Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour donated five million pounds to the ruling Conservative Party in Britain.
Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour donated five million pounds to the ruling Conservative Party in Britain.
Mansour is the Minister of Transport under Mubarak from 2006 to 2009 and was dismissed on October 27, 2009 due to the Al-Ayyat train collision, which was the second in two years at the same location.
Despite this, Mansour said in an article he published in the British newspaper The Telegraph that he had modernized the transportation system in Egypt, but moved to Britain because it respected the law, and donated to the Conservative Party the largest donation the party had ever received in 20 years, because of his belief in the ability of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to develop the economy.
The former minister owns the Mansour Group, the McDonald's franchise in Egypt, the Metro supermarket chain, and another group of major companies, some of them in Britain, that employ about 600,000 people around the world.
He start his article in The Telegraph began by talking about the nationalization in the mid-1960s of his father's property, which was one of the major cotton manufacturers in Alexandria.
“When I was a teenager, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized my family’s assets, seizing their lands, homes, and other properties.
My life changed overnight. I was at university in the United States. From that moment on, my family could not help me, so I had to trade in my car and work as a waiter to pay for my studies. I knew the feeling of hunger and the struggle to provide the price of food and utilities.
As for my father, in Egypt, he was trying to support the family with a meager pension.
That experience left me with a lifelong belief in the importance of political stability, property rights, and the rule of law.
My father established a cotton company in Sudan, but it was also nationalized.
When Anwar Sadat took over, he returned to Egypt and began the task of rebuilding the family business, and I had the honor of continuing this work with my brothers.
We diversified our business away from commodities and started working with companies such as General Motors and Caterpillar. Today, our family business employs 60,000 people worldwide.
In 2005, I quit my own business to take over the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, and spent nearly four years trying to modernize the country's transportation infrastructure.
At the end of my tenure as a minister in Egypt, I realized that there was only one country to which I should transfer my work, which had the rule of law, respected property rights and had an enviable record of political stability. This country: the United Kingdom.
When Muhammad Mansour was appointed treasurer of the Conservative Party last December, the party administration was met with a storm of criticism for choosing one of the men of Mubarak's authoritarian regime, an official in a party that governs a country that sanctifies democracy, freedoms and the rule of law.
