Just a couple of months ago, her husband, the steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz, moved in Egypt’s most elite circles, a parliamentary leader and political enforcer for the ruling party, and a close friend of Gamal Mubarak, the son of then-president Hosni Mubarak.
But since the regime-toppling revolution here, Ezz, 52, has been paraded through the streets like a common criminal, taunted by a mob, and tossed into jail on charges of graft. (For good measure, pro-democracy demonstrators also looted and torched the headquarters of Ezz Steel.)
Ezz, in a recent public letter from jail, says he did nothing illegal. But as Egypt purges elements of its old order and gropes to structure a new one, he has emerged as perhaps the most hated symbol of a system that rewarded the few and oppressed the many. Fairly or not, Ezz — the oligarch who cornered the market on steel production in the Arab world — represents for millions of Egyptians a pervasive crony capitalism that, before the revolution, was simply a fact of life.
Several colleagues would only talk about Ezz anonymously, saying they feared for their safety if their names were revealed. In a series of interviews, Abla Ezz, a well-coiffed 48-year-old, sometimes dropped her voice to a paranoid whisper: “Everyone in the country is afraid to say they work for Ezz Steel.” She said it is best to avoid showy jewelry and to drive “a very humble car, because you can’t be seen as a rich girl.”
But she still resides at a Four Seasons hotel in the spacious 24th-floor apartment she kept with her husband and their 14-year-old son. Fresh-cut flowers abound, and the view of the Nile is unsurpassed. Surveying the city one recent afternoon, she offered this interpretation of the prevailing public mood: “Anyone who is rich in this country is corrupt, is evil, and he should be behind bars.”
Her assessment may not be far off the mark. Since February, prosecutors have aggressively pursued scores of businessmen with ties to the former regime, freezing their assets, banning them from travel and filing corruption charges related to sweetheart deals between self-enriching businessmen and government officials. Now some in the business community say such swift revolutionary justice may put the nation’s economy at risk, because entrepreneurs such as Ezz, no matter their methods of doing business, provided jobs and built solid companies. The rising industrialists, telecom magnates and financiers of the past decade fired the economic engines of growth, privatization and foreign investment.
“There is no reasonable country that puts their businessmen in prison and loses their economy. We need to build; we don’t want to destroy,” said Mohamed Hamouda, a well-known Cairo attorney who says he declined to take Ezz’s case, certain that the billionaire could never get a fair trial. “Who will come to Egypt to invest if he will find the businessmen in the prison?”
But the public rage against Ezz also seems fueled by another factor: The boom years that created a super-rich class yielded no benefits for the masses, analysts say. Some 44 percent of Egyptians dwell in deep poverty, surviving on less than $2 a day. Last year a citizens group filed a complaint against Ezz for alleged price-gouging, branding him “the consumers’ first enemy.”
Visit any downtown coffee shop and customers young and old will emit an earful of allegations about Ezz — he’s a thief, they say, a monopolist who blocked cheaper imports and fed at the public trough. “Ezz is like a guy who has a weapon and threatens you: ‘Give me your money or I will kill you,’ ” said Mohamed Gaaora, 54, who serves coffee and tends to customers’ hookah pipes.
He ticked off the names of former government ministers and Ezz’s fellow party bigwigs, including Gamal Mubarak, and pronounced, “They used to get together in nightclubs drinking wine, and at the same time sucking the blood from the people.”
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