Lawyers dog Ahmed Shafiq with corruption charges

Ahram Online, Tuesday 26 Jun 2012

Lawyers charge that Shafiq carried water for Mubarak's sons and sold land at below market prices in the 1990s before becoming an aviation minister in 2001

Egypt
An archive photo of the ousted President Hosni Mubarak and the current Presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq (Photo: Reuters)

Less than 24 hours after Ahmed Shafiq lost the presidential contest to Mohamed Morsi, several lawyers have filed complaints with the office of the prosecutor against  Mubarak's last prime minister charging him with corruption.

A high-level judicial source said that councillor Osama El-Seidi, a Justice Ministry investigator, will receive this week the report prepared by experts in the Illicit Profiteering and Real Estate Agency who have examined procedures for the allocation of land sold by the Cooperative for Construction and Housing for Pilots, which was headed by Ahmed Shafiq in the 1990's.

Former MP Essam Sultan of Al-Wasat Party issued a complaint against Shafiq as the former head of the cooperative, accusing him of selling a piece of land in the area of 40,238 square metres to Alaa and Gamal Mubarak in 1993, at an extremely low price of only 75 piasters per square metre.

Meanwhile,  the office of the prosecutor general Abdel Meguid Mahmoud transferred a complaint to El-Seidi against former president Hosni Mubarak and Ahmed Shafiq, in addition to ex-agriculture minister Youssef Wally, for illegally seizing 119 feddans of land (1 feddan= 1.038 acres).

The complaint stated that the defendants seized land that belongs to fish farms illegally allocating it to the Pilots' Association for Land Development, which was headed by Shafiq.

In the months following the ousting of Mubarak, more than 30 separate lawsuits of corruption were filed against Shafiq with the authorities but most of them have not been processed so far.

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