More than a decade after the 25 January uprising challenged the political and economic networks built under Hosni Mubarak, some of that era’s most prominent businessmen are once again conspicuous at the centre of official public life. Ahmed Ezz and Hisham Talaat Moustafa are among them.
Their appearance at the Grand Egyptian Museum’s opening, as prominent guests or sponsors, sparked debate about the state’s continuing reliance on figures associated with the former regime. Neither had disappeared from business. But their presence at an event of such national importance renewed questions about how much of the Mubarak-era relationship between wealth and power survives.
After years of prosecutions following the uprising, Ezz remained a major force in steel, with financial settlements bringing cases against him to an end. Moustafa, convicted in the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim and later pardoned, returned to a leading role in a property group expanding through luxury housing, hotels and partnerships with state bodies.
Both had represented more than commercial success under Mubarak. Ezz belonged to the ruling National Democratic Party’s “new guard”, associated with Gamal Mubarak, and was widely criticised for his role in organising the party’s overwhelming parliamentary victory in 2010. Moustafa’s rise came through a property sector in which access to land and relations with the state were central to large developments.
Critics see their renewed prominence as evidence that the old system has been repackaged. The economic case for relying on established business groups, by contrast, rests on their capital, experience and ability to undertake large projects during a financial crisis. The dispute is not simply about individual careers, but about who shapes development and who benefits from it.
Ahmed Ezz: steel and political influence
Ezz’s rapid expansion in the 1990s made him one of the clearest examples of the growing overlap between business and political authority. Born in 1959 into a family trading in building materials, he developed interests in ceramics and steel before becoming closely associated with Gamal Mubarak, the former president’s younger son.
Contemporary accounts described bank financing and an agreement with Italy’s Danieli to develop steel production, followed by additional rolling and melting capacity. His appearance alongside Gamal Mubarak at a regional economic conference in 1996 became a symbol of the relationship. In 1998, he supported the Future Generation Foundation, which Gamal founded.
Ezz’s interests expanded into land, industrial investment and business representation. His acquisition of a stake in Alexandria National Iron and Steel, known as Dekheila, was especially consequential. A 2011 account in Youm7 described the transfer of employee-shareholder stock and a share issue worth EGP 456 million, followed by his accession to the chairmanship in 2000. It also alleged that subsequent production decisions favoured his other factories. These claims formed part of the controversy surrounding his rise, rather than a complete account of the later judicial outcomes.
His industrial influence was matched by political office. He entered parliament in 2000 and the National Democratic Party’s general secretariat in 2002, becoming a leading figure in its organisation and in the business-oriented circle around Gamal Mubarak. As chair of parliament’s Planning and Budget Committee, he occupied a powerful position at the intersection of economic policymaking and private industry.
By 2010, reporting put his businesses’ share of Egypt’s steel market above 60%. His wealth, party role and influence over the parliamentary elections made him one of the most controversial figures of Mubarak’s final years.
After the 2011 uprising, Ezz was arrested and faced several proceedings involving allegations of profiteering, money laundering and misuse of public assets. A steel-licensing case initially resulted in a ten-year prison sentence in September 2011. Further convictions followed in 2013 in proceedings concerning Dekheila.
The legal position subsequently changed through appeals and financial reconciliation. In March 2018, the last corruption case was brought to an end after a settlement reported at around EGP 1.7 billion, including funds recovered from frozen overseas assets. It is therefore misleading to describe the earlier sentences without explaining the later resolution of the cases.
His companies continued to expand. According to Ezz Steel’s 2021 financial results, the board of Al Ezz Dekheila approved buying 18% of Egyptian Steel for EGP 2.5 billion in December 2021. The transaction took place in January 2022. The stake was the holding associated with Ahmed Abou Hashima; it was not the acquisition of the entire Egyptian Steel group.
Hisham Talaat Moustafa: property, conviction and return
Born in Alexandria in 1959, Hisham Talaat Moustafa developed the family business founded by his father into one of Egypt’s largest property groups. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the company expanded into major residential and hotel projects, including Al-Rehab, Madinaty and Four Seasons developments.
His position within the National Democratic Party and relationships with influential figures placed him close to the governing establishment. Critics of the period regarded the allocation of state land to large developers as a central mechanism through which commercial and political interests reinforced one another.
The Madinaty project became a particularly prominent example. The original 2005 agreement covered approximately 8,000 feddans and allocated the land without a public auction in return for a share of completed residential units for the state. The agreement and subsequent arrangements became the subject of litigation and dispute. Later reporting described settlement obligations in cash and in kind worth EGP 12.9 billion, then equivalent to approximately $1.7 billion. Those later obligations should be distinguished from the original agreement’s terms.
Al-Rehab also illustrates the scale of the group’s property business. In a televised interview reported in May 2025, Moustafa said that residential units launched in 1996 at EGP 900 per square metre were selling at EGP 90,000 per square metre. These were figures he gave for housing prices—not evidence of the price at which the company acquired state land.
The group’s hotel developments in Alexandria and Sharm el-Sheikh, alongside its large residential projects, made it a major player in a sector where relations with public authorities and access to land remained important.
Moustafa’s public career was interrupted by the murder of Suzanne Tamim in her Dubai apartment in 2008. He was prosecuted for commissioning former police officer Mohsen al-Sukkari to kill her for $2 million. Both men initially received death sentences in 2009.
The Court of Cassation ordered a retrial in March 2010. In September that year, Moustafa was sentenced to 15 years in prison and al-Sukkari to life imprisonment. The property group continued operating under its board and other family members while Moustafa was imprisoned.
A presidential pardon in June 2017 allowed Moustafa to leave prison and return formally to business. His group subsequently expanded through large developments and partnerships with public bodies, including the Noor project east of Cairo.
In August 2023, a Cairo court granted his application for judicial rehabilitation. Such an order removes the legal disabilities and restrictions on rights arising from the conviction; it is distinct from a finding that the offence never occurred. His return to the electoral rolls contrasted with the difficulties faced by other former prisoners seeking restoration of political rights, documented in Zawia3’s reporting on Egyptians barred from voting after completing their sentences.
A civilian face for a different power structure?
Economic researcher Elhami El-Merghany sees the renewed prominence of Mubarak-era businessmen as a restoration of old networks and the practices critics associate with them. He described Ezz’s appearance at the museum opening as a negative signal about the state’s sensitivity to Egyptians’ political memory.
El-Merghany argues that the authorities need a “civilian face” in response to criticism from international financial institutions of the military’s expanding economic role. Rather than building a new business elite, he says, they have brought familiar figures back to the foreground.
In his view, the move reveals a problem within the current system’s social and economic base: established names are used to improve the appearance of policies without changing their substance. For people who associate those businessmen with the grievances behind the January uprising, he said, their renewed prominence understandably provokes anger.
Akram Ismail, a member of the central committee of the Bread and Freedom Party, which is still seeking formal registration, offers a different emphasis. Ezz Steel is a major industrial enterprise with roots in the Mubarak period, he said, irrespective of its founder’s relationship with Gamal Mubarak.
Ismail argued that Ezz’s loss of political standing and his experience after 2011 had made him more responsive to the wishes of state agencies. When asked to support or finance a project, he said, Ezz was likely to comply. He contrasted this with businessmen such as Naguib Sawiris, whose international investments provided a different degree of financial and political independence.
For Ismail, Ezz and Moustafa are particularly close to the state and benefit from those ties while accommodating its priorities. Their presence at a flagship event such as the Grand Egyptian Museum’s opening was therefore deliberate and symbolic. The museum began under Mubarak and was completed under Sisi, he noted, making the participation of figures connected with its development or sponsorship unsurprising.
He nevertheless sees an important shift between the two periods. Under Mubarak, a circle of businessmen was associated with Gamal’s political project and the possibility of dynastic succession. Under Sisi, he argues, the old business class has lost much of its political autonomy, while a newer network is more structurally dependent on the state bureaucracy and a larger military role in the economy.
In Ismail’s reading, figures such as Ezz and Moustafa retain a place as a civilian face of the system, but no longer possess the same project for sharing political power that characterised the late Mubarak period.
Old faces, unresolved economic questions
Journalist Mohamed Saad Abdel Hafiz, a member of the Journalists Syndicate’s council, considers Ezz’s public return more than an incidental appearance. It reminds those who witnessed or joined the January uprising of the closure of political and economic life under Mubarak, he said, and of the role of the 2010 elections in deepening the crisis.
Abdel Hafiz described Ezz as a symbol not only of concentrated industrial power but also of political exclusion through the circle around Gamal Mubarak and the NDP’s Policies Secretariat. Bringing those figures forward again, during parliamentary elections he described as tightly engineered, reopened an old wound.
He warned that the authorities risked overlooking the connection between electoral exclusion and the previous regime’s collapse. In his view, recycling familiar figures during a period of economic and political frustration reflected an inability to renew the governing elite or build a modern civilian base. He feared serious consequences if that course continued.
Economic and social researcher Mona Ezzat, however, said Ezz’s appearance at the museum was hardly unexpected. He had remained active in official meetings and government-convened economic discussions, and his companies had continued operating. The public anger was understandable, she said, but the event itself was not the heart of the problem.
For Ezzat, the central issue is the continuation of economic policies that deepen inequality—not whether particular businessmen attend official celebrations.
She argued that the state continued turning to established business figures instead of widening participation to independent economists, academics and researchers offering different development choices. Many of those marginalised voices, she said, had long warned against excessive reliance on construction and real estate without a broader productive strategy.
Construction and tourism matter, Ezzat acknowledged, but they are vulnerable to international shocks. The pandemic and regional wars had demonstrated those risks. A more resilient economy required a diverse industrial, agricultural and productive base capable of generating a wider range of jobs and reducing the influence of a small number of business groups over economic priorities.
She saw the prominence of old figures as a symptom of the absence of a new economic vision. Rather than relying on familiar networks to improve the public image of the economy, she called for independent expertise and development policies grounded in social justice and living standards.
The debate surrounding Ezz and Moustafa therefore extends beyond their individual returns. It concerns the relationship between capital and political authority, the changing balance between private enterprise and state institutions, and whether Egypt’s economic model has meaningfully changed since the grievances that helped drive the January uprising.
