EU freezes 4 bank accounts linked to Gamal Mubarak

Local human rights organization the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) and the UK-based Corner House received a letter from the European Commission confirming that four bank accounts linked to a Gamal Mubarak co-owned company in Cyprus have been frozen.

European Commission Officer Tung-Lai Margue verified in his letter that Gamal Mubarak has a 50 percent holding in a company called Bullion Co Ltd.

The letter goes on to state that local authorities have confirmed that four accounts of which the former president’s son is a co-beneficiary have been frozen.

No link has been established between the other shareholders of Bullion Co Ltd and Gamal Mubarak, but “the Cypriot authorities are keeping these issues under investigation," according to the letter.

The Cypriot authorities also told the EU that no “no real or other personal property has been located in Cyprus belonging to, or owned by, Gamal Mubarak.”

The correspondence from the European Commission’s Service for Foreign Policy Instrument came in response to a joint letter sent by the two organizations in April of last year to European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton.

EIPR and the Corner House initiated the correspondence after identifying through a joint investigation freezable assets belonging to Gamal Mubarak in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. They wrote both to local authorities and to the EU expressing concern that “no action appears to have been taken to investigate these companies or, if grounds exist, to freeze their assets.”

The freezing of assets is important “because it denies those suspected of corruption access to the money, and it prevents them from moving and hiding their money until further investigations are carried out about the lawfulness of such assets,” EIPR’s anti-corruption and transparency researcher, Osama Diab, told Mada Masr.

The freezing of Gamal Mubarak’s bank accounts is pursuant to a European Union freeze originally imposed in March 2011 on former President Hosni Mubarak and 18 others, including his two sons.

The decision was renewed last week for a further year, as it has been the previous two years.

In December, Switzerland extended its three-year freeze on 760 million Swiss Francs of assets belonging to former regime members of Egypt and Tunisia, due to have expired in February of this year, by a further three years.

In a statement responding to the EU’s decision to extend its freeze, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said in a statement that it came “in the context of intensified efforts by the ministry and the efforts of the Egyptian embassy in Brussels.”

The EU letter to EIPR and the Corner House states that the “Republic of Cyprus is in constant communication and in full cooperation and coordination with the Egyptian authorities” regarding the matter.

EIPR’s Diab, however, has doubts about the will or ability of the Egyptian authorities to recover the assets, saying that there is “no political will” to do so.

This is commonly found in countries in transition, Diab told Mada Masr.

“This is why we have been calling for a more efficient system where there is less reliance on the institutions of the victim country from which the money was stolen, because in most cases these are countries who suffer from institutional failure, and are still very much controlled by the same corrupt networks. Egypt provides no exception to this rule.”