JERUSALEM – Suddenly, the most talked-about Palestinian in the Holy Land is not a politician, an anti-Israel militant or even a soccer player.

Instead, he is a multi-millionaire businessman who evidently knows how to call a spade a spade.

What's more, he's Canadian.

He also boasts a name to reckon with: Yasser Mahmoud Abbas.

The first name pays homage to the late Yasser Arafat, long-time leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, while the rest of the moniker is identical to that of the current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas who is, in fact, Yasser Abbas' father.

In fact, speculation surged this year among some sectors of the Israeli political cognoscenti that Mahmoud Abbas might be grooming his 46-year-old son to become his political successor when his presidency expires in January.

The younger Abbas attracted uncustomary attention to himself this month when he granted a rare interview in Dubai to a reporter from alaswaq.net, a Saudi-owned business website.

Abbas, former chair of the Canadian-Palestinian Business Council, provided intriguing details about his considerable wealth, denied exploiting family connections to acquire it, railed against the Islamist group Hamas that rules the Gaza Strip and freely owned up to being a collaborator with Israel.

He said Palestinians have no choice but to collaborate with Israel, assuming they want to get ahead in the world.

"We have massive amounts of products being exported or imported via Israeli ports," Abbas explained. "They all need the approval of the Israeli customs officer before reaching the Palestinian one.

"Saying that Yasser Abbas deals with the Israeli side is not a scoop. Most Palestinians deal with Israel. As for the rest, they live out in the rain."

Senior Palestinian officials groused about the interview in at least one newspaper in Israel, where people have seized almost gleefully upon news of such wealth in the hands of a man so closely associated with the top Palestinian leadership.

Married with two sons and a daughter, Abbas owns several large businesses gathered under the umbrella of the Falcon Holding Group.

He struck the carcinogenic equivalent of gold early this decade when he obtained a monopoly on the distribution of American cigarette brands such as Lucky Strike, Kent and Viceroy in the West Bank and Gaza.

The tobacco business, he said, was reeling in about $35 million (U.S.) annually until last year, when revenue dropped by more than half, mainly because the Hamas takeover in Gaza in June 2007 cut off his access to the market there.

Abbas also heads an insurance company, a civil engineering firm and a real-estate business, all with their main offices in Ramallah, the de facto West Bank capital.

Along with his brother, Tariq, Abbas also owns a West Bank advertising agency.

Abbas spent several years living in Montreal during the late 1980s and early '90s, when he ran a company whose main business was renovating apartment buildings.

Raised mainly in the United States, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Washington State University in 1983, Abbas took out Canadian citizenship while in Montreal and retains many ties with his former northern home.

Since moving to the West Bank in 1997, he has periodically acted as an emissary between the Palestinian Authority and Canada, notably in July 2007, when he travelled to Ottawa to urge resumption of financial aid, suspended after Hamas' victory in the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006.

Like many Western countries, Canada has labelled Hamas a terrorist organization and refuses to deal with its leadership.

"I worked very hard to acquire my fortune," Abbas has said.

"I became wealthy before my father was elected president, and I will continue to do business after his term in office expires."

In the meantime, Yasser Mahmoud Abbas remains Canada's closest link to the corridors of Palestinian power.