Megalli, Murad M(ichael) (b. December 6, 1957, Egypt – d. February 4, 2011, Kurdistan Region of Iraq), engineer, banker and collector.
Megalli emigrated to the United States as a teenager and studied civil engineering at George Washington University. After graduating in 1980, he worked as an engineer in the United States and Sudan for five years. In 1986, he received a master’s degree from Yale University and began working at Citibank in New York. From 1987 to 1990, he worked in Citibank’s Istanbul branch as an investment banker. Following this, he co-founded the consulting firm, Pangaea Partners Ltd. In 1997, he took over the Istanbul branch of Chase Manhattan Bank’s investment banking operations for Central Asia, the Balkans and Turkey. In 1998, he was appointed as director of Chase’s Russia and CIS operations. When Chase Manhattan merged with JP Morgan in 2001, becoming JP Morgan Chase, Poland was added to his area of operations. In the same year that Megalli moved to Turkey, he also took responsibility for operations in Turkey, Israel and Central Asia. In 2009, he became the CEO of operations in the Middle East, Northern Africa, Turkey and Central Asia. Megalli died in a plane crash while returning from a business meeting in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in 2011.
In addition to his work in the financial industry, Megalli amassed a collection of ikat textiles, unique to Central Asia, which were donated to the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, after his death. His collection of kilims was donated to the Sadberk Hanım Museum in Istanbul.