Overview

Gender

male

Tarak Ben Ammar, whose uncle Habib Bourguiba was Tunisia’s first independent President, has built a business over four decades spanning the worlds of politics, finance, film and TV.

His credits include bringing George Lucas’ Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark to Tunisia, and producing Franco Zeffirelli’s Oscar-nominated La Traviata as well as the epic Emmy Award-winning TV series The Bible amongst dozens of other feature films and TV series. He has also built the biggest film studios in both France and the Arab world.

In the business and political worlds, Ben Ammar has served as special advisor and partner to Rupert Murdoch, HRH Prince Waleed Bin Talal and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

He currently sits on the board of Italy’s largest private investment bank Mediobanca and Telecom Italia.Ben Ammar is a founding shareholder and board member of The Weinstein Company and also owns Eagle Pictures, the leading independent film distributor in Italy.

In 2009, Tarak Ben Ammar officially launched Nessma TV in Tunisia, the first privately-owned, independent satellite channel catered to audiences in North Africa. In the struggle between the values of modernity against extremism, Nessma in now a leading voice of the youth in a region where two-thirds of the population are under the age of 30.

In December 2012, Ben Ammar acquired leading Egyptian news channel ONTV, which had established itself as a truly independent voice in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution.

The new platform of Nessma and ONTV reaches a combined population of 170 million across North Africa and Egypt, accounting for more than half of the Arab world, and is dedicated to promoting the values of tolerance, transparency and plutocracy.

Recently, Ben Ammar played a crucial role bringing the two sides of the Tunisian political spectrum together to help shepherd the peaceful handover of power, culminating in the passage of the new Tunisian constitution, itself the most progressive ever democratically introduced in the Arab world, guaranteeing freedoms of women, religions and speech.

Tarak Ben Ammar will this year also launch Nessma Europe. The network will speak directly to the millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who are disenfranchised or without a voice in their adopted homes as a way to wrestle control away from the voices of extremism and fundamentalism and provide a platform for the voices of moderation, progressiveness and inclusion.