From The International Herald Tribune: Once fallen from grace, Egypt officer regains clout BY DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK | INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES CAIRO — A year after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, the general responsible for rooting out public corruption, Mohamed Farid el-Tohamy, faced a barrage of allegations that he deliberately covered up the cronyism and self-dealing that flourished under the old government. General Tohamy stood accused of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in improper gifts, squashing inquiries into illicit land-deals and bribes by high-ranking officials and thwarting the post-revolutionary search for money Mr. Mubarak and his circle might have stashed away. The general’s accuser was a veteran investigator who had worked under him for seven years. President Mohamed Morsi promptly fired the general, prosecutors opened an investigation, the news filled the papers, and his career appeared to end in disgrace. But now the general is back, more powerful than ever. His protégé and friend, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, ousted President Morsi four months ago, and virtually the first move by the new government was to rehabilitate General Tohamy and place him in charge of the feared secret police. Western diplomats and Egyptians close to the government say General Tohamy has emerged as the leading advocate of the lethal crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood, in a drive to eviscerate the movement. Any public trace of those corruption charges immediately disappeared. ‘‘What happened to the prosecutors’ claim of evidence of his corruption and obstruction of justice?,’’ asked Hossam Bahgat, one of the few Egyptian human rights advocates willing to publicly criticize General Tohamy. ‘‘Why was he ousted in that humiliating fashion? Why was he brought back from retirement the morning after the military takeover?’’ he continued. ‘‘There is zero public discussion of these very serious questions.’’ General Tohamy declined to be interviewed and did not answer written questions. No court has evaluated the allegations against him. His accuser, Lt. Col. Moatassem Fathi, has also declined to be interviewed. In a television interview last fall, he acknowledged that at one point he temporarily quit the agency, the Administrative Oversight Authority, over a job transfer that he deemed punitive, suggesting a potential grudge. Critics of General Tohamy say he was the quintessential Mubarak man, the handpicked guardian of the system of corruption and impunity that was a central grievance of the revolution of January 2011. His swift rehabilitation, the critics say, is emblematic of the restoration of the old order since after the military takeover. Yezid Sayigh, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut who has written about the Administrative Oversight Authority, asked: ‘‘Of all the qualified people in Egypt, why bring in Tohamy, who is way past his retirement age and under a cloud already? Why is this so urgent?’’ Western officials who have met with General Tohamy and other leaders of the military-led government say he quickly distinguished himself as its most influential hard-liner. ‘‘He was the most hard-line, the most absolutely unreformed,’’ one Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings with General Tohamy. ‘‘He talked as if the revolution of 2011 had never even happened.’’ General Sisi and the civilian ministers around him initially pledged to try to include Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters in a new democratic process. For more than a month, General Sisi appeared to consider the arguments of Mohamed ElBaradei, then vice president, and a few others urging restraint in the interest of reconciliation with the Islamists, who had camped out by the tens of thousands at sit-ins protesting the takeover. But within days of the takeover General Tohamy was arguing against any inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that led the voting in elections for Parliament and the presidency. Its members were ‘‘terrorists’’ whose movement must be excluded and crushed, General Tohamy argued, according to the Western officials who met with him and with Egyptians in the new government. By mid-August, General Tohamy prevailed: security forces used overwhelming force to clear the Islamist sit-ins, killing nearly a thousand demonstrators in the largest mass killings in modern Egyptian history. (More than 40 security officers were killed that day in a backlash from the Islamists, some armed.) All the state and private television networks adopted the same vocabulary as General Tohamy. ‘‘Egypt fighting terrorism,’’ ran a banner the networks affixed to their screens, in Arabic and English. Islamists accused General Tohamy of a vendetta against Mr. Morsi. ‘‘Revenge is a powerful motivator,’’ said Wael Haddara, a former Morsi adviser now living abroad. Even the name of the head of the secret police was considered a secret until Mr. Mubarak’s chief, Gen. Omar Suleiman, stepped into public view as the president’s alter-ego on matters of foreign affairs. Egyptians and Westerners who met with senior intelligence officials say they harbored deep distrust of Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president. In June, Mr. Suleiman’s former deputy publicly urged Egyptians to join the demonstrations demanding Mr. Morsi’s ouster, and since then credible news reports have said the intelligence services had been spying on Mr. Morsi to collect information that may now be used against him. In contrast, General Sisi, Egypt’s new de facto leader, had a long relationship with General Tohamy. They climbed together through the ranks of the Egyptian infantry, where General Tohamy, 66, had become a mentor to General Sisi, 58, according to Egyptians and Western officials who know both officers. General Tohamy had served as head of military intelligence, and he helped pick General Sisi as his successor. That was when General Tohamy took over the Administrative Oversight Authority, a secretive agency run by the Egyptian military. It is a singular combination of a domestic spy service and an auditing bureau. Historians say President Nasser created it after leading the 1952 military coup in order to keep the army on top of his ever-expanding civilian bureaucracy. The authority conducts its own electronic surveillance and operates its own jails. Former detainees, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, say both suspects and witnesses under interrogation were sometimes confined there for months without any judicial process, or any assurance of release, and its extrajudicial detentions appear to have continued under Mr. Morsi. But the authority reports to the president. ‘‘Mubarak, and presidents before him, used it to exercise a form of control that stood above the state,’’ Mr. Sayigh of the Carnegie Center said. ‘‘It could be used to reward or punish whenever it suited the president.’’ As soon as Mr. Mubarak had handed power to the generals in 2011, Colonel Fathi, the investigator, filed detailed charges with prosecutors accusing General Tohamy of colluding in the corruption he was supposed to root out, the colonel later said. But the case was quickly transferred to a military court and disappeared, he added. When Mr. Morsi was sworn in as president in June 2012, his power was initially circumscribed by a simultaneous military takeover of all legislative and budgetary authority. Only in August did top military leaders appear for the first time to grant Mr. Morsi real power. Within days, Colonel Fathi gave a television interview declaring that the handover to a civilian president had ‘‘dismantled freedom’s last shackle’’ as the revolution had promised. He refiled his charges and this time went public, declaring in the television interview that General Tohamy ‘‘is one of the reasons for the corruption Egypt has suffered for the last 30 years.’’ ‘‘He is protecting the former regime,’’ Colonel Fathi said. In the television interview, Colonel Fathi said he had earned a master’s degree in forensic accounting and worked for 10 years in a secret unit handling sensitive cases. He charged that General Tohamy had consistently thwarted the agency’s investigators by locking away evidence in a ‘‘secret safe.’’ He appeared credible. One of his friends, a police officer, said Colonel Fathi had opposed Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and state media quoted superiors in the agency describing Colonel Fathi as a star investigator. Colonel Fathi charged that General Tohamy had covered up reports that Mr. Mubarak’s sons, Gamal and Alla, were given use of a government-purchased private plane and a yacht. He also said he had personally written reports on allegations against both Mr. Mubarak and Ahmed Shafik, the former president’s last prime minister and then a presidential candidate, but General Tohamy squashed them. ‘‘You write complete information and you submit them and cases but they don’t come out,’’ Colonel Fathi said in the interview. Colonel Fathi said that he had firsthand knowledge of 14 cases Mr. Tohamy had blocked to protect senior officials, including a general who was governor of North Sinai and another general who was minister of military production. Colonel Fathi said that he and his colleagues had filed a 40 page report detailing charges of bribes and payoffs involving the sale of vast acreage of public land outside Cairo under the minister of housing, Mohamed Ibrahim Soliman. In one example, he said, the owners of the Maxime development company sold Mr. Soliman two luxurious apartments on Omar Ibn al-Khattab for about $100,000. But a sale to a publicly owned bank around the same time put the value of the two units at more than $1.5 million, Mr. Fathi said, and Omar Suleiman, the former spy chief, and Alaa Mubarak, the president’s eldest son, received apartments in the same building. And around the same time as the apartments’ sale, Mr. Soliman had arranged a deal involving 90 acres of public land for the same company, Maxime, Colonel Fathi said in the interview. But — Colonel Fathi charged — General Tohamy censored the report to just a few pages and left out all the evidence. Mr. Soliman, who left office in 2005, said in an interview this week that he was innocent of any crime. He said that while Mr. Mubarak was still in power prosecutors had concluded there insufficient was evidence of the charges Colonel Fathi had mentioned and dropped them. Under military rule after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster and then under Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Soliman was arrested on other corruption charges, jailed for two and a half years, and forced to surrender millions of dollars. He was released last week, under the new government, and he is awaiting a retrial for one of the charges. Colonel Fathi said that General Tohamy had covered up documents, wire taps, surveillance and testimony that showed that the chairman of the Industrial Affairs Committee in the upper house of Parliament, Farid Khamees, had paid more than $300,000 to bribe two senior judges. (His lawyers later confessed to delivering the bribes on his behalf and the judges who received them quit or were fired, but Mr. Khamees, who also owns the rug giant Oriental Weavers, was acquitted for lack of evidence of criminal intent, according to news reports. Farid el-Deeb, lawyer for Mr. Khamees and for the Mubaraks, declined to comment.) Colonel Fathi said General Tohamy had protected others in the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces who had profited from the smuggling of subsidized fuel, some accumulating fortunes of as much as $8 million. ‘‘There are complete cases of corruption involving officials at the military council known to everybody, including the council members,’’ Colonel Fathi said in the interview. (He volunteered that General Sisi was clean.) General Tohamy himself had received ‘‘millions of pounds’’ in gifts from state companies, Colonel Fathi said, and in turn he used his agency’s budget to buy birthday gifts worth as much as $16,000 a year for the former defense minister, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, and other presents for Mr. Mubarak’s sons. M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-American legal scholar who has worked with Egypt and Western governments on attempts to find the stolen assets abroad, said the Administrative Oversight Authority was one of the few institutions that could have helped locate such funds. But it had consistently failed to provide the needed financial records, he said — corroborating Colonel Fathi’s allegations, if such money does exist. ‘‘The Administrative Oversight Authority has the evidence, but none of that was ever disclosed,’’ Mr. Bassiouni said. ‘‘That is why Egypt has never recovered a penny.’’ Learning of Colonel Fathi’s allegations, two senior Morsi advisers, Rifaa Tahtawy and Assad el-Sheika, called Mr. Fathi to the presidential palace, according to other former officials and news reports, and Mr. Morsi soon fired him. (Mr. Morsi, Mr. Tahtawy and Mr. Sheika are now in detention.) Colonel Fathi had quit at the start of 2011 after a job transfer, convinced he had been punished for his reports. But he later won his old job back. Now, surprisingly, although he has been transferred again to a more limited job outside of Cairo, he is still there at work. ‘‘They have got him locked in the basement,’’ said Mr. Soliman, the former housing minister who said he was falsely accused by Colonel Fathi’s reports. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington. ◼ Get the best global news and analysis direct to your device – download the IHT apps for free today! For iPad: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404757420?mt=8 For iPhone: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404764212?mt=8
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:04:12 +0000
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