Ronaldo Mouchawar

Chances are you have Ronaldo Mouchawar to thank for your wife’s ever-increasing credit card bill.

The man who founded the online retailer Souq.com hails from Aleppo in Syria, where his first claim to fame was as a basketball player for Jalaa SC Aleppo.

Although the company was launched in 2005, it was a decade later when he launched its “White Friday” sales that people really took notice: 600,000 items were sold across the region over just three days, with 13 million visitors to the site.

One of those visitors was the world’s richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He liked was he saw so much, he took over Souq.com for just under US$600m a couple of years ago, keeping Mouchawar at the helm.

The Syrian entrepreneur is widely credited for almost single headedly developing the online sales market in the Arab world.