A new report exposes the difficulties of the Mubarak asset recovery

Together with its partner Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Public Eye conducted a new analysis on partly unpublished court documents from Egypt and Switzerland relating to the investigations opened following the Arab Spring. In a report based on exclusive documentation (partly downloadable below), Public Eye sets out what happened in 2016, when Switzerland released one quarter of the Egyptian funds that had been frozen in 2011 – about 180 million Swiss francs. The meagre information communicated by the Swiss authorities at the time contrasts with the importance of this decision.

In August 2017, after six years of investigation, Swiss judicial authorities told the Egyptian General Prosecutor that mutual legal assistance had now been closed without any material results. The case shows how difficult it is to prove the illicit origin of Egyptian money still frozen in Switzerland. For the Egyptian population, the size of the amounts is sufficient to demonstrate its illicit origin. However, the path of international legal assistance did not prove it, and the funds could therefore not be seized. In these circumstances, all the efforts employed following the freezing of the Mubarak funds have served only as a sad show of powerlessness, as the confiscation of the money appears now to be increasingly unlikely.

The report “Failed Recovery” is a case study that examines the difficulties that might arise in any asset recovery process when the usual means of collaboration between the judicial authorities fail, a not-uncommon situation in such matters. In particular, it shows the inadequacy of the Swiss law for dealing with money from Politically Exposed Person (PEP), failing to enable assets of dubious origin to be seized when international legal assistance breaks down. The report also describes how Switzerland’s banks, having accepted the dubious Egyptian money in the first place, then take advantages of this failed recovery. No clear signal has been sent to banks and some may interpret this to mean that, in the future, they will be able to accept such funds with limited risk.

Download the report:

• Failed Recovery: How Switzerland released the Funds of a Famous Egyptian Crony
• Arabic version 

Download the annexes of the report:

• Annex 1: FBI Report dated August 28, 1984 in case Hussein Salem et al – Fraud against the [US] Government
• Annex 2: Credit Suisse contract for the opening of a current account on the name of Hussein Salem and Nazima Salem, concluded August 14, 1974
• Annex 3: Memorandum on Examination of Complaint No. 29 of 2011 Illicit Gains, and Communications No. 60, 921, 999 for the year 2011 Public Prosecutor's Reports - 28/3/2011
• Annex 4: Supplementary Reconciliation Record attached to the record of the proceedings provided for in Article 14 bis of Complaint No. 20 of 2011 Illicit Gains - 23/12/2015

For more information about illicit financial flows check our French or German website.

http://issuu.com/erklaerungvbern/docs/2017_10_publiceye_report_failed-rec?e=3524425/54581226