Ragheed Shanti, Fellow of GCC BDI and Chartered Director of UK IoD, had acted as Senior Advisor to the Board of National Holding from 2009 till 2020. He advised the Group on corporate governance and represented it on the boards of its strategic subsidiaries and affiliates. Earlier, Ragheed acted as Chief Executive Officer of Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank in 2007 where he put in place the transformational strategy for the bank before he founded Paradigm, an investment banking boutique at the DIFC in 2008. Ragheed had earlier established and oversaw ABN Amro’s investment banking operations in the Middle East & Africa, out of the DIFC, from 2004 to 2006.

Ragheed joined ABN Amro in 1998 and worked at its offices in London and New York overseeing the bank’s credit capital markets operations in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Middle East and Africa. Previously, he headed Merrill Lynch’s institutional sales in the Middle East, out of London, for five years. Ragheed began his career in corporate finance in 1987 with Citicorp Investment Bank in New York before he moved to Sumitomo Trust, New York, to head its North American structured finance for five years.

Ragheed holds an MBA in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Sord scholar, in 1987. He also completed his MS in Construction Management there in 1985. Ragheed finished his Civil Engineering with honors from Leeds University in 1980.