Anger in Egypt as Mubarak associate says to run in polls

An announcement by a senior leader of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party has stirred up a hornet’s nest across Egypt.

Ahmed Ezz, a steel production baron and the head of the organisation committee in the party of ousted President Hosni Mubarak, said on Saturday that he would run in Egypt’s next parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for late March.

He added in a statement that he had decided to run in the elections, promising to create what he described as a “developmental breakthrough” in his constituency in the Nile Delta province of Menoufiya.

A short time earlier on Saturday, lawyer Samir Sabri submitted a request at the Prosecutor-General’s office, calling for preventing Ezz from running in the elections.

In his request, Sabri said Ezz was deeply involved in “spoiling Egypt’s political life” under Mubarak, who was ousted in 2011.

Ezz had been put in jail soon after Mubarak’s ouster on charges of corruption, abuse of power and monopoly.

He was, however, released from jail recently after spending three years in this jail.

Ezz was known as a close associate of Mubarak’s younger son, Gamal, who was rumored to be groomed to replace his father.

The parliamentary elections are the third step in Egypt’s transitional roadmap, which was approved following the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July of 2013.