KARACHI   -   The father and son aboard the missing Ti­tanic tourist submers­ible hail from one of Pa­kistan’s most prominent and wealthiest families, who are known for their philanthropic contribu­tions to the country.

Dual British-Paki­stani nationals Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19 -- who to­gether spent half a mil­lion dollars on an exclu­sive excursion -- are part of the Dawood empire, which has become one of the most profitable in Pakistan. The patriarch at the top of the chain, Shahzada’s father Hus­sain Dawood, is one of Pa­kistan’s richest men, ac­cording to local media. 

After Pakistan was founded in 1947, the Dawoods provided fund­ing to the government and were behind the first wave of industriali­sation, said Aqeel Karim Dhedhi, a business ty­coon and stock trad­er in Karachi. “They set up major industrial proj­ects and thus provid­ed employment to thou­sands of people in the newborn country,” Dhed­hi told AFP.He described the family as being “one of the top philanthropic groups in Pakistan”, add­ing: “They don’t boast about any of it.”

The Dawood conglom­erate includes Engro, of which Shahzada is the vice chairman. It boasts investments in energy, ag­riculture, petrochemical and telecommunications ventures and clocked a revenue of 350 billion rupees ($1.2 billion) in 2022. Educated in the UK and the United States, Shahzada lives in Britain with his wife Christine, his son Suleman and his daughter Alina.

A family statement de­scribed Shahzada as a “loving father” with a keen interest in “photog­raphy, especially wild­life photography, and ex­ploring different natural habitats”.

Suleman enjoys Rubik’s Cube puzzles, volleyball and “is a big fan of sci­ence fiction literature and learning new things,” it added. Shahzada’s inter­est in exploration extends to space and he is a trust­ee of the California-based Search for Extraterrestri­al Intelligence Institute (SETI), which looks for evidence of alien life, ac­cording to its website.

Shahzada and his family are perhaps most revered for their philanthropic work -- particularly pro­viding business and ed­ucation opportunities for young people from low-income backgrounds. 

Since the 1960s, the Dawood Foundation has focused on establishing education institutions across Pakistan -- partic­ularly catering to the de­mand for engineers and technology experts. 

Shahzada is also on the board of the Prince’s Trust in Britain -- a char­ity that helps young peo­ple get jobs, education and training. 

In February 2020, he was a keynote speaker on a panel at the Unit­ed Nations on equality in agriculture. “Women are under-represented in such an important fact, which is our food and our livelihood. We need to look at the perspec­tive of women first,” he said. Both Shahzada and his father Hussain were named in the 2016 pub­lication of the so-called Panama Papers -- a leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal re­cords exposing secretive offshore accounts of the world’s rich and power­ful. Both were listed as having accounts in the British Virgin Islands be­tween 2005 and 2009.