Seventy years after his grandparents were forced out of their home in Baghdad, Philip Khazzam is suing the French government for over $17-million in unpaid rent relating to the property, which has served as the French embassy in Iraq since the 1960s. Khazzam spoke to The Jerusalem Post on Monday from Montreal, where he lives.
Khazzam's grandfather, Ezra Lawee, and Ezra's brother Khedouri, built the house and lived there with their children.
"My grandfather and brother did everything together, they lived in the same house," Khazzam told the Post.
Until things started "to get very difficult for the Jews," in the late 1940s, Khazzam's family had a good life in Baghdad alongside the other 150,000 Jews in the country.
However, in 1951, over 100,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq. Most headed to Israel, but the Lawees left for Canada.
"They had someone take care of the house after they left, and then in 1964 they rented it to the French government to use as their embassy."
A few years later, Saddam Hussein told the French government to stop paying the Lawees and pay his regime instead. "For another year or two, we continued to get paid, and then it stopped," said Khazzam.
A while later, one of Khazzam's cousins made an attempt to contact the French government and wrote a letter. He never received a reply.
"For the following 30 or so years, nothing was done; my family considered it lost. Then in 2003, Quebec lawyer Lucien Bouchard wrote a letter to the French ministry which was also ignored."
Khazzam told the Post that he became interested in the property in around 2009 or 2010 "more from a financial standpoint," and started making some calls to Baghdad, and "looking up real estate to get an idea of what the value [of the property] was."
He asked to speak to the owner of a Baghdadi real estate company, but was told they were unavailable, so he contacted the Amman branch of the same company. Somehow, the man he spoke to ended up being the person who did the renovation on the Lawee property about 6 years prior.
However, the search again stalled.
'Not just about the property, it's about human rights'
"Then another ten years went by, and one day it hit me - it's not just about the property, it's about human rights," Khazzam told the Post. "It became less about property and more about what's right and wrong."
The family's lawyer, Jean-Pierre Mignard, contacted the then-French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who didn't know anything about the property at the time but searched and found the lease in the archives in Paris.
"It's acknowledged by the French government that the property is in our name, but it's a frozen property," Khazzam continued. All such properties were frozen, not expropriated, as Hussein took over, meaning that part of the Iraq government was responsible for all the properties, and took a cut of the rent.
The real problem is not the Iraqi side, Khazzam said, but the French government, which rented the property at a very low price, "maybe a tenth of what it should have gone for."
This made it a case for "unjust enrichment, France enriched themselves by 90% of the rent," said Khazzam.
The property has been valued by Iraqi certifiers, and the unpaid rent is estimated at more than $20-million and counting.
He believes the reason they never contacted us is because they knew if they took over, we'd charge them the full rent. "It may have been somewhat okay from an individual, but from a country? They took advantage of a family," he said.
"Various Iraqi prime ministers have given a nod to us to unfreeze the property, no one is standing in our way, but there is a lot of red tape when it comes to unfreezing properties in Iraq."
Khazzam could go down the legal route for unfreezing but his hope is that France will "pay the back rent and purchase the property."
"We have no interest in renting it to the French," he said.
The slight advantage in the case is that the property was never sold or transferred, and remains in the family's name.
Khazzam and Mignard took the French government to court earlier this year asking for $17-million in back rent and $9-million in moral damages.
The French government had until May 15 to respond to Khazzam's family's offer of mediation, but did not.
The tribunal will now set a date for a hearing.
"If this succeeds, it will potentially be one of the largest properties taken away from Jews from Arab countries that could be retrievable," he said.