{"id":16851,"date":"2026-02-15T19:38:05","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T17:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=16851"},"modified":"2026-10-23T23:24:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T21:24:33","slug":"alaa-abed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/alaa-abed\/","title":{"rendered":"Copy and Paste: Nine Websites Publish a Statement Warning Against Sharing Zawia3\u2019s Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around nine news websites and newspapers published a statement attributed to former MP Alaa Abed, in which Counsellor Alaa Abed, a lawyer before the Court of Cassation and the Supreme Constitutional Court, announced that he had taken on the legal defence of Dr Gihan Zaki, the Minister of Culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

The statement said that, in light of content previously published by the Zawia3 website, which it described as \u201cbroadcasting from outside the country\u201d, and which it considered to include offences classified as crimes of insult, defamation and slander, it had been decided to take immediate legal action against anyone who republishes these materials, in whole or in part, by any means whatsoever, as they are crimes punishable under Articles 25, 26 and 27 of Law No. 175 of 2018 on Combating Information Technology Crimes, in addition to Articles 302, 303 and 308 of the Egyptian Penal Code.<\/span><\/p>\n

The statement also called on social media users to seek accuracy and objectivity and not to be swept along by what it described as rumours aimed at sensationalism and confusion, stressing that all legal rights would be exercised and the necessary measures taken in this regard.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the websites that published the statement with the same text, without any change in wording, content or word order, were the websites of<\/span> Al-Watan<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Al-Dostour<\/span><\/a> <\/span>and Cairo 24<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is worth noting that in October 2016, Alaa Abed’s assumption of the chairmanship of the House of Representatives’ Human Rights Committee drew criticism from a number of rights advocates, against the background of reports that he had been accused of involvement in an incident of torturing a citizen during his service in the police in 2005. <\/span>The National Council for Human Rights discussed at the time<\/span><\/a> this issue within the framework of the available information, as the late Hafez Abu Seada, a member of the council and head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, pointed out in statements to Al-Shorouk newspaper that Abed’s name had appeared in the organisation’s annual report in connection with a torture case, in addition to a specialised report issued by the organisation in 2006 on torture in police stations, without the developments of the case or the prosecution’s decision on it having been confirmed at the time. For his part, Abed denied those accusations in statements to the same newspaper.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not the first time that talk has arisen of Gihan Zaki taking legal action against the Zawia3 website: in 2024, media figure Mohamed Nasser<\/a> discussed a message which he said someone had sent him, stating that Zaki had submitted a request to the Public Prosecutor against the website, and claimed that what was stated in the Zawia3 report was untrue, based on the content of that message of unknown source. During the same video, he also asked whether the website works with intelligence agencies, allegations for which he provided no evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is worth noting that Zawia3<\/span> published<\/span><\/a>, in October 2024, a report that addressed incidents linked to suspected financial and administrative irregularities surrounding Gihan Zaki, a member of the House of Representatives’ Legislative Committee appointed by a decision of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, before she later assumed the post of Minister of Culture following the cabinet changes made this February.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report covered the period during which she held the post of CEO of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which did not exceed four months and twenty days from her appointment on 27 May, before her service was abruptly terminated. The report also traced the roots of the incidents under examination back to 2019, when the then Minister of Culture, Inas Abdel Dayem, issued Decision No. 545 of 2019, which included reviewing and examining the annual inventory of all the contents of the Egyptian Academy of Arts in Rome, which Zaki headed as the first Egyptian woman to hold this post since the academy’s founding, in addition to reviewing some financial work and the legal proceedings brought on behalf of or against the academy in Italy.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the report, a committee was formed, headed by Ahmed Salah El-Din Bahgat, then head of the Minister of Culture’s office sector, with the membership of Counsellor Essam Mohamed Refaat, a judge at the State Council, and the accountants Tarek Mohamed Metwally, Azza Ahmed El-Hag and Mahmoud Youssef Hassan, and its work concluded that financial and administrative irregularities had been proven. When the committee travelled to Rome to conduct the investigations, Zaki left the academy’s premises before its arrival, despite having been officially notified on 19 August 2019 that the committee would arrive on 20 August, and she merely annotated the email with the phrase \u201cThey will be hosted\u201d, before wrapping up her personal belongings and shipping them through a freight company in preparation for leaving Italy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The documents showed that she left the premises two days before the end of the legal period, the period during which the handover of financial and administrative affairs was supposed to be completed, which resulted in the academy being left without financial or procedural authorisations, and with a safe whose contents did not exceed EUR 8.89, without any official banking measures being taken to secure the needs of the work.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report also pointed to financial settlements and disbursements made without official authorisations or direct purchase forms, and to the financial attach\u00e9’s inability to prove the legality of the expenditures or to determine where they went, even though they had been issued by decision of the then director of the academy, which prompted the Ministry of Culture’s auditor to reject the financial statements sent, on suspicion that public money had been appropriated without being spent.<\/span><\/p>\n

During the fiscal years from 2012 to 2018, amounts whose disbursement was not supported by official documents were tallied, including EUR 63,251 in 2012\/2013, EUR 11,654 in 2013\/2014, EUR 22,154 in 2014\/2015, EUR 1,578,065 in 2015\/2016, EUR 355,987 in 2016\/2017 and EUR 635,255 in 2017\/2018, all of them surrounded by suspicion of appropriation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The committee identified irregularities in the scrapping of the academy’s belongings, as these operations were not carried out according to the procedures that generate financial revenue; instead, the items were disposed of by paying fees to companies, including the scrapping of the equipment of the exhibition of Egypt’s official and Pharaonic antiquities in 2013 at a cost of EUR 655,345 borne by the academy, and the scrapping of nine furnished rooms in 2014 for EUR 11,240, despite their having been renovated in 2009 and rarely used.<\/span><\/p>\n

In September 2015, an exhibition was opened in the city of Venice at a cost of EUR 32,980 without settlements or official procedures proving the validity of the expenditure. At the Venice International Exhibition in 2016, EUR 1,214 was spent on the travel of the head of the academy on the opening day, in addition to EUR 17,544 for hosting 204 visitors without accounting for taxes or fees to the Italian government, according to the report.<\/span><\/p>\n

The irregularities extended to the employment of irregular labour in 2017 in violation of Italian laws, which resulted in an employment fine of EUR 3,500, and the payment of EUR 11,548 in social insurance, EUR 5,800 in fees for an Italian lawyer, EUR 4,352 in fees for the withdrawal of a lawsuit by an agricultural worker who had been hired in violation of the rules, and EUR 45,483 in compensation to another employee, in addition to EUR 1,300 to a law firm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviews by the investigating bodies also revealed the existence of a temporary advances item under which sums of money were disbursed on the instructions of the head of the academy without official documents or oversight, in addition to the spending of EUR 2,244 over five months on hosting people from outside the academy. It also emerged that no annual inventory of assets had been carried out, that numbered disbursement books had not been adopted, and that there had been a failure to respond to the Ministry of Culture auditor’s objections regarding the settlement of EUR 5 million transferred annually from Cairo, based on instructions not to send the prepared response to the minister’s office sector, which led to the inflation of advance payments, according to what the Central Auditing Organization recorded.<\/span><\/p>\n

Counsellor Essam Mohamed Refaat confirmed the authenticity of the documents obtained by Zawia3, pointing out that the committee identified financial irregularities estimated at around EUR 5 million during the last five years of her work, and that no action was taken on the committee’s report or on the complaint submitted to the Administrative Control Authority until his secondment as legal adviser to the Minister of Culture ended. In 2020, Presidential Decree No. 5 of 2020 was issued appointing her as a member of the House of Representatives, without the committee members being summoned or its statements being heard, according to what he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zawia3 had tried to contact Zaki before publishing this report to enable her to respond to the incidents and information it contained, but she did not respond to the requests for comment at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around nine news websites and newspapers published a statement attributed to former MP Alaa Abed, in which Counsellor Alaa Abed, a lawyer before the Court of Cassation and the Supreme Constitutional Court, announced that he had taken on the legal defence of Dr Gihan Zaki, the Minister of Culture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":15120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[413],"tags":[],"kateb":[710],"class_list":["post-16851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-en","kateb-zawia3-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\u0628\u064a\u0627\u0646-\u0632\u0627\u0648\u064a\u0629-\u062b\u0627\u0644\u062b\u0629-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16851"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23765,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16851\/revisions\/23765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16851"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=16851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}