Special documents: Integrated map of the Brotherhood plan to strike “Egyptian economy”

The sun of mid-August 2013 was on the way to sunset, when the scene in Egypt started to look frightening, as the Brotherhood began their madness all over the country burning and killing. 

On the evening of August 14, 5 years ago, the smoke rose from 132 churches and 32 police departments in the govern-orates of Giza, Minya, Cairo, Alexandria, Beni Suef, Qalyubiya, and Sharqia.

At first, it seemed a hysterical reaction from a terrorist group, and followed by massive demonstrations, in the millions, against a ruling that lasted only a year, but the days after that revealed the truth.

Chaos was nothing but the easy part of the Brotherhood’s terrorist plot to respond to its isolation from government, and it was guaranteed by group’s cadres who were forced to “obey”, while the others was left to the emperors of money and the keys to the treasures of its huge economic empires.

After 2013, which witnessed the fall of the Brotherhood from the rule of Egypt, the group drew a new plan to destroy the as revenge for their fail, relying on expanding the scope of terrorist operations to limit the investment patch, manipulating the Egyptian market by collecting currencies and raising the price of the dollar, to spoil the foreign investment environment.

Malik  group

At empty center on the outskirts of Giza, west of the Egyptian capital, our journey began to unveil a mafia-like network that terrorist group leaders had spent about 4 decades building it.

In a humble house in “Awsim” on the outskirts of Giza, Muhammad was waiting for us, he is a former employee of Hassan Malik Company, one of the most prominent businessmen in the Brotherhood’s economic empire, and the first suspect in case No. 721 is restricting the security of a supreme state known to the media as “harming the national economy.”

Karam Mohamed was very generous with us but he didn’t say anything and kept silent in front of our questions, after more than two hours of trying to convince him, he decided to testify.

Mohamed joined the Malik Group Company, owned by Hassan Malik, with its main branch in Heliopolis, east Cairo, in 2009.

During the first years of his work, which spanned five years, he realized that there is a dark side to the company’s work and files that were not available to everyone, only a small group surrounding Malik, most of them work in accounts and treasury treasures, everything seemed normal, but things changed by the spring of 2011

“The talk was all over the place that ‘’Malik Group’’ will expand enormously and will hold broad partnerships with international companies,” Mohamed says, adding, “Foreign delegations were constantly visiting the place, and on one occasion I heard from a senior employee of the company that he was studying Including some troubled companies from the public sector.

In June 2013, things were changing again, this time on the opposite way.

The first procedure, according to Muhammad, was the process of withdrawing large amounts of money from banks and depositing them at the company’s headquarters.. “I remember that many papers and documents were transferred from the company during that period, but I do not know where it was transferred” but another person knew.

Fares Abdel-Gawad … “the puzzle”

Fares Abdel-Gawad was more like “a puzzle”, the man who supposed to have answers to our questions is absent from the search engines, and he himself has been absent from his residence in al-Salam city eastern Cairo since 2015, but fortunately appears in the papers of the case 721 restricting the security of a supreme state.

Our difficult mission was to get the files of the case restricted by No. 721 inventory the security of a supreme state, which surrounded by great secrecy because it is a case related to national security directly, and after a work mission that lasted about a month, hardly we succeeded to get  the judicial files related to the full case, as well as very important and dangerous information from Egyptian judicial sources and security authorities familiar with this files.

Muhammad used to know Abduljawad as one of the most important aides of Hassan Malik and chief accountant of the Malik Group, but the documents found in his possession indicate what is more dangerous.

According to the case papers, a man has in possession of a file consisting of 6 papers that includes the plan of action of the specific committees, which are responsible for the armed action by organizing for a period of 3 months in different geographical sectors, and a binding of 14 papers containing the names of companies in Gulf countries, and other companies in the United States, and Another paper has a map of gas lines in Egypt.

The documents draw a perfect map of the Brotherhood’s plan to destroy the Egyptian economy, and a mechanism for injecting huge numbers of money into the paths of terrorist organizations in Sinai, and it also gives an integrated picture of the financial file in the group’s mafia.

In a country that relies on imports to a large extent, and still recovering from a pressing economic crisis, and suffers from deep structural problems, and barely began to implement its reform program, the weak point was the exchange rate of the dollar.

According to official data, Egypt needed about one and a half billion dollars a month (11.7 billion pounds) to provide its needs of strategic goods in 2015.

The biggest side of the risks came from overseas. Professional adventurers in Europe and the United States deliberately speculated in emerging markets, in what is known as hot money, and the Brotherhood guaranteed pressure to double the crisis.

The process of transferring money outside the country was like  hitting two birds with one stone in relation to the Brotherhood, on the one hand allowing the group to evade the efforts of the authorities in Egypt to dry up the sources of terrorism, and on the other hand confusing the political scene in the country by putting pressure on the economy.

Since late 2013, the Egyptian authorities have started to confiscate the terrorist organization’s funds, and the group’s property list that was included in the reservation decisions included the funds of 1589 members from the affiliates and supporters of the Brotherhood, 118 companies with different activities, 1133 NGOs, 104 schools, 69 hospitals, and 33 websites. And satellite channel.

The documents revealed that after seizing a number of leaders of the terrorist organization and confiscating their money, the group developed a plan  aimed at striking the Egyptian economy by smuggling foreign exchange outside the country by exploiting its financial institutions, in conjunction with providing financial support to its members and specific committees to carry out armed operations in Egypt.

Dr. Abdel-Moneim El-Sayed, Director of the Cairo Center for Economic Studies, said, “The group has already started with a two-side strategy to prevent the dollar from entering the country, and they have relied on this to purchase currency from Egyptians abroad through intermediaries.”

Remittances from Egyptians abroad represent an important source of foreign currency for the country.

Remittances of Egyptians abroad recorded their lowest level during the five years of conflict from 2013 to 2019 in the 2015-2016 fiscal year, reaching 17.1 billion dollars (132.6 billion pounds), (the average dollar price in 2015 is 7.8 pounds), down a billion and a half billion Dollars from the previous fiscal year.

The second part of the war

As for the second part of the Brotherhood’s plan, it depended on withdrawing the dollar from the local market and smuggling it abroad, to double the sense of the crisis and reproduce its hellish plan.

The black market for process trade has been a regular reality in the country since the 1970s, and during the crisis years of 2013 the margin of disparity between the official price of the dollar and the black market touched about half the pound, but by 2016 the dollar was setting a record in the black market by a difference of about 4 Pounds for its official price.

It was clear that there was manipulation, but the last three months of 2015 were decisive, as the market full in need by withdrawing large amounts of dollars and smuggling them abroad.

In that period, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Egypt announced the closure of 53 exchange companies, due to manipulation in the currency market; of which 26 companies were permanently closed and 27 companies were closed between 3 months and a year. ”

The Brotherhood activity in dollar purchases in the country has led to its security monitoring.

In early January 2016, security forces arrested a young man in his thirties, while he was waiting at the passenger terminal at Cairo Airport on a trip to Jordan. In case papers 721, the Supreme State Security lists part of his story.

Mustafa Hammam was carrying, during his arrest, the equivalent of one million and 650 thousand dollars (12.870 million pounds), three mobile phones, a passport and airline tickets, and a letter attributed to an exchange company that included that the amount is directed to a company owned by the Brotherhood and working in the field of import and export. But Hammam’s confessions during the case’s investigations led to the disclosure of an aspect of the Brotherhood’s network.

According to the documents, Hassan Malik and his partner Abdul Rahman Muhammad Mustafa Saudi, assigned a number of the organization’s members: Ahmed Saeed Ahmed Abu Al-Muati, Karam Abdel Wahab Abdel Jalil, Faten Ahmed Ismail, Najdat Yahya Basyouni, Ashraf Abu Zaid, Ahmed Abu Zaid, Faris Al Sayed Abdel Jawad, and Islam Taha, to smuggle the money Outside the country via the organization’s Belonging to Brotherhood organization, the most prominent of which are the Tawhid and Al-Nuran Exchange companies owned by the accused Karam Abdel Jalil, and the Western Exchange, owned by the accused Najdat Yahya.

Smuggling of funds through the Muslim Brotherhood network continued to take place through the wide door of Cairo International Airport, and the share of this aspect of them amounted to about two billion pounds, according to a statement by the former Attorney General.

An informed judicial source said that the terrorist organization succeeded in smuggling about 160 million dollars (the dollar was equivalent to 7.80 Egyptian pounds) outside Egypt in the period following the June 30 revolution, indicating that the country witnessed a liquidity period that helped the group implement its plan.

The source pointed out that the money was transferred to Gulf and Arab countries with the help of some corrupt workers at Cairo Airport and the sea port.

In exchange for a financial bribe of two million Egyptian pounds, three security personnel working at Cairo Airport facilitated the transfer of the dollar out of the country.

And in bags and parcels passed through the distinctive service portals (VIP) as bags for investors and businessmen, and most of the money smuggled on the airline to the Kamal Exchange Company in an Arab country, as it is parcels for the companies of import and export of furniture and Rawda for exchange in successive operations, without that Pass through inspection gates and devices, or uncover bags leading to the customs area of ​​Cairo Air Port.

We contacted with (M.A) one of the most important witnesses in the case, he worked in the security sector at Cairo Airport at the time of the accident, and said that the Egyptian law allows travelers to carry a sum of money that does not exceed 10 thousand dollars, but the distinctive service portals at the airport are usually assigned to only one of the employees Because there are few persons pass by it, which is the important reason for facilitating the exit of funds after receiving bribes.

He confirmed that he gave his detailed testimony before the court, and those responsible for the incident were punished and they were dismissed from work permanently.

The former Egyptian Attorney General Nabil Ahmed Sadiq issued a decision at the end of 2017 to refer 3 police secretaries to the Criminal Court on charges of requesting and accepting a bribe in exchange for helping to smuggle nearly two billion pounds out of the country consecutively through the gates and inspection devices of the customs area at Cairo Air Port without seizing it, according to What was published by the local press at the time.