An ongoing investigation into the wealth of three of ousted president Hosni Mubarak's senior officials says they accumulated vast fortunes during their long years in office, Gamal Essam El-Din reports Osama Youssef, a Cairo taxi driver, has been busy wondering these days. He has read a lot about the wealth of deposed president Hosni Mubarak and his regime's former senior officials, asking himself: "What if Egyptians had access to this wealth? Every Egyptian would get at least LE1 million." Cairo's taxi drivers are not the only ones wondering and calculating these days. Go anywhere in Egypt and you'll see how the vast wealth and enormous fortunes reaped by Mubarak's henchmen have become the talk of the town. Almost three months after the resignation of Mubarak on 11 February, watchdog institutions have been able to gather documented information about the wealth of a list of his regime's most influential stalwarts. Topping the list are Mubarak's three longest- serving officials: Safwat El-Sherif, minister of information for 22 years and seven-year chairman of the Shura Council; Zakaria Azmi, for 21 years the chief of presidential staff and a member of parliament for 24 years; and Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People's Assembly -- Egypt's lower house of parliament -- for two decades. The three are now being held in Tora prison south of Cairo, pending further investigations into their alleged ill-gotten wealth and other charges. When El-Sherif, 78, was questioned whether he was in possession of any assets in Europe and America, his answer was a firm "not at all". El-Sherif, however, was taken aback when investigators at the Ministry of Justice's Illicit Gains Office (IGO) showed him a list of his possessions, including two big flats in London and Paris. According to witnesses, El-Sherif wept, stating that he never imagined anybody knew about the flats. A report submitted by the Administrative Control Authority (ACA) showed that El-Sherif, his wife, two sons and daughter are in possession of 34 palaces, 18 villas, four chalets, four apartments, four plots of land and 20 companies. Out of this, El-Sherif alone owns 12 palaces, one villa and one chalet and two flats in London and Paris. El-Sherif's wife, Iqbal Helmi, owns 5,000 shares of the Egyptian Satellite Company NileSat. His older son Ashraf, now in Paris, is in possession of 18 companies, mostly involved in media activities, clearly making use of his father's 22 years as minister of information. Ashraf and his wife Lola own 22 palaces and a vast plot of land. Just one day before the headquarters of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) was torched on 28 January, the deadliest day of the revolt which ultimately forced Mubarak to step down, El-Sherif, the NDP's secretary-general for nine years, said, "I have nothing to be afraid of and I will never flee the country. We have been serving this country for a long time and it is of great pride for us to stay here and not leave it." El-Sherif, however, must have rued the day he did not at least try to escape. On 11 April El-Sherif was remanded in custody for 15 days. It was renewed for another 15 days on 23 April. El-Sherif also faces charges of masterminding violent attacks against pro- democracy protesters in Tahrir Square on 2 February, what came to be known as "the Battle of the Camel". Next in the line of wealth is Azmi, chief of Mubarak's presidential staff for 21 years. ACA's investigation showed that Azmi and his wife Bahia Halawa, a journalist with Al-Ahram and editor of the quarterly magazine Diwan Al-Ahram, are in possession of 22 palaces, three flats, and an 80-feddan plot of land, not to mention a farmland and a fleet of Mercedes cars. Azmi married twice but has no children. Azmi once said, "Corruption in Egypt has reached the heels." Some years later when a new apartment building suddenly collapsed in Cairo's high-class district of Heliopolis, Azmi said, "Corruption in Egypt is up to the neck." Many wondered at the time that if a senior official so close to the president was so sure that corruption had become so endemic, why no concrete action was ever taken to fight it. On Fathi Sorour, Egypt's longest serving parliamentary speaker, the ACA report disclosed that Sorour and his wife Zeinab El-Foli own 28 palaces, one villa, one apartment, a plot of land and three companies involved in real estate, tourist development and computer engineering. Sorour's two daughters, Hanaa and Hanan, own two villas, four flats and two big plots of land. Sorour's only son Tarek owns two flats and three plots of land and a gymnasium. All in all, the families of El-Sherif, Azmi and Sorour own as many as 84 palaces, 22 villas, four chalets, 10 flats, vast stretches of land and companies. The ACA report noted that Mubarak's three longest- serving stalwarts do not have significant deposits in Egyptian banks. "This is not surprising as most of Mubarak's henchmen refrained from owning big bank deposits in public Egyptian banks and opted instead to invest their money in possessing real estate assets such as palaces, chalets and flats," the report said, adding that "the price of real estate assets in Egypt is constantly fluctuating and represents a very profitable source of investment, not to mention that these assets were registered in the names of the family members of senior officials." For example, the ACA report said Sorour bought a flat for LE700,000 from construction magnate Hisham Talaat Mustafa, a former NDP member who was sent to jail pending trial on charges of inciting a bodyguard to kill a Lebanese singer in Dubai. "When Sorour urged that Talaat be acquitted of the charge because the murder was committed on foreign land, he re-sold the flat to Mustafa for LE2.5 million," the report said. As expected, the assets of Mubarak's three influential officials are concentrated in high-class housing communities east of Cairo: Heliopolis, Qattamiya Heights, and Al-Tagammu Al-Khamis. Their chalets and villas are located mainly in Alexandria's beach resort of Marina, and at the Red Sea resorts of Sharm El-Sheikh and Hurghada. Their possession of lands are mostly on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road where most business tycoons and state officials own palaces with farmlands far from Cairo's densely populated and polluted districts. Assem El-Gohari, chief of the IGO's office, announced on 3 May that the government decided to seek the help of a law firm in Switzerland to recover the financial deposits of Mubarak, members of his family and other former senior officials of his regime including former minister of trade Rachid Mohamed Rachid and former minister of finance Youssef Boutros Ghali. "These deposits are estimated at 410 million Swiss francs," said El-Gohari, adding, "When we gain access to all these deposits and others, we could sit down and see how we may distribute them among Egyptian citizens."
