The son of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has said he and family members were innocent of corruption charges made in international courts after the country’s 2011 popular uprising forced his father to step down.
In a video statement posted on Tuesday, Gamal Mubarak said recent court decisions in the EU and elsewhere demonstrated their innocence — though he did not explain how the family had amassed its significant wealth.
In February, a massive leak of Credit Suisse clients’ information showed Gamal Mubarak and his brother, Alaa, to have held at least $197.5 million in the bank at one point.
“The facts have now been established and the false allegations have been unequivocally rebutted. The historical record has thus been independently and judicially corrected,” Gamal Mubarak, the former president's one-time heir apparent, said in the video released on YouTube.
He blamed Egyptian judicial authorities for taking the issue to international courts.
The deposed president’s family has spent much of the 11 years since the uprising trying to rehabilitate its image.
The 2011 protests were built on calls for an end to perceived systematic police brutality, deep-rooted embezzlement and government corruption in Egypt. It was also sparked by growing concerns that Gamal Mubarak was being readied to succeed his father, who was in power for 29 years.
The international anti-corruption group Transparency International has estimated that as president, Mubarak stole some $70 billion in public funds.
The former president died in 2020, aged 91.
In April, Swiss prosecutors decided not to file charges after concluding a decade-long investigation into alleged money laundering and organised crime linked to Mubarak’s circles in Egypt. They also said they would release some $430m frozen in Swiss banks.
The same month, the General Court of the European Union ruled that the rights of Mubarak’s wife, two sons and their wives had not been respected during a local Egyptian investigation of his assets, on which the prosecution was depending.
The ruling meant EU sanctions on the Mubaraks’ accounts were deemed unlawful and lifted. Gamal Mubarak said his family was being reimbursed for their legal costs related to the case.
Ruling condemned by global transparency movement
Transparency International condemned the move, saying it would show corrupt leaders around the world that they can act with impunity.
The EU and Swiss investigations were part of a series of court proceedings against the Mubaraks following the mass protests. The father and the two sons were first detained in April 2011, two months after the uprising forced Mubarak to step down as part of the Arab Spring protest movement.
The Supreme Military Council led by the late Field-Marshal Mohammed Tantawi, Mubarak's longtime defence minister, took over the reins of power from Mubarak but later gave way to President Mohammed Morsi after elections in 2012. Morsi, an Islamist from the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, was deposed by the military amid street protests against his divisive, one-year rule.
Following a lengthy trial, Hosni Mubarak was acquitted of killing protesters during the 18-day uprising against his autocratic rule.
The two sons and their father were sentenced to three years in prison following their conviction of embezzling funds set aside for the restoration and maintenance of presidential palaces, using the money to upgrade their private residences.
The sons were released in 2015 for time served, while Mubarak walked free in 2017. The trio paid back to the state the money they embezzled.
The sons were briefly detained in September 2018 pending their trial on charges of stock market manipulation. They were released on a bail of $5,600 each after an appeals court accepted a motion moved by their defence lawyers to remove the judge who ordered their detention. They were acquitted in 2020.
