A.A.H.D.Writing

Projects · العربية

Building arabian.ceo: a sourced record of Arab business leaders

Ali Adnan Haider Darwish · · 3 min

arabian.ceo is an executive and corporate intelligence platform for the Arab world. It publishes profiles of business leaders, company pages, leadership appointments and curated lists, in Arabic and English. It is part of BHD Group, which I lead as founder and CEO.

The problem it answers

Who runs a company in the Gulf? The question sounds simple. The answer is often hard to find.

A bank names a new chief executive, or a minister moves to a new post. The news appears once, in one place, and then it is gone. Profiles on other sites are often old, or they carry no source at all.

My own work is with boards and investors. I need to know who leads which organisation. So does every person who prepares a board paper. We built arabian.ceo to keep that record in one place, and to keep it checkable.

What the platform does

People. Each leader has a profile with their role, company and country. Every fact on a profile points to a source you can open. Each profile lists the pages it came from and the date the editors read each one.

Companies. Each company has a page with its industry, country and the leaders on record. Readers can browse by industry, from banking and logistics to energy and government.

Moves. The platform tracks appointments, resignations and departures, with the date each one takes effect. Upcoming moves show before they start.

Lists. The editors publish curated lists, such as the 2026 cabinets of Arab governments. Every list carries its method, its publication date and its editor.

Countries. The site covers the Arab world. It has country pages today for the six Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. In October 2026 it holds more than 4,700 leaders and more than 1,000 companies.

A weekly update. One email goes out every Thursday. It carries the week's leadership changes, the most read profiles and what the editors added.

The rules we publish by

The rules matter more than the features. We wrote them on the site so readers can hold us to them.

First, a profile carries only what a public source supports. If we cannot open a source, we do not publish the fact.

Second, every record has an Arabic page and an English page. Some biographies exist only in English. In that case the Arabic page says so. It does not use a machine translation.

Third, nobody can pay to be selected for a list. Lists and features are editorial decisions. A company can pay for a verified profile, an interview or a sponsored placement. That content always carries a sponsored label. A partner list says so at the top of the list.

Fourth, we do not publish claims we cannot check. That covers customer counts, delivery averages and ratings.

Leaders and companies can also take part. A person can nominate a leader, verify their own profile or ask for a correction. The editors check each change against a public source before it goes live.

A second part of the same site

arabian.ceo also carries a separate services catalogue. It lists social engagement packages for public profiles on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Telegram and LinkedIn. It never asks for a social media password. It works only from a public link. The catalogue sits apart from the editorial record and does not affect any profile or list.

What I learned

A directory of names is easy to build. A directory that people trust is hard. Trust comes from the source link beside each fact.

Arabic also had to stand equal to English. A record of Arab business leaders must read well in Arabic. So every record has both pages from the start.

The last lesson is about money and editorial work. They must stay apart, and the reader must see where the line is. That is why we label every sponsored item on the page where it appears.

arabian.ceo sits in BHD Group next to our printing, software and AI companies. I built it the same way as the others. I saw a need in my own work. Then we built the tool for it.

Related: BHD Group ventures and Board KPIs a board can use.