Nicholas Sehnaoui was born in Beirut, to parents Maurice Sehnaoui and Mouna Bustros, on 23 April 1967 and grew in the Achrafieh a Beirut neighborhood.
He attended Grand Lycee Franco-Libanais following which he earned a BA in Economics from Panthéon-Assas University and an MBA from ESA Beirut.
In 2000, Sehnaoui became chairman of the board of Sogecap, a leading life insurance company and in 2004, chairman of the board of Sogelease Liban a financial leasing firm. He held both positions until early 2008. Since 1996, he has been a board member of Sehnaoui Plant a regional construction equipment distribution company.
Sehnaoui served as the Minister of Telecommunications of the Republic of Lebanon between June 2011 and February 2014. Under his leadership, the Ministry of Telecommunications upgraded antiquated copper backbone to fiber optics and DWDM latest technologies with plans ready for FTTC and FTTB, replaced ancient EDGE cellular networks with 3G across the country and 50 Mbit/s 4G LTE in greater Beirut, and increased Lebanon’s international bandwidth tenfold via IMEWE whilst securing redundancy through participation in the Alexandros submarine cable; all while reducing internet & mobile costs by over 80%. By June 2013, with the infrastructure well on its way to recovery, Sehnaoui turned his attention to Lebanon’s knowledge economy, more specifically its digital economy: he created Beirut Angels – Lebanon’s 1st tech startup angel network – and actively supported the creation of Banque Du Liban Circular 331 – a groundbreaking 400 million USD equity investment guarantee initiative that transformed Lebanon’s banks into VC-oriented institutions. Sehnaoui is now leading Lebanon’s Digital Roadmap Steering Committee to ensure the successful implementation of BDL C331. All these efforts where measured & confirmed by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union that ranked Lebanon 1st in progress out of 157 countries in the 2012 ICT Development Index (IDI).
One of the notable achievements of the Ministry under Sehnaoui’s management In 2011, Lebanon was included among 10 countries that witnessed the greatest rank improvement according to the IDI moving up three spots globally and ranking sixth regionally.
As Minister, Nicolas Sehnaoui took many initiatives to involve Lebanese youth in deciding the future of technology in the country. Worth mentioning are the bloggers competition in which the winner got to accompany the minister free of charge on his visit to Silicon Valley and the Be The Minister competition in which the winner got to sit in the minister’s seat at the ministry for 24 hours.
Politics:
In 1991, and alongside Georges Corm, Borhane Alaouie, Karim Kobeissi and Abdel Rahman Ghandour, Sehnaoui co-founded the Lebanese Citizen’s Movement that militates for a secular Lebanon. Between 91 and 95 the movement published a monthly magazine, ‘Al Mouaten’ (directly translated as ‘the citizen’), in both Arabic and French and produced a short movie titled ‘If the People One Day’ which calls for the organization of a war tribunal to judge war crimes committed during the Lebanese Civil War. The Minister has also founded the Free Patriotic Economic Committee which he headed between 2005 and 2011. In 2018 he was elected as deputy in the Lebanese parliament.
Humanitarian Initiatives:
The Mouna Bustros Foundation, an NGO named after Sehnaoui’s late mother and founded in 2009, aims at assisting Lebanese citizens in need in various areas of Lebanon.