The pillage of Egypt by Sisi and Britain Inc.

In echoes of Britain’s support
of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s
along with the US, and Margaret Thatcher’s thanks to August Pinochet
for “bringing democracy to Chile”, Britain will host
Egyptian junta leader Abdel Fattah El Sisi on a state visit in November.

This follows a trip by
British Defence Secretary and MP for Sevenoaks, Michael Fallon, to Egypt to
attend the 6 August function for the opening of a new branch of the Suez Canal.
Fallon, writing
an op-ed in the local Egyptian state paper, hailed the "rejection of
authoritarianism" by the régime of Abdel Fattah El Sisi, while some 46,000 of
the best minds and the most active people in Egypt languish in the régime’s
prisons on trumped up charges, in filthy conditions and without medical care;
176 of those are parliamentarians.

Fallon towered over the
slighter figure of François Hollande at the ceremony, maybe seething as French Rafale
fighter-jets screamed overhead. France had been looking for a buyer for the
Rafales for twenty years.
Now French defence industry sales are way ahead. The $5.2bn Rafale contract
signed in February effectively bails out Dassault, the French arms
manufacturer. France will also relieve
itself of two Mistral amphibious assault ships destined for Russia, but
withheld from the western antagonist due to European sanctions, bringing $1.1 billion into state coffers from a further Egyptian deal.

It seems David Cameron’s
appearance in Tahrir Square in the heady days of the Egyptian Revolution in
February 2011, with eight arms dealers
on his retinue, didn’t pay off. Perhaps this invitation of Sisi to a state
visit, extended on 17 June 2015, the day
after the passing of the death sentence on incarcerated legitimate Egyptian
leader Morsi, might now do the trick of squeezing yet more money out of the
bankrupt country for arms sales.

The delay of Sisi’s
visit to London until now resulted from fear of the junta leader’s arrest
on charges of crimes against humanity. As in the case of his state visits to
France and Germany,
Sisi’s state visit to Britain should have brought with it automatic immunity
from arrest. However, the existence of a legitimate president in jail in Egypt
fighting for his life complicated matters with the ongoing
appeals in international capitals raised by the Egyptian Freedom and Justice
Party.

For example, on November
27, 2014, a High Court order forced Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service to
allow British
police to begin investigating and prosecuting the Egyptian junta’s war crimes,
a process that has already begun to restrict the travel of certain Egyptian
figures. The arrest
in London this June of Rwandan general, Karenzi Karake, on war crimes charges
filed in Spain was evidence that international jurisdiction cases are being
effectively pursued in British courts.

In the period since
June, British government lawyers have been working to ensure there would be no
problems with Sisi’s visit. Sisi’s scheduled visit to Johannesburg on 10 June
2015 was cancelled for similar reasons, when South African lawyers called
for the Egyptian junta leader’s arrest. Unlike the British government, the
South African government have not renewed the invitation. Egypt’s expulsion
from the African Union as a result of the 3 July 2013 coup had been rescinded
as a result of heavy pressure from the Arab Gulf states and the west on behalf
of Israel. African states are now no longer under the same pressure, because
the new régime
of King Salman in Saudi Arabia is not such an avid supporter of Sisi as the old
régime of King Abdullah.

So when you watch the video
of Egyptian-American activist Mohamed Soltan, emerging from Egyptian jails
having been abused and tortured, urging the UK and the west ahead of Sisi’s
state visit “not to remain silent and turn a blind eye to Egypt's glaring
violations of international laws and conventions”, you should know that Britain
Inc. is not in this case being pressured by Arab Gulf states as before, and is
following what it mistakenly sees as its own immediate interests in Egypt.

The Suez Canal project

Fallon’s hagiography in
Egypt’s state paper during the 6 August visit to the Suez Canal tells us how
Sisi was about to “unveil a modern wonder”. The new 40m wide lane added onto 35
of the 192 km length of the Suez Canal would allow ships to pass in both
directions, and reduce waiting times to eight hours from the current 18 hours.

The whole exercise has
nothing to do with commercial opportunity, but was an attempt by Sisi to shore
up his damaged reputation
both at home and abroad. His 6 February call for mobs to go the streets in
their millions to support a new crackdown on internal ‘terrorism’ as a show of
virility to the ‘international community’ at the Davos conference had been met
with an unusual deathly silence.

The Suez Canal project
is now sinking Egypt financially. Shipping demand barely
existed for the old capacity of the Suez Canal before its expansion.
Furthermore, the massive $8 billion expense of digging out this channel will not
qualify as a good long-term investment, in view of the fact that enterprising
Chinese carriers are now braving
the arctic route in the summer months to cut 13 days off the trip from the
Yellow Sea to Rotterdam via Suez. The rush to build the extension to the canal
as a PR stunt has had some seriously deleterious effects.

Mohamed Aly-Hassan
of the Kyoto Institute of Technology predicted the collapse of the Egyptian
currency, as a result of the unstudied headlong dash to complete the crazy
project, on his Facebook page on 18 October 2014.
He points out that in its first phase the project, which had been due to
excavate 341 million cubic metres of earth, hit a snag after just 40 of them, when it was
discovered that the Suez Canal Authority hadn’t planned for the right sort of
equipment to complete the project. This resulted in a doubling of costs, as the
equipment had to be hired from foreign contracting companies at exorbitant cost.

The Suez Canal project is now sinking Egypt financially.

Aly-Ḥassan’s prediction
was borne out when Egypt Central Bank governor, Hisham Ramez, said, a year
later to the day on 18 October 2015, that the country had run out of foreign
exchange as a result of the Suez Canal project.
No sooner had he said that than Ramez was removed from his position and replaced
with Tarek Amer, ex-head of the National Bank of Egypt (Al-Ahly) and close friend of Gamal Mubarak, the
ex-president’s son.

Embarrassed by this
outcome to the Suez Canal project, Sisi decided to blame the collapse of the
Egyptian currency on Muslim Brother leading figure Hassan Malik, who was
arrested a few days ago on charges
of currency manipulation. This accusation flies in the face of the fact that
all of his assets had already been frozen
by the state, and the 68 companies that make up his commercial group closed, as
of 21 January this year. He has been more or less housebound since.

Malik had not been
arrested with the rest of the Muslim Brother leadership in the hope that
pressure could be applied on him to back the new régime and swing public
opinion. But his stubborn refusal to bend to the junta’s will has created
problems for Sisi.

Malik’s 28-year old son
Omar was consequently imprisoned and sentenced to
death along with Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Badie, in order
to force the father to the negotiating table. Malik’s response to the new
pressure was nevertheless and predictably negative, which infuriated the junta
even more. The collapse of the currency together with the crushingly low turnout
in the parliamentary elections—despite personal appeals by Sisi
on TV for the population to go out and vote—has resulted in a week of panicky
reactions by the Sisi junta.

Mohamed Soltan had been
sentenced to
life in jail as part of the same batch of mass-sentencing of
political opponents as Omar Malik, but was released because of his American
citizenship. He has used his release to plead for Britain to reconsider its
stance. But what we can take from Cameron’s recent actions is that clearly
Britain Inc. is unmoved by Soltan’s video appeal against Sisi’s state visit.

Britain Inc.
and Blair

Immediately after the 3 July coup in Egypt, Tony Blair came out
very strongly in favour of the military takeover in a TV interview. Although
Blair was no longer prime minister, he remains an essential member of
the establishment, having dragged the country’s main Labour opposition squarely
into the conservative fold, not only on matters of geopolitics, but also on
matters of neo-liberal ideology.

Blair’s protected
status is clear from his charmed life. Consider for instance that the Chilcot
enquiry into Blair’s actions in the Iraq War has run into the sand*,
while the Hutton report into the death of UN weapons inspector David Kelly has classified
the evidence for 70 years.

For Britain, the Morsi
government and the Muslim Brothers always represented a serious obstacle. Under
Mubarak, Britain Inc. was the leading foreign investor in Egypt, with BP and British Gas far
and away the largest individual foreign investors in the country (Ismael and Perry
2013). A BP-led consortium had been haggling over terms for drilling the West
Mediterranean Deep Water concession for years. After the exploratory phase ended,
BP held out for unprecedented terms, which included direct ownership over the
gas assets by the foreign consortium and accrual to them of 100 percent of the
profits. The 2011-13 democratic experiment in Egypt had thrown a spanner in the
works, however, with Hatem Azzam, secretary-general of the parliamentary
industry and energy committee, objecting
vigorously to these terms.

Blair ran a consultancy
brokering gas
deals in the East Mediterranean region, and was directly involved in these
negoatiations. The March 2014 Sharm el-Sheikh investment conference, set up to
promote the road-map to
democracy myth, was called by the New York Times, "abetting Egypt’s
dictatorship". Its key figures and organisers
were none other than Blair and Martin Sorrell, who is chairman of the British
WPP advertising and public relations conglomerate, and a business partner of
Blair counsellor and spin doctor, Peter Mandelson.

It was no surprise that
the only actual investment deal to be announced and to be signed after
this essentially political event was the $12 billion contract with BP for the West
Mediterranean Deep Water concession. The whole sham event had been designed
around the BP deal.

The failure of the
Sharm el-Sheikh investment conference to bring other new business to Egypt was
the major reason which led Sisi to decide on the expansion of the Suez Canal as
a new PR stunt to impress the international business community.

All this has backfired,
as the political situation has deteriorated, while the war against the Sinai
tribes, far from being resolved, has expanded. We have already seen 13
multinationals leave Egypt in recent months, while 11 further companies are threatening disinvestment, with 855
factories closing and 3500 SMEs folding since the coup.

The short-sightedness
of European régimes is therefore not limited to their policies in Libya and
Syria. The situation in Egypt is potentially as bad if not worse. Hollande
saving Dassault, Merkel saving Siemens, and Cameron saving BP/British Gas/Blair
by propping up a cabal of military figures totally unqualified to run a major
economy on Europe’s fringes, will blow up in all their faces on a scale they as
yet cannot imagine.

This junta is desperate
and will resort to increasingly desperate acts to stay in power. Meanwhile, all
those who are qualified to manage Egypt are either in jail or in exile.

The strangest aspect of
the saga is that most of the funding for the projects and for the sales of arms
to Egypt discussed in this article is likely ultimately to come from European
export credits. The problem for France, Germany and Britain was that European
Union competition rules do not allow them to bail out their companies directly.
These rules had originally been put into place precisely in order to stop a
long history of bail-outs.

As Winfried Ruigrok and
Rob van Tulder pointed out as far back as 1995 in The Logic of
International Restructuring, at least 20 companies in the
Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their
respective governments. As western economies careered into the 2007 crash, bail-outs subsequently became a fixture of the western state capitalism system.

The twisted logic of
this system protects the socialisation of the Egyptian economy in favour a
military clique, whilst condoning the wholesale imprisonment of its
capitalists.

*Since writing this
article a vague date has been
set for the publication of the Chilcot enquiry, although the verdict
is really already out.

The Suez Canal project

Britain Inc. and Blair

Britain Inc.
and Blair