Shahzada Dawood was vice chairman of the World Economic Forum.
This is not true. Shahzada Dawood was neither the vice chairman nor an employee of the WEF. He was the vice chairman of another company, Engro Corporation, that was a partner of the WEF. He also belonged to the forum’s ‘Family Business Community’.
Several posts on social media falsely claim that one of the passengers on the Titan submersible was the vice chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The posts claim that the businessman Shahzada Dawood, who was on board the sub with his son, Suleman Dawood, was the vice chairman of WEF.
The Titan sub was diving to see the wreckage of the Titanic when it was reported missing on 18 June. Its five passengers are all believed to have sadly died with officials reporting that the sub imploded near the wreckage.
While the businessman had ties to the WEF, he was not a vice chairman or an employee of the organisation. He does not appear on its leadership page.
Some of the posts point to a profile for Mr Dawood on the WEF website. The profile is real and does say that Mr Dawood was a “vice chairman” but for a different organisation called Engro Corporation—not the WEF
Engro is a Pakistani conglomerate that is part of Mr Dawood’s family’s firm, Dawood Hercules, and invests in a range of sectors including energy and agriculture. Engro is also listed as a WEF partner which means it is able to participate in the organisation’s “centres” and networking events.
A WEF spokesperson told fact checkers at the Associated Press that Mr Dawood was not a WEF employee but did belong to its ‘Family Business Community’.
The WEF website says that the Family Business Community ”exists to connect the most prominent family business leaders worldwide and to promote shared understanding of the global issues affecting family businesses.”
The Associated Press also reported that WEF profile pages are made for anyone who attended a WEF event or has written a blog post for its site. Mr Dawood appears on a list of participants for a number of WEF events.
Full Fact has contacted the WEF for a comment and will update the article if we receive a response.
Claims like this can spread quickly online and give people a false understanding of people and events. Misinformation about the Titan sub has flourished online in the wake of the vessel’s disappearance. Full Fact checked a number of posts falsely claiming to show the wreckage after it was confirmed that debris from the sub had been located during the search—including several which appear to have been generated using Artificial Intelligence.
The WEF is also the subject of many conspiracy theories, which Full Fact has written about previously. This includes claims that the WEF engineers the climate, has its own paramilitary force and is connected to a “social credit app” allegedly implemented in Ukraine.
Image courtesy of World Economic Forum
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because it’s not true that Shahzada Dawood was the vice chairman of the WEF.
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