Cairo: History seems to repeat itself for MP Mohammad Al Sadat, the nephew of late Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat.
In 2007, the parliament, controlled by loyalists of then president Hosni Mubarak, voted for scrapping the younger Sadat’s membership.
The move followed his daring request for questioning Zakaria Azmi, a stalwart of the Mubarak regime, over alleged complicity in the tragic sinking of an Egyptian ferryboat that left more than 1,000 people dead a year earlier.
Now Sadat Jr, a sea skipper by education, is heading for similar fate. He represents the Nile Delta province of Tela in the parliament.
The legislature’s Ethics Committee last week recommended expelling him for breaching trust allegedly for presenting discrediting reports to international institutions, including the European Parliament, on the Egyptian assembly’s performance.
He is also accused of forging signatures of other MPs purportedly to push for parliamentary debate on issues he deems urgent.
The committee, meanwhile, recommended that the younger Sadat be barred from attending some sessions of parliament in punishment for alleged leak of a draft law, on regulating non-governmental organisations, to foreign embassies in Cairo. The parliament passed the law late last year.
Al Sadat, a businessman-cum-politician, has dismissed the accusations as politically motivated.
“My recent request for bringing the parliament’s budget for debate has hastened my referral to investigations,” he said in a press statement. “What happened to me is a clear message to any MP, who wants to tell the truth in the chamber.”
Earlier this month, Al Sadat came under parliamentary fire after saying in a television interview that the legislature spent 18 million Egyptian pounds (Dh4.1 million) on buying three armoured vehicles for the assembly’s head and his two deputies.
“How can we justify this lavish spending to the ordinary people at the time they are asked to live austerely?” Al Sadat said.
In recent months, Egypt has seen sharp rises in prices of different goods and services after the government floated the local pound and cut the fuel subsidy as part of tough economic reform measures.
In an apparent bid to contain the furore triggered by Al Sadat’s disclosures, parliament said that the money for purchasing the armoured vehicles had been allocated in the public budget before the incumbent legislature was inaugurated last year.
Parliamentary officials also denied that suggested punitive measures against Al Sadat are in response to his dissenting views.
Months ago, Al Sadat quit the chairmanship of the parliament’s human rights committee, accusing both the assembly and the government of ignoring the panel’s recommendations.
He also criticised the government for negotiating a bailout loan of $12 billion with the International Monetary Fund without returning to the parliament as the constitution dictates.
In an action preceding the parliament’s vote slated for February 26 on his fate, the beleaguered Al Sadat has asked the country’s chief prosecutor to lift his parliamentary immunity in order to clear the way for his questioning by prosecutors. “The assembly is acting as a foe and a judge at the same. It deliberately distorts my public image,” he said.
Al Sadat, now in his fifties, is the founder of the little-known Reform and Development Party of which he is the only representative in parliament. Whether he will weather the current storm remains to be seen.
