[Citation Links in original]
February 13, 2011
Tomdispatch.com [But I couldn't find a link there]
How Hosni Mubarak Became One of the Richest Men in the World on Our
Dime
By Tom Engelhardt
The fortune amassed by Egypt's former president and his two sons (both
billionaires) could reach $70 billion.
With Hosni Mubarak gone, let's do a little Egyptian math on the Mubarak
years.
According to experts, the fortune amassed by Egypt's former president
and his two sons (both billionaires) could reach $70 billion. That
includes funds in secret offshore bank accounts and investments in
residences and real-estate properties reaching from Rodeo Drive in
Beverley Hills to Wilton Place in central London and Egypt's Sharm
el-Sheik tourist resort. Since Mubarak has been president for 30
years, he's put that little fortune together at a record clip --
something like $2 billion or more a year. He and his family are now
worth approximately four times the gross domestic product (GDP) of
Paraguay, five times the GDP of embattled Afghanistan, and more than
ten times the GDP of Laos. He may be the richest man and they the
richest family on Earth. All this happened, by the way, in the years
when millions of Egyptians -- at least one in every 10 -- lost their
farms, while more than 40% of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day.
And let's just mention a few others in the cast of characters who let
the good times roll and made a few bucks off the reign of the Mubarak
family: steel magnate and ruling party insider Ahmed Ezz, for instance,
managed to eke out a $3 billion fortune, while former Interior Minister
Habib Ibrahim El-Adly scraped by with a near-rock-bottom $1.2 billion.
And they are just two of at least five much-loathed Mubarak cronies who
reportedly crossed the billion-dollar mark in these years.
As for a trio of Washington lobbyists -- former Republican
representative Bob Livingston, former Democratic representative Toby
Moffett, and mover-and-shaker Tony Podesta -- who bravely hired
themselves out to the Mubarak regime, they made chump change:
reportedly a mere $1 million a year for their efforts. Who knows what
Frank Wisner, the former ambassador sent to Cairo by the Obama
administration to give Mubarak the boot, made working for Patton,
Boggs, a company which proudly boasts of the litigation work it's done
for Mubarak and company? Conflict of interest anyone?
Meanwhile, don't forget the Egyptian military. It didn't do so badly
in the Mubarak years either. After all, according to one expert, it
owns "virtually every industry in the country," and it still managed to
take in a handy $35 billion in "aid" from Washington since 1978.
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Michael