A self-made man, Issad Rebrab started his professional life teaching accounting and commercial law, before kickstarting his industrial career in the 1970s. After stints in construction and steel sector, he went on to run Cevital, Algeria’s biggest conglomerate. The conglomerate manages not only one of the world’s largest sugar refineries, but also has interest in steel, cars, agriculture and refining. In 1998, Rebrab launched the project to create an industrial/ energy complex, Cap 2015, about 60km east of Algiers, together with a small town of 250,000 inhabitants with the ambition of generating 100,000 direct jobs and a further million indirect jobs.
His involvement in Cevital comes after a challenging professional period when his operations in Algeria were attacked by terrorists in 1995. In recent years, Rebrab has begun looking outside Algeria and has been targeting distressed assets in Europe. He acquired French appliance manufacturer Groupe Brandt in 2014 and saved it from bankruptcy. Cevital has invested $200m building a Brandt plant in Algeria and Rebrab believes the country can compete on a global scale by targeting low-cost labour. “We have huge potential; we can make up for lost time very quickly,” he was quoted as saying by Forbes in early 2015.
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