Walid Harfouch Dismisses Bio Questions as ‘Racist’

According to Wikipedia, Walid and his brother, Omar, were born in Tripoli, Lebanon (not to be confused with Tripoli, Libya).

A successful, well-connected and controversial entrepreneur, Walid became a citizen of Ukraine in 2005. He speaks fluent Russian but not Ukrainian.

In late 2004, he led Robert Ménard of Reporters Without Borders on a Ukrainian tour meant to legitimize freedom of the press à la Yanukovych. (A few months earlier, an article in Libration had linked Ménard to Omar Harfouch and Muammar al-Gaddafi.)

After the Orange Revolution, Walid chased Yushchenko’s son-about-town in his Paparazzi magazine and suffered a burned Bentley. In the last presidential campaign, he coached Hanna Herman, Yanukovych’s right-hand woman.

For this longstanding service, they appointed him vice chairman of the National Television Company of Ukraine (NTCU). Just imagine a vice president of France Télévisions or RFI who doesn't speak French.



Asked about his vision for the company considering his “непроста біографія” (“tricky/checkered biography”), he dismissed the whole question as “racist.”

Attempts to reason with Walid failed. He called host Roman Skrypin “racist” and refused to answer the question. Roman called it a day.

Why overreact to a legitimate question aimed at filling in the gaps?

Should a public employee use his membership in an anti-racist organization as a defense against bona fide inquiries into his qualifications?

Speaking of qualifications, NTCU (read: taxpayer) has already been fined for missing the deadline on submitting Ukraine’s Eurovision entry, marred by a plagiarism scandal.

Video embedded from: http://zaua.org/pg/video/editorial_1/read/19766/