EGYPT: Justice for the corrupt

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Egypt’s rich and politically connected, often floating above the law with manicures and arrogance, have not fared so well these days.

Hisham Talaat Mustafa, a burly billionaire with ties to the ruling regime, was sentenced to the gallows last week for arranging the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Tamim, a talented, but troubled Lebanese pop star. She was found with her throat slit in her high-rise Dubai apartment in July.

Mustafa’s verdict followed a seven-year prison sentence given in March to Mahmoud Ismail, the owner of a huge bank account and a dilapidated ferry that sank in the Red Sea and killed more than 1,000 passengers in 2006. Ismail, who fled to London following the incident, was sentenced in absentia and most likely will not do any jail time.

The cases of Mustafa and Ismail may be anomalies, but coming in close succession they’ve offered the Egyptian public a sense of justice against corrupt tycoons who prosper while most of the nation barely scrapes by. The men were former members of Parliament and influential voices in the ruling National Democratic Party. They sunned in resorts; they traveled the world.

Now, they are disgraced: One faces death; the other, exile. Their tales of wealth and privilege both repulsed and conjured envy in a country where 40% of the population lives on about $2 a day, thousands of political dissidents are imprisoned, and the state presides over underfunded hospitals and failing schools.

But, in the end, they became liabilities too large for their political machine to protect.

-- Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo