switzerland Putting on the Glitz

Sometime this month, one of the world's wealthiest people expects to start transforming a sleepy Swiss village into the next great ski destination in the Alps.

Samih Sawiris is an Egyptian hotel developer who’s said to be worth $1.5 billion –- enough to rank him as number 655 on Forbes' list of the world’s richest people. He made his money running the fast-growing resort division of Orascom Group, a conglomerate founded by his father, Onsi Sawiris. Under Samih's direction, Orascom built the famed El Gouna golf resort on Egypt’s Red Sea coast.

For the past couple of years, Sawiris has trained his attention on Andermatt, a village in central Switzerland. Andermatt has lots of snow, challenging terrain, and plenty of Old World charm, but it lacks pizzazz. For the last 50 years or so, it’s served as a training center for the Swiss army, and its tourist business has consisted mostly of hard-core skiers.

Sawiris believes Andermatt can attract people who want to do more than ski -– people who currently vacation in glitzier places like Gstaad and St. Moritz, which have both a day and a night life. So he’s purchased 247 acres from the army and leased more land from local residents.

By 2014, he hopes to build a "carbon-neutral" resort with more than 500 villas and apartments, a half-dozen hotels (844 total rooms), a shopping area, a spa, a sports center, an indoor pool with a “beach,” and an 18-hole golf course with a six-hole practice course.

Of course, Sawiris isn’t completely focused on Andermatt. His company, publicly traded Orascom Development Holding AG, is currently working on two resort projects in Oman (Jebel Sifah and Salalah Beach, each of which will have golf courses), and it plans to build a pair of golf courses at the Chbika Sahara Atlantique resort in Oued Chbika, Morocco. It also plans to build a waterfront resort with a golf course on the Lustica peninsula in Montenegro.

The golf course in Switzerland is scheduled to open in 2013.

Andermatt-SwissAlps.com, OrascomDH.com