The North Cairo Criminal Court has acquitted former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, deposed President Hosni Mubarak’s sons Alaa and Gamal and other defendants accused of seizing land belonging to the Pilots Association.
Allegations were levelled against Shafiq and others claiming that they illegally sold the government land to Mubarak’s sons at below-market rates in the 1990s, while Shafiq was head of the Air Force. The land in question is a 40,000 square meter plot in the Ismailia governorate allocated to the Association.
Defendants are also charged with condoning procedures to withdraw the plots and violating a provision in the contract requiring them to build on the land within three years of the date of allocation, causing a loss of millions of pounds.
Other defendants include Major Generals Nabil Farid Shokry, Mohamed Reda abdel Hamid Saqr, Mohamed Raouf Helmy and Mohamed Kamal Fakhr al-Islam al-Sawy.
Shafiq is also facing fresh charges made in October against him, his wife and his nephew claiming that they obtained villas in the Casa Blanca resort on the North Coast without informing the association's board. Shafiq is also accused of delaying the implementation of a project in New Cairo by more than five years so that he could transfer it to a firm run by Alaa Mubarak's father-in-law Mahmoud al-Gammal.
