Meet the one man in the Middle East to make it as a Goldman Sachs managing director this year

Goldman Sachs has unveiled the 266 people it has promoted to managing director this year. While there’s an obvious bias towards London and New York, there’s still a fair geographical spread in the names. Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan all feature highly, 16 people in India are now MDs and at least five in Korea. How many in the Middle East? Just one.

That person is Chukri Moubarak, who works for Goldman Sachs Asset Management in the UAE, focused on institutional sales.

Many will view the low proportion of Middle East based financial professionals on Goldman’s MD list as something of a slight to the region, but let’s not forget that investment banking teams based in the Gulf are generally small. In the DIFC, for instance, just seven directors are listed at Goldman and it recently lost its key man in Qatar, Tamim al-Kawari.

Moubarak’s career trajectory shows that loyalty is rewarded at Goldman Sachs. He’s been with the firm since 1999, originally as an institutional salesman focused on hedge funds. It also pays to have worked in developed markets – Moubarak was in New York until 2007, then moved to London to focus on MENA family office coverage for the bank’s wealth management division before finally switching to the Middle East in 2009.

Around 58% of those promoted at Goldman Sachs are in the Americas, 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and 17% in Asia.