30-years-old Omar Harfouch is a cross between a fashion icon and an oil tycoon. This new bred of a polyglot - he is master of six languages and several Arabic dialects - has just acquired the rights to the finals of the Elite Model Look contest, the way you'd buy a racing stable.
The model agency is well known for its famous stars (Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell) and lately for the alleged misconduct of one of its top managers, reportedly caught by the prying camera eye of a British journalist. Omar Harfoush who since 1985 had been supervising all Elite models contests in Ukraine, Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Albania, Tunisia and the Dominican Republic, took a full advantage of this crisis and offered to buy back for a period of five (renewable) years the rights to its international finals.
Despite his youth Omar Harfouch has taken many extraordinary roads. A piano prodigy, he wins in 1988 the first price of a music contest sponsored by Moscow which lands him a scholarship in Russia. Soon after he befriends the mayor of Dnipropetrovsk and future prime minister of the presidential campaign. Owing to this all - music, art, courses in diplomacy, friends in the highest spheres - he becomes the spokesman for Ukrainian media at the Parliament of Strasbourg. Unstoppable, he creates the first FM radio ever broadcast by RFI: "Supernova".
Nowadays as political adviser of Ukrainian Foreign Affairs owner of both a radio and television stations and majority shareholder of his Geneva-based company, Omar Harfouch has not need to polish his well-established fame. But every intention to create a few stars top-models with a simple shove in his limelight.
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