Hussein Salem (11 November 1933 – 12 August 2019) () was an Egyptian businessman, co-owner of the East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG), and ally and advisor to former president Hosni Mubarak. He was also the chairman and CEO of HKS Group, a hospitality company that operates Maritim Jolie Ville Resort in Sharm El Sheikh. He was described as "one of the most secretive businessmen in Egypt", a mogul, and Mubarak's close confidant.
He was known as the "Father of Sharm El Sheikh" due to his resort development activities.Hope, Bradley. "Egypt's pursuit of Mubarak's cronies falters ". The National. 7 May 2013. Retrieved 7 May 2013. Per Suisse secrets held accounts at Credit Suisse for years, even after he had been publicly accused of bribery.
Early life and education Salem was born on 11 November 1933 in Sinai Peninsula, Egypt. Records of the Egyptian Administrative Control Authority indicate, however, that he was born in the Helwan suburb of Cairo, although al-Ahram Weekly states the latter location was actually Salem's father's birthplace. His father, Kamal el-Din, worked as a school teacher, but died of typhoid fever during Salem's childhood. Afterward, his family moved to an apartment in the Korba area of Cairo's Heliopolis district.Hussein Salem: A businessman from the times of crony capitalism, Part 1 . Al-Ahram Weekly. 21 June 2011.
His mother, Hosnia Tabozoda, who was of Turkish origin, encountered great difficulty providing for her children with her late husband's pension, forcing Salem, the eldest of his two siblings to become the family's main provider. He also had five half-siblings from his father's first wife (Hosnia was his second wife), but was not responsible for them, most of whom were older than Salem. Although it has not been proven, he allegedly has Bedouin origins. Some sources say this was a rumor Salem allegedly spread in order to help him secure future business deals with the Bedouin tribes of the southern Sinai Peninsula. The only known relation Salem had with the Bedouin was through marriage; his half-sibling Samiha married into the Abaydah tribe of Ismailia and Sinai.
During his childhood, Salem's sustained an eye injury, disallowing him from entering the mandatory military service. He graduated from the Heliopolis Public High School, but had to repeat his senior year. In 1956, he graduated from Cairo University's Faculty of Commerce. Shortly after receiving his degree, one of Salem's relatives secured a job for him as a clerk in the Textile Support Fund, which then-president Gamal Abdel Nasser had established to alleviate high unemployment rates, particularly among the youth. Later in 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, prompting a tripartite assault on Egypt by the United Kingdom, France and Israel. Although Salem favored open markets, there has been no indication that he opposed the canal's nationalization, although he resented Nasser's decision to nationalize the holdings of top capitalists in Egypt in 1961.
In 1959, he married Nazimah Abdel-Hamid Ismail and the couple moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Golf area of Heliopolis. The monthly rent was (Salem's monthly salary was ). The couple's first child, Khaled, was born in 1961, followed by the birth of their daughter, Magda, two years later. According to one of his neighbors at the time, Salem did not own a car or many luxuries for most of the 1960s and early 1970s. He enrolled Khaled into Saint George, a private British school in Heliopolis, an education that Salem had to frequently borrow money to pay for.
He died on 12 August 2019 in Spain.
Career
Gamel Abdel Nasser era
Egyptian intelligence in Baghdad During the early 1960s Salem landed a job as the branch director for the Arab Company for External Trade in Casablanca, Morocco which paid per month. A former CEO at the company—which was allegedly a front for the Egyptian Intelligence Services—remembered Salem as a very private employee who traveled abroad often. The CEO believes Salem was supervising arms deals to help nationalist struggles against European colonialism in North Africa, in line with Nasser's foreign policy at the time.
In Casablanca Salem befriended Amin Howeidi who served as Egypt's ambassador to Morocco at the time. That same year, 1963, Howeidi was appointed ambassador to Iraq and he brought Salem with him to serve as the Arab Company's branch director in Baghdad. Salem began cultivating relationships with the high-ranking staff of the Egyptian embassy in Iraq, particularly Amin Yousri the embassy's press-attache and Ibrahim Yousri the embassy's second secretary. Al-Ahram Weekly editor Karem Yehia states that the Yousris claim Salem was a "likable" person, but not "intellectually sophisticated". Howeidi mentored Salem on international politics by enrolling him in study groups particularly after Howeidi was appointed by then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the post of Intelligence Director in 1967 following Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel.
According to Ibrahim Yousri, Salem gained Howeidi's trust primarily because he was able to regularly provide Howeidi with useful intelligence due to his connections with business circles in Iraq which would have otherwise been difficult to attain through the Egyptian embassy. Amin Yousri claims Salem cultivated good relationships with other Egyptian embassy employees by helping them buy Mercedes vehicles at low interest rates offered by the Iraqi Central Bank. Despite his relative success in Baghdad, Salem did not find his work there particularly fulfilling and requested Howeidi a number of times for transfer to Europe where he said he had "friends" who could help him start a private business. Instead, Salem was sent on ambassadorial missions to Arab States of the Persian Gulf. There he succeeded in establishing his own personal networks that would later become useful during his future business ventures in those states.
Relations between Howeidi and Salem deteriorated following Nasser's death in 1970 and the succession of Anwar Sadat to the presidency afterward. Howeidi, an ardent supporter and symbol of Nasser's socialist and nationalist struggles, was imprisoned by Sadat in 1971; Salem, uninterested in Nasser's ideals subsequently abandoned Howeidi, did not visit him in prison and ignored his wife's phone calls. Nonetheless, Salem lost his job in the Intelligence Directorate along with its perks. His half-brother Abdel Hamid later managed to secure Salem a job at Nasr Import and Export Company that same year by petitioning a senior official in Sadat's administration.
Anwar Sadat era
Business in Abu Dhabi Unhappy at the loss of the prestige and perks of his former intelligence job, Salem decided to move to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1972 where he became CEO of the Arab Emirates Trade Company, an importer of food supplies for UAE. He was set up there by former Egyptian economy minister Hassan Abbas Zaki, an economic adviser to the president of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, at the time. Using his position, between 1972 and 1977 Salem reportedly developed extensive business relations in several Western countries, as well as India and Pakistan. Through these contacts, he gained considerable wealth and began transferring large amounts of cash to Switzerland where he also purchased a number of hotels.
Starting in 1977 Salem's financial situation began to improve considerably. Following then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Israel on 19 November 1977, the UAE downgraded relations with Egypt. Salem had still managed to maintain good relations with Emirati officials, but nonetheless left the UAE that same year. The primary reason behind Salem's departure was not linked to the political situation between the two countries, however. Instead he was said to have been forced out by some Emirati business families who claimed Salem's operations hurt them financially. According to Yehia, some sources say Salem fled hours before his company's headquarters were raided by auditing officials while other sources claim he was actually arrested and spent a number of days in an Emirati jail. Sayed Ali al-Shorafa, Grand High Chamberlain (Director)of the UAE's President's Court, Stated Salem was not charged with a crime and was subsequently pardoned by Sheikh Zayed. He also denied rumors that Salem had amassed $20 million in Abu Dhabi, stating "These are exaggerations ... We did not have anyone in the Emirates who had more than a million Dirhams at that time." Contrarily, Amin Yousri claimed that Salem had directly informed him that he acquired $200 million in the UAE which he transferred to his Swiss bank accounts. He would later relocate half of his money to Spain, according to Yousri, where he gained Spanish citizenship and bought a mansion in Majorca.
Return to Egypt and move to Washington, D.C. Salem returned to Egypt following his business ventures in the UAE. In addition to his history with the Egyptian government, he had established relations with highly influential figures in Egypt by appointing their sons or relatives to positions in his company in the UAE. In late 1977, not long after arriving in Egypt, he met Hosni Mubarak whom Sadat appointed vice president in 1975. It was only in 1977 that things began to shape up for Salem. After returning to Egypt from a short assignment in the United Arab Emirates, he moved with his family from his Golf area apartment into a new unit in an apartment building he constructed in Saba Emarat area of Heliopolis. For two years Salem lived in his old apartment in Cairo's affluent Heliopolis neighborhood. Although he was a millionaire by then, he took a job as an employee of the economy ministry, tasked with managing commercial deals. He reportedly kept his other business ventures private while working in the government. In 1979, Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil appointed him Commissioned Minister of Trade at the Egyptian embassy in Washington, D.C.
That same year, Salem became CEO of the Egyptian American Transportation Company (ETSCO), established in Delaware with a branch in Cairo. On 9 October 1982, an article was published by The Washington Post entailing violations the company committed regarding various arms deals following the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979. The arms deals involved using money from the Persian Gulf states to fund Mujahideen efforts against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and dictatorships in Latin America. Kamal Hassan Ali, the Egyptian minister of foreign affairs at the time, vehemently denied the allegations against ETSCO, calling them "wicked". He claimed the Egyptian government found no evidence of foul play on the part of the company during its year-long investigation of the incident. Ali went on to threaten to sue "anyone who dares to smear his name or any other Egyptian official" in American courts.Yehia, Karem. Hussein Salem: A businessman from the times of crony capitalism (part three) . Al-Ahram Weekly. 24 June 2011