For nearly three decades, Refaël Bigio has struggled to recover assets taken from his family by the Egyptian government as part of the country’s broad seizure of Jewish-owned property.
Bigio’s grandfather owned a factory outside Cairo in an area he describes as “prime real estate.” In the 1930s, the Coca-Cola Company rented space from the Bigios for its first bottling operations in Egypt. Later the Bigios opened a factory that produced bottle caps for the company. In 1962, Egypt seized the property and formed a new company, the El Nasr Bottling Company, from the merger of Bigio’s company and Coca-Cola’s Egyptian subsidiary.
Three years later, the Bigios were driven from Egypt. Since the 1970s, they have been trying to recover the property. A lawsuit in Egyptian courts went nowhere.
In 1993, Bigio learned that Coca-Cola was about to purchase a significant stake in El Nasr. Bigio said he approached Coca-Cola with several proposed settlements. When that effort failed, he filed a lawsuit against the company in the United States.
This month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether an Egyptian court is the appropriate place for the lawsuit against Coca-Cola, which has moved repeatedly to have the case dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.
The Bigio case has come to the attention of the Zionist Organization of America, which is calling for a boycott of the company.
Leonard Getz, a Coca-Cola shareholder and a Philadelphia-based national vice president of the ZOA, was rebuffed when he moved to allow company shareholders to consider a proposal on the matter at their upcoming meeting.
Getz’s proposal condemned the company for violating its code of conduct by deriving benefit from an anti-Semitic campaign against the Bigios. The proposal also called for Coca-Cola to compensate the Bigios but did not specify an amount.
In denying Getz’s request that the proposal be heard at the shareholders meeting, Coca-Cola argued that it referred to ongoing litigation that as a matter of company operations should be left to the management.
“Until the Bigios’ case is justly and fairly resolved, we urge all Americans and all others of good will to refrain from purchasing any of Coca-Cola’s products,” ZOA President Morton Klein said.
Bigio’s lawyer, Nathan Lewin of Washington, said Coca-Cola has labored intensively to have the case dismissed and avoid having the facts discussed in court.
“Coca-Cola has not once in all these years come up and said, ‘The reason we don’t owe the Bigios is X,'” Lewin said “They don’t have a defense. Instead they’ve been saying dismiss the case, try it in Egypt — but for God’s sake, don’t get to the merits of this case.”
A judgment against the company could be worth $100 million to $200 million, Lewin said.
When Coca-Cola sought to have the case moved to Egypt, ZOA filed an amicus brief attesting to the unlikelihood that the Bigios could receive a fair hearing in an Egyptian court.
“Egypt took the property from these people in the first place,” said ZOA lawyer Susan Tuchman. “Anti-Semitism has been a longstanding problem in Egypt. It’s still rampant today. The notion they would get a fair hearing in an Egyptian court is ridiculous.”
A spokeswoman for Coca-Cola said that Egyptian courts have ruled in favor of Jewish families who lost property. Moreover, she said, there are outstanding questions regarding Bigio’s claims that cannot be adequately considered in an American court.
“The company doesn’t know what exactly transpired,” she said. “There are a ton of questions that have been brought to bear, and we believe that if the case is addressed in Egypt, the questions can be answered.”
But Bigio, now 63, says his claims are well documented and that if they are given a hearing in an American court, he will prevail. “I have no doubt,” he said. “Because we are the owner of these assets, and these assets were stolen from us — and you can’t go and buy stolen assets. All the profits that Coca-Cola generating out of Egypt, my family, and my mother, have a share.”