Manucher Mirza Farman Farmaian

Prince Manucher Mirza (1917–2003) was born in Tehran in 1917. He was the sixth son of Prince Abdol Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma and of Batoul Khanoum.

He studied petroleum engineering at Birmingham University in England before returning to Iran. On his return he joined the military rising to the rank of second lieutenant and left in the weeks surrounding January 1943.

He went on to work in the Ministry of Finance until he was appointed to become the director general of Petroleum, Concessions, and Mines in April 1949.

In 1958 he became the director of sales for the National Iranian Oil Company. A key signatory in the 1959 Cairo Agreement that resulted in OPEC, he was Iran's first ambassador to Venezuela. In 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, Manucher escaped across the Iran-Turkey border with the help of Kurdish smugglers. After fleeing from Ayatollah Khomeini's regime in the 1979 revolution, Manucher Mirza permanently relocated to Venezuela, establishing a new life and a new business (potato crisp manufacturer) for himself. In his later life he co-authored Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince with his daughter Roxane Farman Farmaian, which was published in 1997.

In 2003, Manucher died in Caracas and was buried in Sag Harbor, NY next to his brother Abol-Bashar Mirza Farman Farmaian.^[1]

Publications

• Travels to Persia
• Considerations of the Problems of Oil
• Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince, Random House, New York, 1997.

Government positions held

• Director of Sales for the National Iranian Oil Company
• Ambassador to Venezuela

Offspring

• Roxane Farman Farmaian
• Alexander Farman Farmaian:Alexander Farman-Farmaian is Vice Chairman, Partner and Portfolio Manager at Edgewood. He joined in January 2006 and helped implement the current valuation approach of the Edgewood Investment Committee. He is an analyst on portfolio companies, served as Director of Research, and produces the “Economents™”, a periodic economic and financial markets update for clients. Prior to joining Edgewood, Alex was for 19 years a senior member of the Portfolio Management team at W.P. Stewart & Co. where he chaired the Investment Oversight Committee. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR – NY), the World Presidents’ Organization (WPO), and serves as a Trustee of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), an organization that promotes access to health services and fundamental human rights of women and girls around the world. Alex also serves on the Board of CollegeSpring, a non-profit which educates low income high-school children in SAT college entry testing. Alex was formerly President of the Princeton Club of New York, is a member of the Economics Club of New York and is on the board of Kalinat S.A., a potato chip manufacturing company in Caracas, Venezuela. He received a BA in Economics from Princeton University in 1987, and speaks fluent French, Spanish, Farsi and conversational Italian.
• Teymour Farman Farmaian

See also

• Persia (Iran)
• History of Iran (Persia)
• Qajar Dynasty of Iran (Persia)
• Iran-Venezuela relations

External links

• The Qajar (Kadjar) Pages

Sources

• Blood and Oil: Memoirs of a Persian Prince; Manucher Mirza Farman Farmaian. Random House, New York, 1997.

Notes