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Latest update: 08/02/2011
- Egypt - Hosni Mubarak - Tunisia - Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali
Ben Ali’s fortune and the Mubarak network: A misleading parallel
It has been reported that the fortune of the embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is between 40 and 70 billion dollars. However, comparisons being drawn between the wealth of Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali are misleading.
By Sébastian SEIBT (text)
The fortune of embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s family is said to possibly be as high as 70 billion dollars, or 51 billion euros. That estimation, published in British daily The Guardian, is the result of evaluations carried out by Egyptian experts.
Most of that money is rumoured to be held in foreign bank accounts or invested in real estate in London, New York, and Los Angeles.
This image of a family rolling in money suggests a parallel with ousted Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali’s famously wealthy clan. But several specialists who have written widely on Egypt refute the comparison.
“Apart from his public salary of several thousand euros per month, we don’t know anyt
hing about Hosni Mubarak’s public wealth,” said Jean-Noël Ferrié, research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and the author of a book about Egypt under Mubarak. Ferrié estimates that the evaluation of the Mubarak family’s fortune is inflated by “at least one or two zeros”.
Tewfik Aclimendos, a researcher on Egypt at the Collège de France, agreed with that assessment, saying that it is difficult to pin a number on the Egyptian president’s wealth.
Corruption reaching far beyond Mubarak’s inner circle
That said, according to Ferrié, unlike in Tunisa, all of Egyptian society – “from the lowest-ranking police officer to the highest power” – is part of a larger scheme of corruption. Whereas in Tunisia, authorities have been accused of “organised racketeering”, Ferrié explained that “a system of extreme vote buying” exists in Egypt.
Indeed, both Ferrié and Aclimendos say that Mubarak and even former President Anwar El Sadat in the 1970s granted favours for entire segments of the population – businessmen, military officials – in order to secure their electoral support. These bribes consisted, for example, of real estate opportunities like hotels or plots of land sold at low prices. In Tunisia, on the other hand, only a small clique close to the president and his wife’s family, the Trabelsis, benefitted from those kinds of gifts.
In Egypt, those close to President Mubarak have also benefitted from the pervasive corruption. “We know, for example, that Gamal Mubarak [Hosni’s younger son] owes a part of his fortune to his marriage to the daughter of a rich Egyptian entrepreneur specialised in construction,” said Ferrié.
Mubarak and those that make up his extended clan are hardly the only ones in Egypt putting money in foreign bank accounts. “Any Egyptian entrepreneur, even one from an average company, keeps sums of money outside of Egypt,” Ferrié noted.
Unlike in Tunisia, where a small group of people has its hands on a large portion of the country’s wealth, a far bigger number of Egyptians are to this day financially dependent on Mubarak’s regime.
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Comments (4)
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The Way Forward
THE WAY FORWARD
To help force the departure of Hosni Mubarak
1. The West should stop empty talk and start putting their money where their mouth is:
a. Immediately stop any aid to the Egyptian Government;
b. Freeze all diplomatic ties with the Hosni Mubarak regime and all international contact channelled ONLY through a delegation from the US/EU;
c. Freeze all the personal assets of Hosni Mubarak and his cronies in the west until there is a new government and a full audit of those assets and how they were acquired are carried out;
d. Freeze all private travel of Hosni Mubarak, his family and cronies to the West;
2. The State Television and Radio must become open and reflect the reality on the ground;
3. Appoint an interim administration to set up:
a. An independent electoral commission with a clear mandate to prepare the country for a Presidential and general election;
b. An independent Information Commission to oversee TV, Radio, Internet and Telephone operations and that they are not tempered with;
4. The Israeli government should immediately restart talks with the Palestinian Authority for a two-state solution that will respect the UN defined boundaries of both countries; this should include the evacuation of the occupied territories and leaving behind all physical assets built by the illegal settlers for the Palestinians;
The “West” cannot carry on dictating to the rest of the World how to behave because all their interests until now (be it the “spread of democracy” and “CO2 emissions and global warming” for example) are ONLY on their own interest: when it suites the West, they will support a dictator who “brings stability”; when it is someone they don’t like, then it should be “free and fair elections”. When the West had to develop and industrialise and create wealth for its citizens, pollution and carbon footprints where not an issue; but when the pollution of others may impact Western livelihoods today, suddenly they try to restrict the carbon emissions of the developing world that has only one source of cheap and readily available energy, that is coal.
The founders of the State of Israel have been persecuted in other lands over centuries. They have created Israel to safeguard their people and their decedents. But this DOES NOT give them the right to come and uproot and throw out Palestinians who ARE as entitled to be there as the Jewish people. Hence a 2 State solution is the ONLY solution. By agreeing and helping the setting up of a full free Palestinian State, Israel and its people have everything to win:
1. International support and respect (that they have lost to a huge extent);
2. Legitimacy of their own existence in the eyes of the World;
3. Removing all the claims from the hostile Arab and Iranian regimes for attacks on the State of Israel;
4. Removing any new source of grievance from Palestinians to carry on attacking Israel;
5. Now giving full legitimacy for the State of Israel and its allies to defend itself against Arab aggression.
The arguments presented in
The arguments presented in this article are weak. The arguments start by highlighting the wealth of two men without any comparison and end with corruption charges which are two different things. Not knowing Mubarak’s real wealth does not mean that he does not have it.
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