Embattled Sen. Bob Menendez has a go-to defense whenever he’s questioned about a federal investigation into his ties to a firm that secured a mysterious monopoly on the Egyptian meat supply—his historically hostile posture toward the regime in Cairo.
But The Daily Beast has discovered that a Menendez-backing businessman who lawyered up to deal with the probe sealed a $45 million deal with royalty from a country the New Jersey Democrat has smiled upon from his perch atop Foreign Relations Committee: Qatar.
The 30-year Capitol Hill veteran trotted out his preferred retort about the legal scrutiny on CNN earlier this month, when host Poppy Harlow pressed him about the new defense fund he set up to pay lawyers fending off the investigation.
“Number one, this inquiry will end up, I believe, in absolutely nothing,” he asserted. “If anyone looks at my history on Egypt, they would know that by both denying aid to Egypt, denying arms sales to Egypt, criticizing its human rights record, I’m not in a position to be helpful to anyone as it relates to Egypt.”
Multiple outlets have reported that the investigation centers around a mysterious company called IS EG Halal, ostensibly founded by Wael Hana, an Egyptian-American dual citizen who previously operated a gas station and a small trucking concern in Jersey City—and who in 2019 obtained exclusive rights from the Egyptian government to certify that all meat the country imports was processed in accordance with religious law. Independent Egyptian media have reported that IS EG Halal is likely tied to Egyptian state actors.
In December, The Daily Beast revealed that IS EG Halal operates out of the Edgewater, New Jersey, offices of developer Fred Daibes and his longtime partner Gazmend Lita—both confessed criminals and Menendez donors influential with the state’s notoriously powerful political machines. A lawyer for Daibes, who had also represented Hana in federal court, admitted to The Daily Beast at the time that the property mogul had retained separate counsel to deal with the federal investigation into Menendez and IS EG Halal. The Daily Beast reported that Lita, meanwhile, had done business with the Egyptian Defense Ministry and served on the board of IS EG’s affiliate in India.
But materials filed in New Jersey show that just weeks after The Daily Beast’s story was published, Daibes closed a sprawling deal with Heritage Advisors Limited, the U.K.-based investment firm of Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of the royal family of Qatar. Under the terms of the arrangement, Heritage acquired a one-quarter stake in a swath of Manhattan-facing Daibes properties in Edgewater, including IS EG’s base of operations, for $45 million.
The Al Thani organization further formed a joint entity with Daibes to operate the properties, and it also assumed part of a $25.5 million outstanding mortgage a Daibes-owned company had taken out years before.
Neither lawyer for Daibes responded to repeated calls and emails about these agreements and the sums of money involved. But the deal appears to have been in the works for months, as the Qatari-backed firm formed the purchasing entity—a limited liability company called Heritage 115 Holdings, the number an apparent reference to the address of one of the parcels involved—in Delaware in May 2022.
And beginning in January of last year Daibes, under indictment since 2018 for defrauding a bank he had founded and which had long underwritten his projects, sought and received a federal judge’s permission to travel first to London and then to Qatar to meet with unnamed investors. Daibes would eventually plead guilty to submitting false documents to the lending institution in order to receive a $1.8 million loan, but the court continued to approve his travel through December 2022.
Just days after Daibes and Heritage filed documents of the transaction with local authorities in January 2023, Hana formed two new IS EG-related holding companies at their now-jointly controlled offices. The exact assets of these entities is unclear. New Jersey Department of the Treasury records show that Hana had previously formed multiple real estate entities at the Edgewater address with names resembling those of Daibes’ developments.
Attorneys for Heritage maintained that Al Thani not only had no relationship with IS EG Halal, but also no idea that he had acquired a stake in its headquarters prior to outreach by The Daily Beast. They further asserted that he possesses “no oversight or control” of the complex whatsoever, insisting that Daibes alone was responsible for the facility.
“Our client has no knowledge of, and has had no prior or current dealings of any kind, with IS EG Halal,” the lawyers wrote in a letter to The Daily Beast. “Our client had no reason to undertake due diligence on the current or prospective tenants of the building, because it was always intended that the building would be net leased to an affiliate of Mr Daibes.”
In fact, public records show that a joint Heritage-Daibes entity called Hudson Edgewater Associates controls the location. But Heritage provided heavily redacted documents showing this dual venture had leased the site to another company, which Heritage described as an “affiliate of Mr. Daibes,” for one dollar a year.
The signatory of this document was Joseph Daibes, another Menendez donor and a project manager at the family business. Efforts to reach Joseph Daibes for comment were unsuccessful. But business records show that in August 2019, he founded a now-defunct company with Wael Hana called WHJD Consulting. It is unclear who this company consulted for, but the corporate records indicate a Daibes family employee oversaw its accounts. Public records also show that Daibes and Hana at the time resided at the same building, a Daibes development called The Alexander.
The details of the Heritage-Daibes deal stunned and puzzled observers, who wondered at the potential implications for both Menendez and geopolitics. Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, pointed to Qatar’s involvement in a wide-ranging corruption scandal in the European Union. But he expressed alarm that a Qatari royal might have gained leverage over a crucial food supplier to Egypt, given only recently thawed relations between the two countries, which long stood on opposite sides of a regional breach over Qatar’s funding of Islamist organizations.
“In addition to the appearance of impropriety, there is another important aspect of this transaction,” he told The Daily Beast. “This comes after a decade of bitter political battles over the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Qatar and Egypt may have reached a political understanding. But the [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-] Sisi regime still harbors deep resentment toward the Brotherhood and Doha is still its greatest champion.”
Schanzer noted that, during his tenure on the Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez has held firm positions not just on Egypt but on multiple other Middle Eastern regimes, even defying presidents from his own party.
Yet the senator has maintained an apparent soft spot for Qatar. Public disclosures reveal that his campaign chairman and former chief-of-staff Michael Soliman was a registered lobbyist for the country between 2015 and 2019. And filings made under the Foreign Agent Registration Act show that the firm where Soliman serves a partner, Mercury Public Affairs, will continue to represent Doha in Washington, D.C. through at least the end of 2023.
The senator’s team, including Soliman, refused to answer questions from The Daily Beast for this story.
But despite his fulminations against Doha’s Iranian allies, Menendez has repeatedly used his Senate platform to laud the small Gulf nation’s diplomacy. He has also repeatedly visited the country and met with its royalty, most recently last year amid the World Cup, during which state media quoted the lawmaker praising the host country’s notoriously brutal labor and human rights policies.
The senator’s past Qatari excursions also include an October 2021 junket in which he and several staffers met first with the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, then flew to Cairo for a sit down with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. A source familiar with the substance of the second meeting said that, to the best of their recollection, neither Qatari relations nor meat supply issues arose in the discussion between Menendez and El-Sisi. Menendez’s wife, whom the Wall Street Journal reported is also a subject of the current probe, accompanied her husband on this trip, as she had on others.
Relations between Doha and Cairo had been warming for months at the time, and days after Menendez’s 2021 visit a new Egyptian ambassador presented credentials in Qatar for the first time since the countries had severed ties in 2017. In March 2022, Qatar inked a deal to invest $5 billion into the Egyptian economy. Two months after that, Heritage 115 Holdings formed in Delaware.
Heritage’s attorney insisted that the money in the transaction “are solely our client’s and its principal’s personal funds” and not derived from Qatari sovereign wealth.
Sources on Egyptian internal affairs, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of their own positions, noted Qatari investment in the country tends to cluster around real estate and services guaranteed to bring in foreign dollars rather than local currency. Food imports do not fit this description. However, another company tied to Heritage owner Sheikh Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani has reported a controlling interest in a large halal distributor in Britain.
However, not all observers The Daily Beast consulted sensed something suspicious afoot. Dr. David Roberts, an associate professor at King’s College London and an expert on Qatari affairs, said he understood why the Daibes-Heritage deal would appear politically loaded to others. But he asserted that such arrangements, more often than not, are the result of informal business encounters and not elaborate palace intrigues.
“Most of the time, it’s just a guy who met a guy who met a guy,” he said.
