Beidas established his Intra (International traders) Bank in 1951, together with three partners, Mounir Abou Fadel, Emile Mousallam and Mounir Haddad, with a capital of 12,000.LL Lebanese pounds, according to one source, or £100,000 sterling based on borrowings from his old clients at the Arab Bank. At the time, Beirut's financial importance was enhanced in the wake of the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956, which weakened Cairo's function as a beachhead for European investment in the Arab world, the tight bank secrecy rules and absence of exchange controls in the Lebanese banking system made the country a refuge for capital flight, petrodollars and hot money from Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Intra was soon to become the dominant player in the Lebanese economy, and by 1966 it had between 13 and 17 percent of the country's bank deposits and assets which included the Casino du Liban, the largest casino in the world, through which drug money was reportedly recycled, Middle East Airlines and the Port Authority of Beirut. He turned Middle east Airlines, floundering at the time, into one of the most profitable airlines in the world. he owned a steel mill and a mutual fund society. His group also had an extensive repository of real estate holdings in major cities, 40 branches across the globe, prime property investments in a 27-story skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in New York near the Rockefeller Center, Beidas's bank also controlled a shipyard in Marseille, the Londonderry Hotel in Park Lane and a section of the Champs-Élysées. He also opened up a cinema production company "Studio Baalbek" in 1956, hoping to make Lebanon the "Hollywood of the Middle East".