Hussein Salem

Hussein Salem (11 November 1933 – 12 August 2019) (حسين سالم) was an Egyptian businessman, co-owner of the East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG), and ally and advisor to former president Hosni Mubarak.

He was also the chairman and CEO of HKS Group, a hospitality company that operates Maritim Jolie Ville Resort in Sharm El Sheikh.

He was described as "one of the most secretive businessmen in Egypt", a mogul, and Mubarak's close confidant.

He was known as the "Father of Sharm El Sheikh" due to his resort development activities.

Per Suisse secrets held accounts at Credit Suisse for years, even after he had been publicly accused of bribery.

Salem was born on 11 November 1933 in Sinai Peninsula, Egypt.

Records of the Egyptian Administrative Control Authority indicate, however, that he was born in the Helwan suburb of Cairo, although al-Ahram Weekly states the latter location was actually Salem's father's birthplace.

His father, Kamal el-Din, worked as a school teacher, but died of typhoid fever during Salem's childhood.

Afterward, his family moved to an apartment in the Korba area of Cairo's Heliopolis district.

His mother, Hosnia Tabozoda, who was of Turkish origin, encountered great difficulty providing for her children with her late husband's pension, forcing Salem, the eldest of his two siblings to become the family's main provider.

He also had five half-siblings from his father's first wife (Hosnia was his second wife), but was not responsible for them, most of whom were older than Salem.

Although it has not been proven, he allegedly has Bedouin origins.

Some sources say this was a rumor Salem allegedly spread in order to help him secure future business deals with the Bedouin tribes of the southern Sinai Peninsula.

The only known relation Salem had with the Bedouin was through marriage; his half-sibling Samiha married into the Abaydah tribe of Ismailia and Sinai.

During his childhood, Salem's sustained an eye injury, disallowing him from entering the mandatory military service.

He graduated from the Heliopolis Public High School, but had to repeat his senior year.

In 1956, he graduated from Cairo University's Faculty of Commerce.

Shortly after receiving his degree, one of Salem's relatives secured a job for him as a clerk in the Textile Support Fund, which then-president Gamal Abdel Nasser had established to alleviate high unemployment rates, particularly among the youth.

Later in 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, prompting a tripartite assault on Egypt by the United Kingdom, France and Israel.

In 1959, he married Nazimah Abdel-Hamid Ismail and the couple moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Golf area of Heliopolis.

The monthly rent was (Salem's monthly salary was ).

According to one of his neighbors at the time, Salem did not own a car or many luxuries for most of the 1960s and early 1970s.

He enrolled Khaled into Saint George, a private British school in Heliopolis, an education that Salem had to frequently borrow money to pay for.

During the early 1960s Salem had landed a job as the branch director for the Arab Company for External Trade in Casablanca, Morocco which paid per month.

A former CEO at the company—which was allegedly a front for the Egyptian Intelligence Services—remembered Salem as a very private employee who traveled abroad often.

The CEO believes Salem was supervising arms deals to help nationalist struggles against European colonialism in North Africa, in line with Nasser's foreign policy at the time.

In Casablanca Salem befriended Amin Howeidi who served as Egypt's ambassador to Morocco at the time.

Although Salem favored open markets, there has been no indication that he opposed the canal's nationalization, although he resented Nasser's decision to nationalize the holdings of top capitalists in Egypt in 1961.

The couple's first child, Khaled, was born in 1961, followed by the birth of their daughter, Magda, two years later.

That same year, 1963, Howeidi was appointed ambassador to Iraq and he brought Salem with him to serve as the Arab Company's branch director in Baghdad.

Salem began cultivating relationships with the high-ranking staff of the Egyptian embassy in Iraq, particularly Amin Yousri the embassy's press-attache and Ibrahim Yousri the embassy's second secretary.

Al-Ahram Weekly editor Karem Yehia states that the Yousris claim Salem was a "likable" person, but not "intellectually sophisticated".

Howeidi mentored Salem on international politics by enrolling him in study groups particularly after Howeidi was appointed by then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the post of Intelligence Director in 1967 following Egypt's defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel.

According to Ibrahim Yousri, Salem gained Howeidi's trust primarily because he was able to regularly provide Howeidi with useful intelligence due to his connections with business circles in Iraq which would have otherwise been difficult to attain through the Egyptian embassy.

Amin Yousri claims Salem cultivated good relationships with other Egyptian embassy employees by helping them buy Mercedes vehicles at low interest rates offered by the Iraqi Central Bank.

Despite his relative success in Baghdad, Salem did not find his work there as particularly fulfilling and requested Howeidi a number of times for transfer to Europe where he said he had "friends" who could help him start a private business.

Instead, Salem was sent on ambassadorial missions to Arab States of the Persian Gulf.

There he succeeded in establishing his own personal networks that would later become useful during his future business ventures in those states.

Relations between Howeidi and Salem deteriorated following Nasser's death in 1970 and the succession of Anwar Sadat to the presidency afterward.

He died on 12 August 2019 in Spain.