Munib Masri, a US-educated Nablus-born oil billionaire, has repeatedly been mentioned in some quarters as a possible prime minister of Palestine. His cousin Maher has served as minister of economy and trade, chairman of the Palestinian Investment Promotion Agency, the Palestinian Industrial Estates and Free Zones Area and the Palestinian Banking Corporation. Masris cousin Tahir al-Masri is a former Prime Minister of Jordan.

Currently though Munib Masri who founded Edgo, a billion-dollar family-owned oil and gas contracting company based in Amman, Jordan is chairman of the Palestinian Development and Investment Co., also known as Padico, which was created following the 1993 interim agreement that gave Palestinians a measure of self-rule.

Masri joined a dozen other Palestinian expatriates in seeking to build up a national economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The group formed the holding company Padico in 1994, which helped establish the aspiring states first stock exchange and privately owned phone company and invested in hotels, industrial estates and other projects.

Twelve years on, Padico and its holdings stand as the biggest private employers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, that status is really only an achievement by default: few other private investors have been willing to risk their money in the territories.

Many Palestinian businessmen who arrived after Oslo have long since returned to their homes in the US, Europe, the Gulf states and elsewhere, disillusioned by the collapse of the peace process and the eruption of the second intifada, or uprising aimed at ending Israels military occupation, in September 2000.

Even Padico wasnt left unscathed. Its US$60m, five-star Inter Continental Hotel in the biblical West Bank city of Bethlehem, which opened on the eve of the intifada, stands open but virtually empty after five loss-making years. The companys Gaza Industrial Estate is equally unprofitable: Half its 40 factories have shut down in the past five years.

Masri insists that patriotism not profit should lure diaspora Palestinians to the national cause. The trained geologist has invested more than US$20m of his own money in the Palestinian economy.