Missed connections

Their approaches have been as different as fresh fallen snow is from the salty splash of the sea. Abdel Moneim Youssef, former head of the Lebanese state-owned telecom provider Ogero, was cold. Elusive, even. He avoided questions by dissecting them and firing queries back at his interviewer. Imad Kreidieh—who replaced Youssef after the latter was removed from office amid corruption allegations he was later cleared of—has taken to Twitter to tout accomplishments more often than Donald Trump. Blame for abhorrently slow internet download speeds in Lebanon often fell at Youssef’s feet. Ogero controls the country’s fixed-line telephone network, which includes a fiber-optic backbone—now fully operational—and connections between individual users and the internet, which happen at Ogero centrale around the country. Ogero is also a key decision-maker for telecom policy along with the Ministry of Telecommunications (MoT), which owns all of the country’s mobile-phone network infrastructure. (The country’s two networks, branded