Hamid Jafar

Hamid Dhia Jafar is the Founder and Chairman of the Crescent Group of companies, headquartered in Sharjah, UAE, with regional offices across the Middle East and the UK. The group is engaged in a variety of commercial ventures including container port operations, logistics, real estate, power generation and private equity. Mr Jafar is also Chairman of the Board of Dana Gas (PJSC), the leading publicly listed Middle East natural gas company, in which Crescent Petroleum is the largest shareholder.

Mr. Jafar was educated at St. Paul's School in London and Churchill College, Cambridge University, where he obtained his Bachelor's Engineering degree in 1967 before going on to post-graduate studies, achieving a Master's in Engineering (Thermodynamics and Fluid Flow). Hamid Jafar was born in 1947 in Baghdad, Iraq, to a well-known family, with his father, Dhia Jafar, serving as minister of transport, economy, development, and finance between 1947 and 1958 toward the end of Iraq's monarchy. Crescent Petroleum is the region's oldest private sector upstream oil and gas company, while Dana Gas was the Middle East's first private sector integrated natural gas company.

He also promoted a culture of transparency and accountability in the Gulf Region through the "Pearl Initiative" (whose Board of Governors he chairs), founded in cooperation with the United Nations Office of Partnerships. In 2011, the AUS renamed its Center for Executive Education as the Jafar Center for Executive Education in recognition of Mr Jafar's 'active and outstanding support to AUS and its academic activities'. In a personal capacity, Mr Jafar funded the first Professorship in Petroleum Engineering at Cambridge University.

Career History

• Founder and Chairman, Crescent Group of companies (since 1971)
• Chairman of the Board of Dana Gas (PJSC)
• Chairman, Gulftainer Ltd, a specialist in container terminal operations which manages Sharjah, Jubail and Umm Qasr Ports
• Founder of the UAE Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization and the World Presidents Organization

What Hamid Jafar could bring to Chairman at Dana Gas: With over five decades of founding and leading the Crescent Group across diversified sectors—energy, logistics, real estate, and private equity—Hamid Jafar brings deep expertise in large-scale enterprise building and portfolio management. His founding role in Crescent Petroleum, the region's oldest private oil and gas company, combined with his governance leadership through the Pearl Initiative, positions him to provide strategic oversight and integrity-focused governance to Dana Gas as it navigates regional energy market dynamics and expansion opportunities in the Middle East and Africa.