Calouste Gulbenkian

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Image:Calouste Gulbenkian.jpg Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (Scutari, 29 March 1869–Lisbon, 20 July 1955) was a Turkish-British businessman and philanthropist of Armenian ancestry.

He was born in Scutari, now Üsküdar and part of Istanbul, and educated at King's College London, where he studied petroleum engineering. Immediately on leaving, he went into the oil business, and was one of the first to open up the Middle East to the trade. He was involved in founding Royal Dutch/Shell, and his habit of retaining five per cent of the shares of the oil companies he developed earned him the nickname, "Mr. Five Per Cent". He was naturalized a British citizen in 1902.

When Iraq was taken from the Ottoman Empire after World War I, its oil was divided up among the western countries and controlled through the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Gulbenkian owned five percent of IPC.

Gulbenkian amassed a huge fortune and an art collection which he kept in a private museum at his Paris home. He fled German-occupied France in 1942 and would live until his death in a hotel room in Lisbon. Following his death in 1955, a museum (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian) and a charitable foundation were established in Lisbon. The Gulbenkian Foundation is chiefly associated with educational and artistic projects.

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