Yassin Abdullah Kadi (also transliterated from Arabic as Yasin Abdullah Ezzedine al-Qadi or Yasin A. Kahdi) (born 23 February 1955) is a Saudi Arabian businessman. A multi-millionaire from Jeddah, Kadi trained as an architect in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son-in-law of Sheikh Ahmed Salah Jamjoom, a former Saudi Arabian government minister with close ties to the Saudi royal family.
The UN placed sanctions against Kadi in 1999 and 2000, when he was named by United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1333 as a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden's terror network, al-Qaeda. On 12 October 2001, the U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ordered his assets in the United States to be frozen. The European Union also applied sanctions to Kadi. In response, Kadi's lawyers brought two lawsuits now considered landmarks in EU law and public international law, known as Kadi I (2008) and Kadi II (2013). The case for which he is best known, a 2008 decision by the European Court of Justice, Kadi I, is thought to have challenged "the core framework of UN terrorist sanctions and forces UN member states to tackle difficult legal questions or else face possible collapse of the UN’s terrorist sanctions regime."
Kadi's listing as a terrorist was overturned by several European courts, and his name was removed from blacklists by Switzerland (2007), the European Union (2008 and 2010), and the United Kingdom (2008 and 2010). In September 2010, Kadi "succeeded in having dismissed in their entirety the civil claims brought against him in the United States on behalf of the families of the 9/11 victims", when a U.S. District Judge ruled that the District Court for the Southern District of New York had no jurisdiction over Kadi, a Saudi Arabian citizen. In October 2012, the UN Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaeda granted Kadi's petition to be removed from its blacklist. The Kadi II decision by the European Court of Justice in July 2013 declined appeals by the European Commission and the UK against the earlier annulment of European sanctions against Kadi, saying that there was no evidence to substantiate the allegations of his being linked to terrorism. On 26 November 2014, the United States Department of the Treasury removed Kadi's name from its Specially Designated Nationals list.
Early life
Kadi was born 23 February 1955 in Cairo, Egypt. His father became a successful businessman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has six sisters and no brothers.
Around 1977, Kadi earned a bachelor's degree in architectural engineering from Alexandria University in Cairo, Egypt, and subsequently became an intern at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago from July 1979 to February 1981. He helped the firm develop a master plan and contract documentation for the Mecca Campus of the King Abdulaziz University.
Yassin Kadi married a daughter of Sheikh Ahmed Salah Jamjoom sometime before 1981. He and his wife have seven children, One of his sons is a U.S. citizen.
Business and nonprofit ventures
In the 1980s, Kadi became a vice president of the Jamjoom Group, a multi-national conglomerate headquartered in Jeddah. Around 1986, Yassin Kadi became one of the principal investors in BMI Inc., a Shariah-compliant investment bank based in New Jersey.
Kadi inherited "several million dollars" in 1988. In 1990, he began to establish close business associations with Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, whose family owned a majority interest in Saudi Arabia's largest bank, the National Commercial Bank. Kadi said that he was brought in to maintain good financial relations with pious Muslims throughout the Islamic world, by building a more shariah-compliant banking network for the bank. "We devised systems of leasing and ways to borrow money" that could be used by pious Muslims, who are not allowed to charge interest, Kadi told the Chicago Tribune.