CAIRO - Celebrated Egyptian TV show host Mahmoud Saad has resigned from Egyptian TV for refusing to interview Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. Shafiq told a talk show over the phone that the Egyptian TV programme ‘Masr Ennaharda' (Egypt Today) wanted to interview him, while Saad quit for another reason. “Saad really resigned because his annual salary plummeted from LE9 million to LE1.5 million. And he was informed of that, before being ordered to interview me,” he told ‘Al-Ashera Masaan' (The 10pm) talk show on the privately owned Dream TV Saturday night. Saad rang the same TV talk show to say that he had resigned from ‘Masr Ennaharda', after being ordered to interview Shafiq on Saturday's show, adding that he would not appear again on Egyptian TV, because he will not be forced to interview people. Originally, he had been due to interview Osama el-Ghazali Harb, the Chairman of opposition Democratic Front Party and a participant in the January 25 revolt, for Saturday's episode, but the editor of the programme asked him to interview Shafiq instead. As for what Shafiq said about Saad leaving the programme because of money, he commented: “I'm not a corrupt man. My talk show has earned LE60 million in advertisements for Egptian TV. Despite the financial crisis since the revolution, ‘Masr Ennaharda' attracted about 16 advertisements last week.” Saad refuses to meet the Premier because the young people, who launched the resignation want Shafiq hand his recently revamped Cabinet to resign, allegedly for being loyal to former president Hosni Mubarak. Many people have commented on this furore on Facebook. Some of them have praised Saad for refusing to meet the Premier, with some of them describing him as a hero. But others pose the following questions: “If Saad really is anti-Mubarak and his regime, why did he do a Ramadan TV programme two years ago financed by Ahmed Ezz [the business tycoon now in prison]? If he really is clean, why he didn't resign earlier in the Mubarak era?” Two weeks ago, Saad, a journalist by profession, received a phone call from ex-Minister of Information Anas el-Fiqqi, who referred on air to the fact that he was earning LE9 million per year. Some people have criticised el-Fiqqi for going public about Saad's colossal salary, while others want the Public Prosecutor to probe the salaries of other TV talk show hosts.
