He made his first fortune in construction and real estate before branching out into buying oil refineries in Morocco and Sweden – where he was honoured with the Royal Swedish Order of the North Star by King Carl XVI – and his native Ethiopia, where he bankrolls the national soccer team.

By the end of last year, the current economic crisis had taken a toll on a number of Al Amoudi’s Swedish investments. The stock exchange lost over 30 percent of its value between August and December 2008, while the plummeting oil price hardly helped Al Amoudi’s oilfield operations.

Yet while the Nordic region’s biggest economy is still in recession as the global paralysis of credit markets undermines consumer spending and saps demand for Swedish goods, the stock exchange has bounced back to summer-2008 levels. And that’s good news for investment behemoths such as Al Amoudi, who owns a broad portfolio of businesses not only in oil but also in mining, agriculture, hotels, hospitals, finance, operations and maintenance.

His holding and operating companies, Corral Group and the Midroc Group, employ more than 40,000 people. Corral Group has an investment portfolio in Europe and the Middle East that includes Preem Petroleum, the largest integrated petroleum company in Sweden, Svenska Petroleum & Exploration, SAMIR, Naft Services Company (Saudi Arabia) and Fortuna Holdings (Lebanon).