Yasser Arafat, Inc.

Say what you will about Yasser Arafat's skills as a peacemaker — he's one heck of a businessman. That's the upshot of a report and press briefing issued Saturday by the International Monetary Fund. The Palestinian strongman had diverted a net $591 million in tax revenue that had been owed to the Palestinian Authority into bank accounts that he personally controlled, the IMF said. The diversions took place between 1995 and 2000; the money came from taxes on alcohol, petroleum, and tobacco.

Rather than squandering the money on palaces like Saddam Hussein did, Mr. Arafat used it to fund scores of profitable businesses. The IMF report, citing an audit by a subsidiary of Deloitte and Touche, estimates that Mr. Arafat achieved "a hefty return on equity of 22.4%." The enterprises funded by the tax revenue diversion threw off a total of $300 million in operating profits over the five-year period, the report reckons. And that's a conservative estimate.

The IMF's resident representative in the West Bank and Gaza, Karim Nashashibi, said Saturday in Dubai that the diverted tax revenues were used for "69 commercial activities, both at home and abroad." The IMF report says that just one of those activities — the sale of cement — yielded net profits of $18 million in one year, 1999."All in all, excise tax revenue and profits from commercial activities diverted away from the budget may have exceeded $898 mil lion," the IMF report says.

Mr. Nashashibi said there is now an attempt under way to privatize the businesses developed by Mr. Arafat."I think the objective of the PA is to get out of all these commercial activities," he said.

But there's a lot more of this story still to be told. Who, besides Mr. Arafat, were the partners and owners involved in these 69 commercial activities? Were any of those involved the same crew now posing as "reformers"? What happened to potential competitors — say, an ordinary Palestinian Arab who wanted to be in the cement business and suddenly found himself competing against a company controlled by the dictator-terrorist-nationalist-leader himself? In the long run, state-run monopoly enterprises tend to underperform, in part because they have no incentive to innovate the way that private, competing firms do. But to the extent that Arafat, Inc., was using its state power to charge the prices to Palestinians that allowed it to deliver those "hefty" returns, it means that ordinary Palestinians were paying what amounted to an extra tax.

There's a lot of talk lately about exiling Mr. Arafat. That would only be a good thing for Israel's security. Maybe some private equity firm can help ease the way by making Mr. Arafat an offer and challenging him to see if he can earn a 22.4% annual return without having the resources of a quasigovernmental Palestinian Authority and its security forces at his disposal.