The Government should do its best and act fast to retrieve the country's stolen assets, as it needs the cash to bail out its sliding economy, analysts say. But the Government seems to be failing in this, says Moataz Salah Eddin, the head of the People's Initiative for Retrieving Stolen Assets. Egypt's stolen assets are estimated at $145 billion, according to the World Bank. Analysts say stolen asset recovery may take years, citing the examples of the Philippines, Peru and Nigeria. For instance, Ferdinand Marcos, who was President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, siphoned off around $10 billion from governmental contracts. In 2004, after a long legal process, the Philippines received $624 million in Marcos funds from Switzerland, according to the World Bank. "Toppled president Hosni Mubarak bought 29 presidential aircraft for $1 billion out of US aid money given to Egypt. The planes were used for personal transportation by the Mubaraks. Where have they gone?" wonders Salah Eddin. "A presidential decree has appointed a new commission for the stolen assets file. But its members have yet to be appointed. It is also disturbing that Prime Minister Hisham Qandil knows nothing about stolen assets." Last month, President Mohamed Morsi formed a new panel to take over the stolen assets file. The new formation is headed by Mohamed Amin el-Mahdi, a senior state legal advisor. Salah Eddin revealed that Magdi Rasekh, Alaa Mubarak's father-in-law who fled the country last year, bought properties in Spain for the Mubaraks. As for Hussein Salem, a close friend of Mubarak's who also fled to Spain, he will be extradited, according to Salah Eddin, the Spanish Supreme Court having approved his extradition, as well as that of his son Khaled and daughter Magda, to Egypt. "I'm sure they'll be back in three months," he stressed. Salem is accused of profiteering from selling natural gas to Israel at lower than market prices. Last year, Egypt sent a request to Switzerland to freeze Mubarak's assets in its banks. The Swiss government has frozen $700 million, up from $414 million last year. These assets, tied to the Mubarak family, his close allies and other officials in the old regime, include bank accounts as well as other possessions. British Minister for the Middle East and North Africa Alistair Burt has made it clear that his government "cannot obtain a restraint order on the basis of suspicion alone". In March, the United Kingdom froze assets worth £85 million owned by the Mubaraks and ex-regime loyalists. "It is crucial that the recovery and return of stolen assets is lawful. It is simply not possible for the UK to deprive a person of their assets and return them to an overseas country in the absence of a criminal conviction and confiscation order," Burt explained. Commenting on the same issue, British Ambassador to Cairo James Watt said: "No government can simply confiscate assets without good reason, and without a proper legal process. There have to be reasons, and there has to be evidence. This is what we have been telling the Egyptian authorities." "We think we are making progress. But it has been much slower than we had hoped: in April 2011, we invited Egyptian Public Prosecution officials to visit London to expedite the process, but they did not come until May 2012," the diplomat explained. "Where there are assets in Britain in the names of those people, they are frozen until a court decides whether they have been stolen, and whom they were stolen from. When the court has decided on that, the assets will be returned," Watt added. But the sentencing of Mubarak to life in prison and the acquittal of his two sons on corruption charges, without any reference to their assets overseas, will have negative repercussions on all attempts to recover these assets, analysts say. Mubarak, former interior minister Habib el-Adly and six senior police officers were tried for ordering the deaths of some of the estimated 850 people killed in the January 25 Revolution. Only Mubarak and his interior minister were convicted. The verdict in what the media dubbed the ‘Trial of the Century' said nothing about the Mubaraks' assets abroad, casting a shadow over the possibility of retrieving these funds. Corruption charges against Mubarak's sons, Alaa and Gamal, were dropped due to the expiry of a statute of limitations, while the toppled president was acquitted in one of the graft cases.
