24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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Out of parliament, into jail
Following a conviction on corruption charges, businessman Fawzi El-Sayed has become the third MP to lose his parliamentary membership in only two months, reports Gamal Essam El-Din.
Acting in accordance with a ruling by a Cairo criminal court, 347 MPs voted unanimously on Monday to strip businessman Fawzi El-Sayed of his parliamentary membership.
El-Sayed
El-Sayed, chairman of El-Tawfikiya Construction and Development Company (TCDC) and the ruling National Democratic Party's MP for the Cairo suburb of Nasr City, was sentenced on 15 January to three years in prison for forging official documents to obtain construction licences without paying the required fees. The estimated cost of these fees is LE28.2 billion.
El-Sayed's removal brings to three the number of deputies who have been stripped of their parliamentary since the current Assembly took over in December 2000. Independent MPs Rami Lakah and Talaat Mutawie, both businessmen, were removed from parliament on 18 November on the grounds that they hold dual nationality.
A report prepared by the Assembly's Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Committee indicated that the ruling is binding on parliament, even though El-Sayed still has the right to file a final appeal with the Court of Cassation -- Egypt's highest court. Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour emphasised that article 469 of the Criminal Law states that with the exception of capital punishment, sentences handed down by criminal courts must be implemented, even if defendants have the right to file an appeal with the Court of Cassation.
El-Sayed, 54, was briefly imprisoned in 1994 on the same charges, but he was released five months later, when he agreed to deposit LE29 million in a state bank to settle the fees. He ran in the November 2000 parliamentary election as an independent for the Nasr City seat. Later, El-Sayed joined the NDP and was even appointed as the chairman of NDP's district bureau in Nasr City.
Emboldened by his success, El-Sayed submitted a request to the prosecutor-general demanding that his name be removed from the list of persons banned from leaving the country. But his request was turned down when investigations indicated that the case against him was far from over.
Things darkened further for El-Sayed when in April 2001 prosecutor-general asked parliament to strip him of his parliamentary immunity so that an investigation into charges of forgery could be pursued. In his request, the prosecutor-general emphasised that the 1994 charges against El-Sayed were never dropped.
The charges against El-Sayed were based on the investigation of the Administrative Control Authority, which at that time informed the prosecutor-general's office that the TCDC chairman (El-Sayed) was involved in forging some 24 official documents. In cooperation with two officials in East Cairo's public notary offices, El-Sayed allegedly falsified the signatures of people whose plots of land he had purchased to construct his buildings on. The documents allowed El-Sayed to supply the buildings, which were constructed without the appropriate permits, with electricity and water in the names of the former landowners.
Throughout the period from 1984 to 1992, El-Sayed was able to buy at least twelve large plots of land in Nasr City. The acquisitions were suspicious, given that El-Sayed was an average-income citizen working for seven years as a conscript in the Egyptian Air Force. When it was revealed that El-Sayed owned some 40 apartment buildings in Nasr City, he was dubbed by the local press as the "the whale of Nasr City."
Defending himself before parliament's Legislative and Constitutional Court, El-Sayed claimed that his arrest in 1994 was made on an order issued personally by former Interior Minister Hassan El-Alfi. El-Sayed charged he was being punished for refusing to include El-Alfi's sons in his construction deals, but El-Alfi dismissed the allegations as a well-rehearsed performance. Last June, parliament agreed to strip El-Sayed of his immunity and he was finally referred for trial before a criminal court in November.
Several persons are expected to compete in the Nasr City by-elections to snag the vacated seat. Foremost among the potential candidates are Thuraya Labana, Nasr City's former NDP MP; Nabil El-Mazni, chairman of Cairo's Public Bus Transport Company; and Mustafa El-Sallab, a wholesale ceramics merchant.
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