Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, seated, and his two sons Gamal Mubarak, left, and Alaa Mubarak, right, attend a hearing in a courtroom at the Police Academy, Cairo (Photo: AP)
The Swiss Federal Council has extend the freezing of assets held by former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his associates in Switzerland – worth around $782 million – by three years.
The decision on Wednesday will provide more time for the authorities in Egypt to identify the assets’ origins, the council said.
Around $67 million in frozen assets related to deposed Tunisian president Ben Ali will face the same extension, the council added.
“The aim of the asset freeze is to facilitate mutual legal assistance on criminal matters with the affected states and thus to create the preconditions for judicial scrutiny into the origin of suspicious assets. The asset freezes ensure that potentially illicitly acquired assets are not hidden in other financial centres and thus evade judicial clarification,” the council said on its website.
In May, Switzerland proposed a new law to make it easier to freeze assets stolen and stashed away by foreign leaders and return them to their countries of origin.
The draft law would allow Switzerland to freeze the assets of so-called politically exposed persons, or PEPs, as a preventative measure and would set up a framework to confiscate and return assets to the countries from which they were taken.
Switzerland has struggled in recent years to shrug off its decades-old image as a heaven for ill-gotten gains by seizing the assets of deposed dictators and agreeing in 2009 to soften strict bank secrecy to help other countries catch tax cheats.
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