Ex-Mubarak MP donates $6.2m to UK’s Conservative Party 

Former Mubarak-era MP Mohamed Mansour has donated £5 million ($6.2 million) to the UK’s Conservative Party, the biggest one-off donation given to the party in over 20 years.

Writing in The Telegraph about his recent donation, Mansour said: “This country has a very capable prime minister. One who understands how growth is generated in the modern economy,” adding, “my confidence in the prime minister is why I was proud to become a senior treasurer of the Conservative Party last December.”

“I want to give him the best chance of having a full five-year term and so have donated £5m to the party’s election fighting fund. I look at what he has achieved in his first months in office and think what he could do in five years.”

The Conservative Party announced that the former transport minister would be their senior treasurer in December 2022 which raised questions over the role Mansour played in human rights abuses back home.

One of the Tories biggest donors is Unatrac Ltd, Mansour’s private construction company, which has donated more than $737,650.

READ: Egypt court renews the detention of 2 Zamalek football fans on ‘terror’ charges

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who Mansour served under, was overthrown in the 2011 revolution, and sentenced to life in prison for failing to protect protesters from being killed.

Mubarak was responsible for hundreds of cases of torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions.

Mansour was Egypt’s transport minister between 2006 and 2009 during which time 1,000 people died after the Al-Salam Boccaccio ferry capsized in the Red Sea and became known as one of the worst maritime disasters in Egyptian history.

An investigation found that Egyptian authorities allowed the ship to sail between Egypt and Saudi Arabia even though it was overloaded and there was insufficient safety equipment and that there was a cover-up to hide key evidence.

Mansour resigned in 2009 after a train crash in the south of Egypt killed 18 people and underscored the government’s mishandling of transport safety.

The former transport minister has said that President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has made Egypt “much more stable.”

Since his rise to power in 2013 in a bloody military coup, Al-Sisi has overseen a reign of terror on the Egyptian people, including imprisoning over 60,000 people and systematically torturing them.