Furore over deal with Mubarak-era minister

An Egyptian court has dropped cases against Rachid Mohammad Rachid, who served as minister of trade and industry under former president Hosni Mubarak, clearing the way for sealing a controversial reconciliation agreement with the ex-official.

The Cairo Criminal Court Saturday closed the cases related to illegal profiteering and waste of public money after a state committee unveiled a financial settlement with Rachid, who has been staying outside Egypt since the 2011 uprising that ended Mubarak’s rule.

“The court’s verdict rehabilitates the status of Engineer Rachid, who will return to the homeland after relevant procedures are finalised,” Rachid’s lawyer, Ashraf Abdul Kheir, said without giving details.

The committee, assigned with regaining public money from Mubarak-era officials, has recently agreed to a reconciliation deal with Rachid after investigations cleared him of seizing or squandering state funds, legal sources said this week.

The deal involves dropping the litigation process against Rachid in return for him to pay a hitherto-unspecified sum of money to the state treasury, they added.

Under the agreement, Rachid, a scion of a big business family, will pay 500 million Egyptian pounds (Dh104 million), according to media reports.

Rachid, aged 61, was Egypt’s minister of trade and industry for seven years starting from 2004.

In July 2011, an Egyptian court sentenced him in absentia to five years in prison on charges of wasting public money and ordered him to pay a fine of Egyptian pounds 4 million. Another court handed him a 15-year jail term in a separate case related to making illegal money. Rachid was ordered to pay hefty fines in other cases.

News of the settlement with him, marking the latest with Mubarak-era figures, has triggered a controversy in Egypt.

Lawyer Essam Al Islambuli this week went to court, demanding the deal be blocked. “The decision to reconcile with Rachid wastes the right of the country to restore illegally-earned money as courts in recent years ordered him to pay more than 2 billion pounds [in different cases],” Al Islambuli said in press remarks.

However, authorities’ steps for out-of-court settlements with former official and businessmen have drawn some praise in the media.

“Hostility with an entire epoch is a crime against history,” prominent columnist Emad Al-Din Adeeb wrote in private newspaper Al Watan.

[But] what is more important than financial reconciliation or court rulings is political reconciliation, which acknowledges the right and role of any one belonging to the era of president Mubarak as long as this person did not commit a crime.”

source : gulfnews