Kirdar. His father was a governor of Kirkuk province and a member of parliament; his mother was a homemaker. He earned a degree in economics from the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., and joined his family in Phoenix, where he worked as a bank teller for $250 a month. In 1962, his brother, Nezir, persuaded him to return to Iraq, and Nemir spent the next six years working on a variety of business interests. Mr. Kirdar made his way to New York, where he worked as bank trainee while getting an M.B.A. at Fordham University at night. He became an executive at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1974 and helped it tap into the growing wealth in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the 1970s oil boom. He rose quickly at Chase and accompanied the chairman and chief executive, David Rockefeller, on tours of the Persian Gulf region. He left Chase in 1982 to start his own investment firm, initially setting up operations in a suite in Bahrain’s Holiday Inn. Serra Kirdar. In addition to his daughter Serra Kirdar he is survived by his wife, Nada, whom he married in Baghdad in 1967; another daughter, Rena Kirdar Abboud; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Edib and Jamil.