Understanding What Happened to the Sawiris Family

Last March, the Brotherhood appointed General Prosecutor placed Egyptian billionaires Onsi Sawiris and his son Nasif on the travel ban and arrivals watch lists. The government accused their company, Orascom Construction Industries (OCI), of evading taxes worth $2.1 billion.

“The Egyptian Tax Authority has submitted a tax claim to the company to pay 4.7 billion pounds related to the sale of Orascom Building Materials Holding to Lafarge SA in 2007,” the company said on its website. “To date, the company has received no additional claim with any different tax liability.”

The debate over whether OCI owes the government this amount could go on forever and I do not want to discuss that here. I want to tell you why I think the Brotherhood led government went after this particular family.

I believe the target of this whole ordeal was not the 82 years old billionaire- who is not running any of his businesses today – or his son Nasif. The target was Naguib Sawiris and his political activity. Naguib, who literally sold everything he owns in Egypt, including the private satellite channel ON TV, was the major financier behind the Egypt Bloc, the loose coalition of liberal parties that ran against the Islamists during the last parliament elections. Now that the MB is rapidly losing popularity because of their dreadful way of running the country, having a billionaire on the opposition side is pretty dangerous for the regime. He had to be neutralized. He had to be intimidated. Since Naguib got rid of the vast majority of his assets in Egypt, they has to find another weak spot: his family. They went after his old father who could very much spend the rest of his life in a mansion on the French Riviera, instead he returned to Egypt yesterday after settling the tax issue with the government (OCI will pay $1 billion over 7 years).

What if OCI was indeed guilty of tax evasion? Let us assume this is in fact the case. Why was this particular company targeted on its own? Is OCI the only company that evaded taxes? Is OCI the only company the broke the law? Business laws in Egypt are very complicated, unrealistic and many of them do not make any sense. The nature of these business curbing laws led to the following reality: there isn’t a single businessman in Egypt who has never broken the law even if he was merely a cigarettes kiosk owner. If you want to pull down any business in Egypt, all what you have to do is dig in its papers and you will find something illegal there. This is Egypt! In fact, there is nothing called law abiding Egyptians either! You remember that 20 pounds you stuffed inside the government employee’s pocket so that he gives you your driving license in 1 hour instead of 5? Well, that’s called bribery, that’s against the law!

So if the MB appointed General Prosecutor had targeted a whole list of companies, including Islamist owned companies, I might have believed the whole issue was about trying to collect money from any source possible. But the whole saga has the word politics written all over it. The MB is using the same dirty tactics of the Mubarak regime to ensure that money does not go to their rivals.

Now we will have to watch whether Naguib will relent and stay away from financing the opposition. A source told me that a prominent opposition party approached him for finances and he declined. It seems this will be the case in the foreseeable future. It turned out that his old man loves his Cairo apartment more than the Cote d’Azur mansion.