More than a decade after the 25 January revolution, which aimed to dismantle the system of political and economic influence entrenched under former President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak, a number of prominent businessmen of that era, foremost among them Ahmed Ezz and Hisham Talaat Moustafa, are returning to the forefront once again.
Their striking appearance at the opening ceremony of the Grand Egyptian Museum stirred wide controversy in political and media circles, as their presence, whether as prominent guests or as sponsors of the event, seemed a symbolic signal of a return to reliance on faces of the old regime in the economic system. Although Ezz and Talaat did not disappear entirely during the past years, their declared participation in a national event of this size brought back to mind deferred questions about the extension of the policies and influence of the men of the Mubarak era into the state’s economic present.
After years following the trial of businessman Ahmed Ezz after the January revolution, the verdict issued against Talaat Moustafa on the charge of killing the Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim, and their relative distance from the public scene, the two men have returned to become influential actors in the Egyptian economy: Ahmed Ezz regained his position in the steel market after financial settlements with the state that exceeded the EGP 1 billion barrier, while Hisham Talaat Moustafa returned through expansion in luxury housing projects and cooperation with government bodies in the New Administrative Capital and other real estate projects.
The roles of Ahmed Ezz and Hisham Talaat Moustafa under Mubarak were not only economic; they formed a clear model of the marriage of money and power. Ezz was one of the most prominent symbols of what was known at the time as the “New Guard“, an alliance led by Gamal Mubarak within the National Democratic Party, and he faced direct accusations of engineering the electoral scene in the 2010 parliamentary elections, the last elections of the Mubarak era, in a way that guaranteed the National Democratic Party’s continuation in power and the expansion of its influence within parliament.
Hisham Talaat Moustafa’s rise, by contrast, came through the gateway of the luxury housing and real estate sector, which in that era formed fertile ground for the intersection of interests between businessmen and the state, through privileges and legislation designed to serve the investment circles close to power. While critics see this return as a revival of the old system with new faces, the government justifies this direction as an investment in existing economic expertise to attract investment and stimulate growth in light of the current financial crisis. The state sees Mubarak’s businessmen as “partners” in easing the burdens of the economic crisis and financing the major national projects.
Ahmed Ezz
Ahmed Ezz’s rise began in the 1990s, and within a few years he became one of the most prominent symbols of the structural transformation in the relationship between capital and power during the era of former President Hosni Mubarak. Ezz rose rapidly from running a small steel rolling mill in Sadat City to near-total control of the steel market in Egypt, benefiting from a series of acquisition deals carried out with the support of banking facilities and close relations with economic decision-making circles, specifically with Gamal Mubarak, the president’s younger son.
Ahmed Ezz was born in 1959 to a family working in the building materials trade, and began his economic activity in 1995 when he submitted a request to Hasballah El-Kafrawy, the former Minister of Reconstruction, to obtain a plot of land in Sadat City to set up a steel rolling mill at a value not exceeding EGP 200,000. Ezz’s name was not known at that time, but the “Al-Gawhara Ceramics” project he founded in the early 1990s was an important launching point that opened the doors of the business world to him.
During 1993 and 1994, Ahmed Ezz obtained bank loans worth more than EGP 1,600,000,000, which he used to contract with the Italian company “Danieli” to build the “Al Ezz Rebar” plant with a production capacity of 300,000 tonnes. Two years later, specifically in 1996, he contracted to build a new production line with a capacity of 630,000 tonnes and a melting furnace with a capacity of 600,000 tonnes, bringing the total cost of the plant to about EGP 304 million.
As his commercial activity expanded, Ezz began looking for a “political umbrella” to protect his economic rise, and gradually drew closer to Gamal Mubarak, whose star was rising within the National Democratic Party, the ruling party at the time. The 1996 Middle East and North Africa conference represented a turning point in the paths of the two men, as Ezz appeared publicly beside Gamal Mubarak for the first time, in a symbolic scene that inaugurated the beginning of a new alliance between rising capital and political power.
In 1998, Ezz became one of the first contributors to the “Future Generation” association founded by Gamal Mubarak, the association that served as a platform for building mutual economic and political influence between businessmen and the circle around the president’s son. Since then, Ezz’s empire saw great expansion: he monopolised the ceramics industry in partnership with Mohamed Abou El-Enein, expanded his activity in steel, obtained vast areas of land in Suez and Toshka, and also became deputy head of the Federation of Egyptian Industries, positions that strengthened his place in circles of economic influence.
His great leap reached its peak in 1999, when Ezz exploited the liquidity crisis facing the Alexandria National Iron and Steel Company (Dekheila) as a result of dumping policies that allowed the entry of imported steel from Ukraine and Eastern European countries, and submitted an offer to contribute to the company’s capital. Indeed, part of the shares of the shareholding employees’ union was transferred to his company “Al Ezz Rebar Manufacturing”, and only one month later three million shares were issued in his favour at a value of EGP 456 million, making him the main shareholder in the company.
In February 2000, Ahmed Ezz became chairman of the board of the Dekheila company, and the following year, 2001, he issued instructions to cut rebar production inside the company, which led to a severe liquidity crisis and the accumulation of about 45,000 tonnes per month of “billet” raw material. Later, Ezz bought those accumulated quantities at a price of EGP 68 per tonne for his factories in Sadat City, where he reprocessed them into rebar, which was considered at the time an exploitation of his position to achieve personal gains at the expense of the public company.
At the start of the new millennium, this influence was crowned by his entry into parliament as the deputy for the Sadat constituency in the 2000 elections, then his selection as a member of the General Secretariat of the National Democratic Party in February 2002, as part of what was known at the time as the “New Guard” led by Gamal Mubarak to reshape the party on foundations closer to businessmen.
From his position inside parliament, Ezz chaired the Plan and Budget Committee of the People’s Assembly, and became one of the most prominent faces of the alliance between money and politics under Mubarak. By 2010, Ezz controlled more than 60% of the Egyptian steel market, becoming one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of modern Egyptian economics and politics.
After the 25 January revolution of 2011 and the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Ahmed Ezz faced several charges in cases of monopoly, profiteering and money laundering; he was arrested in February 2011 as part of a campaign against businessmen close to the former regime. In one of the cases, known as the “steel licences” case, a verdict was issued against him in September 2011 sentencing him to ten years in prison and a fine of about EGP 660 million; and then, in March 2013, the Giza Criminal Court sentenced him to prison for 37 years and fined him about EGP 2 billion on charges of profiteering, seizing public funds and grave deliberate damage worth EGP 5 billion, in his deal to acquire the Dekheila Steel company.
But the matter did not stop there; the state later began a policy of “financial reconciliation” with some elements of the former regime, Ezz among them, as part of a track to recover financial returns for a state facing a major economic crisis. In March 2018, the Cairo Criminal Court decided to close the last criminal case against Ezz after he reached a financial settlement with the state amounting to about EGP 1.7 billion, including about EGP 600 million recovered from funds frozen abroad.
In 2021, Ezz returned once again to the economic scene, but this time through the gateway of a huge acquisition deal that brought his name back to the forefront: he acquired the entire stake of businessman Ahmed Abou Hashima in the Egyptian Steel group for about EGP 2.5 billion.
Hisham Talaat Moustafa
Hisham Talaat Moustafa’s rise began in the shadow of the era of the marriage between money and power under former President Hosni Mubarak, as one of the most prominent economic figures close to the circles of power. Moustafa was born in 1959 in Alexandria, and inherited from his father the “Talaat Moustafa” group of companies, but during the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium he was able to transform it from a medium-sized contracting company into a huge real estate empire comprising projects that are among the largest in Egypt’s modern history, such as “Madinaty”, “Al-Rehab” and the “Four Seasons” in Cairo and Sharm El-Sheikh.
In the mid-1990s, Hisham Talaat Moustafa’s star rose: in addition to inheriting the “Talaat Moustafa Group Holding”, he was able within less than two decades to transform it into a real estate empire enjoying huge privileges from the state, benefiting from his position within the National Democratic Party and his close relations with Gamal Mubarak and Ahmed Ezz.
From 1996, Hisham Talaat began obtaining vast areas of land in East Cairo, 6th of October and Alexandria through direct allocation decisions from the New Urban Communities Authority, at prices far below their market value. The most prominent of these was the allocation of 8,000 feddans to establish the “Madinaty” project in 2005, under a contract with the Ministry of Housing by which Talaat Moustafa Group obtained the land without it being offered in a public auction, in return for the state receiving a share of only 7% of the residential units built, in addition to the payment of dues in kind and in cash worth EGP 12.9 billion, equivalent to about USD 1.7 billion, a share described by experts and research centres as “unfair to public funds”.
The group also obtained land in the “Al-Rehab” project in New Cairo with an area exceeding 2.2 million square metres at a price of EGP 900 per metre, while the market price per metre at the time exceeded EGP 1,000 and has now reached EGP 90,000 per metre, in addition to other areas in Alexandria and Sharm El-Sheikh on which were built the hotels “Four Seasons” and “San Stefano”, in contracts marred by a lack of transparency and overlapping interests between parties from the state and the group.
After years of economic and political influence, one of the most sensational cases in the history of Egyptian businessmen erupted in August 2008, when Talaat was accused of inciting the murder of the Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim inside her apartment in Dubai, at the hands of former police officer Mohsen El-Sukkari, in return for USD 2 million.
In May 2009, the Cairo Criminal Court issued a death sentence by hanging against both Hisham Talaat Moustafa and Mohsen El-Sukkari, after convicting them of planning and carrying out the crime. But a year later, specifically in March 2010, the Court of Cassation overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial, and the second trial ended in September 2010 as well with a new verdict sentencing Hisham Talaat to 15 years in prison and El-Sukkari to life imprisonment.
Despite the verdict, the influence of Talaat Moustafa Group did not disappear from the market; the “Madinaty”, “Al-Rehab” and “Four Seasons” projects continued to expand, through the management of his brothers and the board of directors, which preserved their positions within the group.
In June 2017, a presidential pardon was issued for Hisham Talaat Moustafa as part of a list including hundreds of prisoners, and he returned to the economic scene officially, gradually regaining his position through strategic partnerships with the state in the New Administrative Capital, New Alamein and the “Noor” project east of Cairo.
In August 2023, the Cairo Criminal Court accepted the request submitted by Egyptian businessman Hisham Talaat Moustafa for his rehabilitation in the case of the 2008 killing of the Lebanese star Suzanne Tamim, 6 years after his release from prison.
“Rehabilitation” entails erasing the conviction for the convicted person and the removal of everything resulting from it in terms of incapacity, deprivation of rights and all other criminal effects (standing and voting in elections) and others, according to Article 552. Since that date, Talaat Moustafa’s name has returned to the voter rolls once again, at a time when many politicians who completed their sentences have been unable to obtain the execution of a rehabilitation ruling, according to a report published by Zawia3 entitled Banned from Voting: Egyptians Who Completed Their Sentences but Were Deprived of the Right to Vote.
A Civilian Facade for the Military Establishment
Speaking to “Zawia3”, economic researcher Elhamy El-Merghany believes that the return of faces associated with the Mubarak regime to the forefront of the official economic scene expresses the recovery by the symbols of this regime of their old positions “with all the corruption and nepotism they carried”, pointing out that Ahmed Ezz’s appearance at the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, despite his previously calling for legalising the antiquities trade, is “a negative indicator reflecting the state’s loss of sensitivity towards the political memory of Egyptians and of the Egyptian citizen in general”.
El-Merghany adds that the reasons for the return of Mubarak’s men to the forefront are linked to the need of today’s ruling capitalism for a “civilian facade” with which to respond to the criticism and growing pressure from international financial institutions over the expansion of the military establishment’s economic activity and the role of military officers in running vital economic sectors. Hence, he believes that the regime has not actually sought to build a new elite that expresses its orientations and policies, but has preferred to draw on the “old guard” as a symbol of the civilian face of the regime, in an attempt to beautify the current economic reality.
He continues that this return “reveals a crisis in the class structure of the current regime and its continuous attempt to search for cosmetics for its policies and laws, as he describes it, through well-known names from the Mubarak era”, considering that this is what provoked the anger of public opinion and of everyone who links these faces to the era of corruption that sparked the January revolution. Anyone who contemplates the path of these men (how they began, how they accumulated their wealth, and how they turned from businessmen into decision-makers) finds a clear justification for the popular anger that followed their return and their taking centre stage once again.
For his part, Akram Ismail, a member of the central committee of the Bread and Freedom Party (under formation), believes that Ahmed Ezz represents one of the largest industrial empires in Egypt, as the Ezz Steel group is considered “a major industrial fortress” whose roots go back to the Mubarak era, regardless of his close relationship at the time with “Gamal Mubarak”. He points out that Ezz, after the experience of political downfall and what he faced after the January revolution, has become “more submissive to the wishes of the agencies”, so that when he is asked to contribute to financing or supporting a project “he responds without hesitation”, unlike other businessmen such as Naguib Sawiris, who has retained a margin of financial and political independence as a result of the extension of his economic activities outside Egypt and his lack of a direct connection to the Mubarak regime or its security agencies.
Ismail adds that Hisham Talaat Moustafa and Ahmed Ezz are “the closest to the state and its agencies”, and that they in turn benefit from that relationship and are keen to meet its wishes, which makes their appearance at major national projects, such as the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, deliberate and laden with symbolic meanings. The museum, according to him, is “a project that began under Mubarak and was completed under El-Sisi, and it was natural for some of the faces who took part in founding it to appear in the scene of its opening”, especially since some of them actually contributed to financing the project and its marketing sponsorship.
Ismail believes that there is continuity between the Mubarak and El-Sisi regimes, but with a fundamental shift in the nature of the capitalist class. Under Mubarak, businessmen were linked to a narrow network of political interests centred on the succession project and Gamal Mubarak, while under El-Sisi “the claws of this old class were clipped” and it was replaced by a new network of businessmen “structurally linked to the bureaucratic apparatus and the state”, in which the military establishment plays a bigger role in running the economy, while faces such as Ezz and Talaat Moustafa maintain their presence as a “civilian facade for the regime”, without having a project to share in power as in the past.
An Inability to Renew the Faces
On the other hand, journalist and writer Mohamed Saad Abdel Hafiz, a member of the Journalists Syndicate’s board, believes that Ahmed Ezz’s return to the public forefront is not a passing detail but “a signal” that brought back to the minds of the generation that witnessed and took part in the January revolution the corruption of political and economic life under Mubarak, and specifically the man in the shadows whose name was linked to the inheritance of power and to the “engineering” of the 2010 elections, which were the straw that broke the back of the Mubarak regime.
Speaking to Zawia3, Abdel Hafiz adds that Ezz was not merely a businessman who monopolised the steel industry and accumulated wealth through deals tainted by corruption, but was the emblem of the monopolisation of the political sphere itself, through a closed circle associated with Gamal Mubarak and the Policies Secretariat, the circle that paved the way for what was known at the time as the succession project.
He continues that the return of these faces at a sensitive political moment witnessing preparations for “engineered” parliamentary elections, as he described them, is provoking wide resentment among the generation that took part in the January revolution, considering that summoning the symbols of Gamal Mubarak’s group in particular “opens an old wound” and reminds people of the reasons that drove them to take to the streets in 2011.
Abdel Hafiz warns that “re-presenting the leftovers of the Mubarak regime at a moment when Egyptians are suffering from economic and political failures” represents a short-sighted reading by the authorities, because it ignores that the fall of the former regime began with its manipulation of elections and exclusion of its opponents, which he believes is being repeated today, specifically in the parliamentary elections.
He concludes by saying that “summoning the men of the Policies Secretariat back to the front of the scene is not without worrying implications”, as it reveals the ruling elite’s inability to renew its blood or build a modern civilian base, and its contentment with recycling the old faces, which may have “dire consequences for the political system itself if this course is not reviewed”.
In this context, Mona Ezzat, a researcher on economic and social affairs, believes that Ahmed Ezz’s appearance at the celebration of the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum was not surprising, saying that “Ezz never disappeared from the public scene in the first place”, as he remained present over the past years in official meetings and economic discussions called by the government, and also took part in filmed meetings as part of the preparatory campaigns for the celebration. She adds that his companies continued their activity without interruption, which makes the popular anger that his appearance caused understandable, but it “is not the crux of the crisis”.
Mona explains that the heart of the problem does not lie in these faces attending official events, but in the continuation of the same economic policies that entrenched class inequality and deepened social crises, pointing out that the state still summons businessmen associated with the previous era instead of drawing on experts and economists who offer real alternatives for getting out of the current predicament. She says that “the faces being marginalised” (economists and other academics and researchers) have long warned of the dangers of insisting on the same development approach based on construction and real estate, without paying attention to broader productive reforms.
The researcher believes that the state needs to reconsider its economic priorities, as the excessive focus on sectors such as construction and tourism, despite their importance, cannot guarantee long-term stability given their fragility in the face of global crises, as the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic and the regional wars showed. She insists that “real economic strength stems from diversity”, that is, from the existence of a coherent productive, industrial and agricultural base, in a way that creates broader job opportunities and limits the monopoly of a few businessmen over the helm of the economy and their steering of it to serve their private interests.
Ezzat concludes by saying that “the return of these faces is nothing but a reflection of the absence of a new economic vision”; instead of relying on the old crony capitalism to beautify the economic scene, it would have been more fitting to widen the circle of participation to include independent experts and actors capable of putting forward sustainable development solutions that take into account social justice and improving the standard of living.
The return of Ahmed Ezz and Hisham Talaat Moustafa to the forefront of the Egyptian economy more than a decade after the January revolution shows that the system of the alliance between capital and power has not actually been dismantled, but has been reproduced in new forms suited to the current political and economic circumstances.
While the state sees these “Mubarak’s men” as a means to support the economy in its crisis, broad sections of politicians and experts see their return as a symbol of the continuation of the approach of monopoly and the absence of economic justice that sparked the January revolution in the first place.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that Gamal Mubarak is the eldest son of former President Hosni Mubarak; in fact he is the younger son, and the eldest is Alaa Mubarak.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that the Court of Cassation overturned Hisham Talaat Moustafa’s death sentence in September 2010; in fact it ruled to overturn it and order a retrial on 4 March 2010, while the verdict of the second trial was issued in September 2010.
