Spain will not hand over to Egypt a businessman who became Al Sisi's number one enemy. Mohamed Ali Ali Abdelkhalek, 50, an Egyptian builder exiled in Barcelona, caused a political earthquake in his country in 2019 when he denounced the corruption of the regime and pointed out the president, Abdul Fatah al Sisi.
The National Court has rejected the extradition request from the Egyptian justice system, which was demanding him for tax fraud. He has always maintained that the accusations are a fabrication to persecute a political opponent. A year ago, a military court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment and included him on the list of terrorists for “spreading false news” and instigating protests that ended with 4,000 detainees.
The Spanish justice system has not had to go into the substance of the matter and has denied the extradition for a purely formal reason: the Egyptian prosecutor's office never sent the accusation documentation duly translated into Spanish, as detailed in the order, to which it has had access. La Vanguardia, dated December 5, from the Criminal Chamber of the Court.
“They couldn't send anything because they had nothing against me. "Everything is a farce," Abdelkhalek, who three years ago requested political asylum in Spain, still pending, told La Vanguardia.
“Everything indicates that Egypt has tried to mask what is political persecution with an ordinary crime, due to the manifest and public opposition to my client's regime,” says his lawyer, José Ángel Cabello, from the Molins Defensa Penal firm in Madrid.
Known in his country as Mohamed Ali, the name he uses on the internet, he is not the textbook opponent. A well-connected builder in the military, he amassed a fortune as a military contractor. Until he fell from grace. Because? He claims that he simply got fed up with the abuse and when he complained they went after him. He fled Egypt and in the fall of 2019, already installed in Barcelona, he began to broadcast videos denouncing the corrupt dealings of the army and particularly of Al Sisi, for whom he built a palace.
There was a wave of protests. Rais, who came to power in a coup in 2013 and cultivates an image of righteousness, in contrast to the excesses that brought down Hosni Mubarak, did not forgive himself.
Abdelkhalek has paid dearly. He has spent the last three years in a depression, he says. He cannot see his children, who live in Türkiye. He says that he has lost almost all of his money. He has had to sell the house he bought in Maresme, partly to pay off debts incurred in a failed business. He claims that he was the victim of a trap by the Egyptian Government, which sent two criminals to entangle him in a business and defraud him.
In Egypt he has accumulated 14 convictions. In addition to the life sentence for terrorism for his role in the 2019 protests (they accuse him of working for the Muslim Brotherhood), most refer to economic crimes. “Curiously, none of the frauds that I supposedly committed affect my company, because of course, that would mean talking about my business with the army,” he emphasizes.
Public enemy number one in 2019, in recent years people have stopped talking about him in Egypt, although from time to time some acolyte of the regime insults him on television. Especially every time Mohamed Ali posts a video calling on Egyptians to rise up against the dictatorship, for example when Egypt hosted the international climate conference Cop27. That earned him another sentence.
