The former housing minister, Mohamed Ibrahim Suleiman, has been accused of squandering LE300 billion of state funds to benefit business magnate Hisham Talaat Mustafa, who is currently in prison while undergoing prosecution for the murder of a Lebanese singer.
Egypt’s Administrative Court annulled on Tuesday 22 June a land sale between between the government, represented by Suleiman, and the country’s biggest publicly-listed property developer, the Talaat Mustafa Group (TMG), on the grounds that the sale had not been opened to public bidding.
Hamdy el-Dosouky el-Fakharany, the architect who filed the lawsuit in relation to which the verdict was issued, submitted yesterday a report to Attorney General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud in which he claimed that Mustafa’s Madinaty project, run by TMG in a residential area east of Cairo, received preferential treatment. The project “enjoyed exceptions that were not seen by other undertakings,” el-Fakharany said. He also noted that imported items for implementing the project were exempted from custom duties, on the basis of Law 59/1979 on new urban communities.
The Attorney General decided to refer the report to the authorities concerned. A judicial source predicts that the report will be included in investigations being conducted by the Public Fund Investigations police in relation to similar reports submitted by parliament representatives.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
