Adel Hammouda, the journalist and writer who is well known for his support of the coup, has said that Egypt’s upcoming battle will be “Sawiris versus Sisi”. He explained that Coptic businessman Naguib Sawiris has come up with five steps which make up a plot to seize power in Egypt. They are “wealth, culture, cinema, media and politics”.
In an article published yesterday in this week’s edition of Al-Fajr newspaper, Hammouda accused Sawiris of “plotting to rule the country”.
Adel Hammouda was born in 1948. He is an Egyptian journalist, writer and author who worked as chief editor of Rose Al-Yusuf. He then moved to Al-Ahram as a columnist and was founder and chief editor of the second edition of Sawt Al-Ummah newspaper. He founded and heads the editorial board of Al-Fajr newspaper, which is known to for its fierce opposition for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Observers believe that the onslaught on Sawiris, one of the financiers and innovators of the 30 June, 2013, mass rallies, by the pro-Sisi media is being coordinated fully with the security and intelligence services that seem to be very disturbed by the major role Sawiris aspires to play in the country’s future.
Sawiris’s extensive involvement in matters of finance and politics has been causing concern.
In his article, Hammouda listed some of the “bad deals” from which Sawiris accumulated his wealth.
He said that Sawiris’s first step in the plan to govern Egypt was to rally the cultured elite around him enticing them with literary innovation prizes paid for by him. The second step was to rally artists by spending on Cairo’s Cinema Fair. The third was venturing into the world of satellite channels with the setting up of the ONTV channel, which was gradually transferred from a varieties channel to a political one. He later added a news agency and a media training centre to it.
The fourth step, according to Hammouda, was setting up the Egyptian Liberals Party and funding its candidates in the first parliamentary elections held after the January revolution.
He added that once the last step was undertaken, the political ambition of Sawiris became evident, expressing itself or the forces he represents quite clearly. Hammouda wondered whether Sawiris saw himself as a businessman or had just been living for a dream he had long been having and seeking to accomplish, namely to govern Egypt.
He went on to say that the cost of accomplishing this dream may only be a fraction of the wealth Sawiris made out of Egypt and from which he had been spending on looking for the best candidates in various provinces, on funding their election campaigns, on winning over families and clans that have the potential to influence voting and on seizing control of media institutions by means of offering them preferential advertising contracts having known the financial difficulties they were going through.
Hammouda stressed that whatever Sawiris had spent, and is still likely to spend, he would be buying Egypt for a very cheap price, as he put it.
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