UK: Tory Party announce that ex-Mubarak minister will be senior treasurer

The Conservative Party has announced that a former Mubarak minister, Mohamed Mansour, will be their senior treasurer.

Mansour was transport minister from 2006 to 2009 under Hosni Mubarak, the dictator who ruled over Egypt for 30 years.

The autocrat was overthrown in the 2011 uprising and was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for failing to protect protesters being injured or killed.

Mubarak created the State Security Investigations Agency, which was responsible for hundreds of cases of torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions.

Not only was Mansour a part of this government but he has publicly supported the current dictator, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, who has imprisoned some 60,000 political prisoners.

The Conservatives have made Mohamed Mansour their new Party Treasurer – he is a Tory donor, Egyptian Billionaire, former Egyption Minister – and publicly supported Egyptian President el Sissi (al Sisi)'s coup and repression (as I wrote in 2019) https://t.co/OKkjoAPvsd pic.twitter.com/G9lEw1amzb

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) December 14, 2022

Forbes estimates that Mansour is worth $2.5 billion. His construction company Unatrac has donated more than £600,000 ($737,650) to the Conservative Party.

Unatrac is the British arm of the Mansour Group which owns car dealerships, property and a supermarket chain in Egypt.

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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in 2011 that Mansour and his cousin, the former Egyptian housing minister Ahmed El-Maghrabi, were shareholders in the parent company of the developer Palm Hills. Mansour’s brother was the chairman of Palm Hills.

That same year an Egyptian court ruled that a state land deal of a luxury residential development made by Palm Hills was illegal.

During his first year as transport minister Mansour survived a torrent of criticism after 1,000 people died after the Al-Salam Boccaccio ferry capsized in the Red Sea, one of the worst maritime disasters in Egyptian history.

An investigation into the incident found that Egyptian authorities collaborated with the owners of the ship to allow it to sail between Egypt and Saudi Arabia even though it was overloaded and did not have sufficient safety equipment.

At the time, it was reported that a cover-up was launched to suppress key evidence of the Egyptian authorities’ criminal negligence and the connections between key officials and the owner of the boat.

Mansour resigned in 2009 after a train crash in the south of Egypt killed 18 people. The crash, one of several over recent years, sparked an outcry over the government’s handling of transport safety.

Pressure was on Mansour to answer why the deadly crash happened after he himself had led an expensive overhaul of the railways.

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