The Middle East: Cool CAT

Though better known for its shrewd bankers and sharp traders, tiny Lebanon has the nearest thing to a major industrialist in the Arab world. He is Emile Bustani, 54, who, as chairman of Beirut's Contracting & Trading Co. (CAT), bosses the biggest of all Arab-owned industrial enterprises.

CAT is primarily a construction company. Much of the Mideast's oil flows through CAT-laid pipelines. From Kuwait to Algeria, CAT crews today are literally rebuilding the Arab world, dotting it with new schools and hotels, airfields and roads.

CAT also has a paw in Mideast Airlines, in Beirut's St. Georges and Phoenicia hotels, and in a dozen trading companies that sell everything from Land Rovers to soft drinks. In just a decade, CAT's yearly gross has soared from $5 million to $60 million and its profits from almost nothing to $1.5 million a year.

Renaissance Man. Beefy, ebullient Emile Bustani, who runs all this from a Beirut office littered with statues and drawings of bushy-tailed cats, is a kind of one-man Arab renaissance. Born in a primitive mountain village and raised in an American mission orphanage, he worked his way through the American University in Beirut by waiting on tables, then sailed steerage to the U.S., where he earned an engineering degree at M.I.T.

After M.I.T., Bustani settled in Palestine, where he set up a contracting firm that specialized in installing bathrooms. His first big expansion came during World War II, when CAT became a major builder of British military installations in the Middle East. Even its exodus from Palestine after the establishment of Israel did not slow CAT down. By insisting on high standards and by patiently training local labor, Bustani proved that Arabs could do as good a construction job as anyone else. During the great postwar rush to expand Mideastern oil output, CAT began taking contracts away from Western companies, eventually became the largest pipeline layer outside the U.S.

Today, CAT's 17,000 employees operate in 19 Arab, African and Asian countries. Apart from its reputation as a topflight builder, CAT's chief asset is Bustani's keen awareness of the touchy sensitivities of underdeveloped nations. Whenever he enters a new country, he insists on setting up a local subsidiary, encourages local investors to buy stock, and makes it clear that he intends the company to be locally run. Says he: "When we went into Pakistan seven years ago, we sent more than 100 people there from Beirut. Now we have only three Beirut staffers in Pakistan, and we are doing more business there than ever."

Life Sentence. Unwilling to be "just a businessman," Bustani is the confidant of most of the Mideast's rulers, and the author of two provocative books on "the Arab problem." A Maronite Christian and Western in his ways, he is both an intense Arab nationalist and an intense advocate of Arab partnership with the West. His formula for establishing such a partnership: both sides must forget the past, start over with mutual respect.