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Recovering Mubarak assets in Britain a 'complex piece of work,' says ambassador The former president's misbegotten funds could be hidden in the UK under non-Egyptian or assumed names, James Watt explains
Recovering the Mubarak family's money will be a "very complex piece of work", Britain's ambassador to Egypt said on Wednesday. Ambassador James Watt compared the tricky hunt for the ousted Egyptian ruling family's funds to the relative ease of such a process in post-Gaddafi Libya. "[There] assets have a label as they belong to the Libyan sovereign wealth fund [the Libyan Investment Authority]," Watt told Ahram Online. Egyptian assets, in contrast, are harder to trace. "We don't know exactly who do they belong to. It could be hiding under a chain of British names, and fake names. We don't know these names," he said. The ambassador was speaking to a group of journalists on the sidelines of a conference on Private Public Partnerships held at the British Embassy in Cairo on Wednesday. Watt said that Egyptian prosecutors had sent the UK government a list of names of people who might be involved in hiding the Mubarak family's money, allowing them to freeze assets worth 40 million pounds sterling. Seemingly not on this list were assets linked to Medinvest, a company partially owned by Gamal Mubarak, or Horus3, a private equity fund based in the Cayman Islands, in which he had investments. Both entities were at the centre of media debate last week, following the screening of an expose of the Mubarak family's wealth on Egypt's ONTV channel. "I don't think the list that was given to us includes these names. You may check with the prosecutor general office," Watt said. The British ambassador said that recovering these assets will not be easy as it depends on a court ruling which would involve a lengthy legal process. "Every step is controlled by the court, not government decisions. The court needs evidence," he said. Watt stressed Britain's commitment to returning stolen assets to Egypt, but he said such actions were dependent on full investigations in Egypt. "We only have some information, not enough evidence that there are big sums of money in Britain," he said.
