CAIRO: The family of ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak still owns assets on British territory nearly two years after British authorities called for them to be frozen, Egypt’s largest investment bank has disclosed.

EFG Hermes, the fund’s co-owners, has admitted that “to the best of [their] knowledge” Mubarak’s son Gamal has a 17.5 per cent stake in a fund registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). It is 20 months since the territory’s authorities issued an order calling for the freezing of Gamal Mubarak’s assets.

According to EFG-Hermes, Mubarak has received around $880,000 annually from the fund since it was incorporated in July 2002, though the fund currently does not contain any “meaningful” assets.

But the news — confirmed in emails to the campaigner Nick Hildyard, and to me — raises questions about the British government’s willingness to pressure its overseas territories into investigating and freezing money belonging to Hosni Mubarak’s family. It comes only six months after a BBC investigation revealed that former members of the Mubarak regime had millions of unfrozen assets on mainland Britain.

“The UK government are keeping their lips sealed about this,” said Osama Diab, a researcher in economic and social justice at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). “We keep on hearing about other unfrozen assets belonging to the former regime. There’s no good explanation as to why they remain unfrozen.” While the return of dictators’ assets to their country of origin is often a lengthy and litigious process, the freezing of their assets should be quick and straightforward since it merely places the money under investigation, rather than reappropriating it entirely.

By their clandestine nature, accounts full of laundered money are often hard to track down, and it is difficult for BVI’s small financial regulators to monitor suspicious accounts. But campaigners said that both the UK and its overseas territories (including dependencies like the BVI) had a track record of not doing enough to monitor and freeze dictators’ assets.

By arrangement with the Guardian