Tunisian tycoon Rached Horchani's conglomerate spans tuna fleets, Sahara hotels and banks

Almost every Tunisian kitchen has held a can of El Manar tuna. Very few Tunisians could name the man who makes it.

That gap between the visibility of the product and the invisibility of its owner has defined Rached Horchani's career. He started canning fish in 1983. Four decades on, the company that grew out of it owns a deep-sea tuna fleet, four date businesses, an olive oil operation, a seafood freezing plant that ships to Japan, three hotels, a set of quarries, two industrial plants, two property developers, a microfinance lender and shareholdings in most of the significant financial institutions in Tunisia.

He has given almost no interviews in the entire period.

The tin that started it

Manar Thon remains the anchor. The company cans tuna and sardines and produces fishmeal, and the group says it has led the Tunisian market since 1983. It sells under four labels rather than one: El Manar, Oscar, Raïs and Tonnara.

What makes the food business unusual is how far back down the chain it reaches. Horchani Pêche runs the group's own deep-sea fishing fleet, purpose-built for tuna. The catch that arrives at the cannery is landed by boats the family owns.

Medigel handles the other half of the marine business, packing and freezing shrimp, squid and octopus. Its customers are not domestic. The company exports to Greece, Japan, France and Spain, four of the most demanding seafood markets in the world, which requires cold chain discipline that most North African processors cannot deliver.

Dates, and the reason there are four companies

The date operation is split across Horchani Dattes, Horchani Dattes International, HDPM and Kartago Foods.

Tunisia is among the leading exporters of deglet nour, and the trade rewards operators who control everything from the palm to the container. Splitting production, domestic packing, international sales and branded food into separate entities is how a family group manages that chain while keeping export contracts, currency exposure and farm assets in different boxes.

Horchani Olive Oil sits alongside them, producing and exporting extra virgin oil with organic certification. Olive oil is Tunisia's largest agricultural export, and the certified organic segment carries the margin.

The group's own summary of the agrifood arm is that it controls the entire value chain from production to export. On the evidence of the corporate structure, that is accurate rather than promotional.

Three hotels in the desert and on the coast

The tourism division trades as Odyssée Hotels and runs three properties.

Odyssée Resort and Thalasso Zarzis is a four-star seaside hotel on the southeastern coast, positioned between the Mediterranean and the desert, built around thalassotherapy. Tamerza Palace sits in the mountains near Tozeur, in the oasis country close to the Algerian border. Tozeur Plaza is an urban hotel in the same oasis region.

The geography is deliberate. All three are in the south, away from the crowded Hammamet and Sousse corridors where Tunisian tourism has historically concentrated and where it has been hit hardest by security shocks and price competition. Saharan and thalassotherapy tourism serves a different and higher-spending customer.

An older iteration of the group's corporate literature listed a wider tourism footprint including Hôtellerie et Tourisme Saharien, Odyssée Palace, Odyssée Management as the hotel management arm, and Promocar in car rental.

Quarries, transformers and cold rooms

The industrial arm is the least visible part of the group and among the most revealing.

It comprises Best Transfo, Best Frigo, Les Carrières Horchani, Medicar and Process. The names describe the businesses: electrical transformers, industrial refrigeration, quarrying, and a metal fabrication operation that designs and builds equipment and metal structures across sectors.

Each connects back to something else the group does. Refrigeration serves the seafood and date businesses. Quarry output feeds construction. Metal structures supply the property arm. The group describes its industrial presence as covering construction materials and the electrical and mechanical industries.

Real estate runs through Immobilière Horchani and Makateb El Horchani, developing residential and commercial property, with an older entity, STUMAC, in building materials distribution.

The pivot into finance

Around 2013, Horchani started buying banks.

The vehicle was Horchani Finance, with Horchani as chairman and chief executive, and the campaign is documented in a trail of threshold declarations to the Tunisian market regulator.

The first target was Banque de l'Habitat, the state-linked housing lender now trading as BH Bank. His direct and indirect holding moved from 3.49% to 7% through block trades executed on April 15, and he announced then that he would seek a board seat. On September 9, 2014 he crossed 10%, holding 9.725% directly, a further 0.117% through Horchani Finance and Horchani Pêches, and 0.161% in concert with Fares, Yesmine and Neila Horchani. He told the regulator he intended to keep buying.

In January 2015 the family restructured. Horchani Finance, holding just 0.19% of the bank directly, crossed the 5% threshold by taking 1,750,587 shares representing 9.73% of capital from another family entity, Makateb El Horchani. The stake never left the family. It moved into the holding company.

By 2019 the group's position had reached 21%.

Six weeks at BIAT

The other significant move came at Banque Internationale Arabe de Tunisie, the country's largest bank.

On May 10, 2017, a block trade covering 6% of BIAT's capital crossed the Tunis exchange. The seller was Italy's Intesa Sanpaolo. The buyer was Horchani.

Africa Business+ reported that he and his advisers identified, negotiated and closed the transaction inside six weeks. Acquiring 6% of a systemically important bank from a departing European institution in a month and a half requires committed funding arranged in advance. The group now puts its BIAT stake at 6.67%.

The portfolio

Set out together, the financial holdings look less like an investment sideline than a second business.

The group's own disclosure lists 21% of BH Bank, 66.952% of Taysir Microfinance, 6.67% of BIAT, 5.45% of Amen Bank and 1.06% of Al Wifak, an Islamic bank. In leasing it holds 14.27% of Tunisie Leasing, one of the largest private leasing companies in the country, and 9.00% of Attijari Leasing, the fourth largest. In insurance it holds 5% of Société Tunisienne d'Assurances et de Réassurances, the STAR group, of which Groupama owns 35%.

Beyond financial institutions, the group holds 2.94% of Carthage Cement, 1.70% of One Tech Holding in cables, mechatronics and information technology, and 1.25% of the brokerage Tunisie Valeurs.

Those figures are the group's own account rather than current regulatory filings, and at least one detail on its site has gone stale. Inkyfada calculated in 2021 that the group's transferable securities on the Tunis exchange exceeded $100 million.

The resignation

The BH Bank position eventually brought Horchani into open conflict with the Tunisian state.

The bank remains state-influenced despite its private shareholders, and in late 2022 the finance ministry moved to install its own candidate as director general. At a board meeting in November, the five directors representing private shareholders voted against the nominee, joined by the two independent directors.

The ministry pressed ahead and was reported to be threatening to dissolve the board and reconstitute it on terms less favourable to the private side. Hours before a board meeting scheduled for Monday, December 26, 2022, Horchani resigned as a director. Habib Miled, holding 2.2%, went with him.

He was by then the bank's largest private shareholder at 23%. He gave up the seat and kept the shares.

BH Bank has had a rough period since. It reported net profit of 108 million dinars for 2024, but was forced in April 2025 to restate its 2024 accounts over the affair of the businessman Adel Ben Romdhane, whose exposure at the bank was put at 450 million dinars.

Carlisle Investments Inc.

In October 2021 the Tunisian investigative outlet Inkyfada, a partner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, published an investigation that placed a different frame around the fortune.

Working from Pandora Papers documents and publishing the underlying files, Inkyfada reported that Horchani owned Carlisle Investments Inc., a company incorporated in 1992 in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.

Carlisle's original directors were corporate nominees with names such as Fiduciary Services Limited and Standard Nominees Limited. In 1995 the then sole director granted full power of attorney to Marco Maximilian Elser, an Italian-born financier, authorising him to manage assets, open accounts, order transactions and trade shares indefinitely.

Horchani's name appears in a 2007 agreement between Carlisle and AdviCorp PLC, Elser's company, marked strictly private and confidential. He signed on behalf of Carlisle and described himself as its 100% shareholder owner.

A 2011 form submitted to the offshore services firm Trident Trust set out the origin of the funds. The account had started with $500,000 in 1984 and grown beyond $10 million through gains in regulated markets. A Pershing LLC statement from October that year, Pershing being a Bank of New York Mellon subsidiary, showed more than $8.5 million held across positions in dollars, euros, yen, sterling, Swiss francs, Thai baht and Hong Kong dollars. Carlisle also held accounts with Interactive Brokers and Goldman Sachs.

At the same time, Tunisie Telecom invoices were supplied to Trident Trust establishing that Horchani was resident in Tunisia.

What the money did

Some of Carlisle's activity is traceable through United States securities filings.

The company extended two loans of $500,000 each to Trans-Lux Corp, a Delaware-incorporated business, at 12% interest, maturing in 2017 and 2019. Trans-Lux missed both. Carlisle agreed to postpone. A company filing notes that Elser, a former Trans-Lux director, holds decision-making powers as a director of Carlisle.

Carlisle also bought 2,500,000 shares in Protalex Inc for $500,000. Within months Protalex told shareholders it would cease operations and Elser resigned. It was dissolved in 2021.

In 2007 Elser used his authority to buy Upgrade Srl, an Italian company, for 1.3 million euros, a price that included 1.2 million euros of debt.

Inkyfada asked both men whether Horchani knew about these transactions. Neither replied.

The residency question and the law

The arrangement grew harder to maintain as disclosure rules tightened. In October 2016 Elser and Fares Horchani, Rached Horchani's son and a United States resident, were appointed directors of Carlisle under a confidentiality clause.

When Trident Trust demanded updated documentation the following year, Elser responded that Horchani had no Tunisian tax identification number because he was resident in Malta. The employee handling the file was unconvinced, as no Maltese address was ever substantiated. Documents were eventually supplied. The paperwork that emerged listed Rached Horchani alone as sole director since 2013, at a Tunisian address.

The point matters because Tunisia's foreign exchange regime is strict. Any Tunisian habitually resident in the country must declare all foreign assets to the Central Bank of Tunisia within six months, and cannot dispose of or modify them without prior authorisation. Violations carry up to five years' imprisonment, a fine and confiscation. Income from jurisdictions classified as having a privileged tax regime has been taxed at 25% since 2019, and the British Virgin Islands are on that list.

Horchani declined to answer Inkyfada's questions and has not commented publicly in the five years since. No proceedings, findings or regulatory action arising from the investigation have been reported. The group's website went offline after the interview requests were sent and has since returned.

The next generation

The regulatory filings name the children. Fares, Yesmine and Neila Horchani appeared in the 2014 BH Bank declaration as parties acting in concert with their father. Fares later surfaced in the Carlisle documents as a director, resident in the United States.

The structure is conventional for a North African family group. Horchani Finance sits at the top, the operating companies and financial stakes sit beneath it, and family members hold small direct positions alongside.

What it adds up to

The group describes itself as founded in 1983 and now operating across agrifood, finance, tourism, industry and real estate, one of the largest private companies in Tunisia.

Stripped of the corporate language, the shape is clear enough. A man who started canning fish built boats to catch it, freezing plants to store it, and quarries and metal shops to build the facilities. He planted dates and pressed olives for export, put hotels in the desert where the tourists were not, and then spent a decade converting the cash from all of it into ownership of the banks, insurers and leasing companies that finance everyone else.

The offshore chapter runs through the same years, involves a company he signed for as sole owner, and concerns a jurisdiction Tunisian law treats with particular severity. Horchani has never addressed it.

He gave up his seat at BH Bank rather than accept a minister's appointee, kept the 23%, and went back to where he has been since 1983, which is behind the label rather than on it.