February 4, 2011
The Guardian (UK)

Mubarak Family Fortune Could Reach $70bn, Say Experts

Egyptian president has cash in British and Swiss banks plus UK and US property

by Phillip Inman

President Hosni Mubarak's family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.

After 30 years as president and many more as a senior military official, Mubarak has had access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits. . . .

Christopher Davidson, professor of Middle East politics at Durham University, . . . said most Gulf states required foreigners give a local business partner a 51% stake in start-up ventures. In Egypt, the figure is commonly nearer 20%, but still gives politicians and close allies in the military a source of huge profits with no initial outlay and little risk. . . .

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"The Looting of America," The Wisdom Fund, February 7, 2009

[A coterie of well-connected Afghan businessmen and politicians may have plundered as much as $900m from the country's biggest commercial bank, three times the amount of earlier estimates, and the equivalent of about 7 per cent of Afghanistan's total gross domestic product.--Julius Cavendish, "Afghan elite 'plundered $900m' from leading bank," Independent, February 1, 2011]

[Brunei is a family-owned oil Sultanate of 400,000 people located on the island of Borneo in southeast Asia. A brother of the sultan was finance minister until 1997, when the Asian financial crisis hit Brunei. The Arthur Anderson accounting firm was called in to audit the books. The accountants found that between 1983 and 1998 $40 billion had disappeared and that the finance minister himself had personally spent $14.8 billion. . . .

On January 29, 2002, CBS Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." "We know it is gone," said Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, "but we don't know what they spent it on." . . .

U.S. taxpayers are paying the Department of Homeland Security $56,336,000,000 this year to porno-scan and grope them and otherwise invade their privacy, while millions of Americans are foreclosed out of their homes.--Paul Craig Roberts, "From Brunei to Washington -- Kleptocrats at Work," counterpunch.org, February 7, 2011]

Robert Fisk, "Mubarak will die in jail, but that's no thanks to us," Independent, June 3, 2012