Israeli billionaire Sammy Ofer, who was at the center of a recent scandal involving trade with Iran, died June 3 in Tel Aviv. He was 89.
The shipping magnate and philanthropist was listed last year by Forbes magazine as Israel’s richest person and No. 109 in the world.
Ofer’s family released a statement saying he died at his Tel Aviv home after a long illness. A June 5 funeral in Tel Aviv was attended by hundreds of people, including many of the leading lights of Israel’s economy, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported.
Ofer’s name had been in the news since the U.S. government sanctioned his company, Ofer Brothers Group, last month for selling an oil tanker to Iran’s national shipping company through a Singapore subsidiary. The sale violated U.S. trade restrictions on Iran.
That embarrassed the Ofer family and the Israeli government, which has long been a vocal proponent of tighter sanctions on Iran.
Ofer died as calls grew in Israel for an investigation into the affair.
Along with his brother, Yuli, he owned Zim Integrated Shipping Serv-ices, one of the world’s biggest container shipping companies. The family controls the Israel Corp., with vast assets in shipping, chemicals, energy and transportation.
The Ofer brothers did not comment publicly on the U.S. charge. A spokesman said the $8.5 million deal, small for the massive conglomerate, was conducted unwittingly with an Iranian shell company.
Media reports suggested that the Ofers’ ties with Iran might have been authorized by the government, and there were broad hints that their activities were linked in some way to Israeli intelligence operations.
Ofer, born in Romania in 1922, moved two years later to pre-state Israel. He served on a Royal Navy minesweeper in World War II and later as an officer in the Israeli navy.
He and his brother turned a small family shipping business into a huge international conglomerate, and he moved to Monaco in the late 1970s. He returned to Israel permanently only in the years before his death.
Ofer funded numerous causes in Israel, but the Ofers nonetheless remain a family many Israelis love to hate. Sammy Ofer, with his trademark goggle-like designer glasses, was widely seen as a symbol of the intersection of power and money.
Critics have long charged that the Ofers were allowed to buy up privatized government assets at below-market rates and that they wield undue influence on the media and in politics. They were also accused of allowing their chemical and energy businesses to pollute the environment and contribute to the alarming shrinking of the Dead Sea.