Spain will not hand over to Egypt a businessman who became the number one enemy of Al-Sissi. 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 singled out the president, Abdul Fattah al-Sissi.
The National Court has rejected the extradition request of the Egyptian justice, which claimed 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 in prison and included him on the list of terrorists for "spreading fake news" and instigating protests that ended with 4,000 arrests.
The Spanish judiciary has not had to go into the substance of the matter and has refused the extradition for a purely formal reason: the Egyptian Prosecutor's Office never managed to send the documentation of the accusation duly translated into Spanish, according to details the interlocutory, to which La Vanguardia has had access, of December 5, of the criminal court of the Court.
"They couldn't send anything, because they had nothing against me. It's all a farce", Abdelkhalek declares to La Vanguardia, who three years ago applied for political asylum in Spain, which is still pending.
"Everything indicates that Egypt has tried to mask with an ordinary crime what is a political persecution, for the manifest and public opposition to the regime of my client", says his lawyer, José Ángel Cabello, of the Molins Defensa Penal office in Madrid.
Known in his country as Mohamed Ali, the name he uses on the internet, he is not a textbook opponent. A builder with good contacts in the army, he amassed a fortune as a military contractor. Until he fell from grace. Because? He claims that he simply got used to the abuse and when he complained they went against him. He fled Egypt and in the autumn of 2019, already settled in Barcelona, he began broadcasting videos in which he denounced the corrupt dealings of the army and particularly of Al-Sissi, for whom he built a palace.
There was a wave of protests. The rais, who came to power in one fell swoop in 2013 and has an image of moral rectitude, as opposed to the excesses that brought down Hosni Mubarak, did not forgive him.
Abdelkhalek has paid dearly for it. He has spent the last three years in a depression, he explains. He cannot see his children, who live in Turkey. He says he has lost almost all 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.
He has 14 convictions in Egypt. In addition to the life sentence for terrorism for his role in the 2019 protests (he is accused of working for the Muslim Brotherhood), most of them refer to economic crimes. "Curiously, none of the frauds that I allegedly committed affect my company, because clearly, that would mean talking about my business with the army", he underlines.
Public enemy number one in 2019, in recent years he has stopped being talked about in Egypt, although from time to time some acolyte of the regime insults him on television. Especially every time Mohamed Ali publishes a video in which he calls Egyptians to rise up against the dictatorship, for example when Egypt hosted the Cop27 international climate conference. After that he received another sentence.
