Voice recording exposes Brotherhood’s financial corruption

Mohamed Abdel Ghaffar

A leaked voice recording has exposed financial scandals of Muslim Brotherhood leaders living in Turkey. The recent leak, on July 24, has exposed a divide among the Muslim Brotherhood leaders over $2 million donated by a member of the Brotherhood’s international organization.

Amir Bassam, a member of the Brotherhood’s Shura Council, revealed in the voice leak that the money was divided among 3 Brotherhood figures living in Turkey. Bassam did not name these three Brotherhood leaders, who bought branded real estate worth $1.2 million. Bassam said a sum of $700,000 was distributed among the Brotherhood’s leaders.

The son of Mahmoud Hussein, the Brotherhood’s secretary-general, received a sum of $100,000 to buy a BMW.

Bassam wondered how the Brotherhood’s leaders get such amounts of money while the Brotherhood’s young people, who took refuge in Turkey, receive 200 Turkish liras. Bassam was also angry that no Brotherhood leaders objected to the incident as three figures took the money without any right, although they admitted they had received the money during a meeting in Istanbul.

In the leaked voice recording, Bassam has affirmed that he only accepts Mahmoud Ezzat as an acting supreme guide of the Brotherhood, asserting that Mahmoud Hussein and Ibrahim Mounir “had violated the Brotherhood’s rules and teachings”.

In August 2017, Bassam posed a text on the Internet in objection to the way the Brotherhood’s leaders run the organization. “Why the [the Brotherhood’s internal] elections were cancelled in some countries? Why a Brotherhood leader was not elected? This violates the Brotherhood’s well-established customs,” Bassam said.

Bassam said there should be transparency and accountability about the Brotherhood’s spending.

Researcher Hisham El-Naggar, an expert on Islamist affairs, has said that it is usual to hear some leaks about the Brotherhood’s corruption from time to time.

“There has been a conflict between the Brotherhood’s old guards and the young generation. The old guards want to take grip of the organization by controlling the young people. When the old guards want to get rid of young people, they notify the Turkish authorities that they are jihadists and do not belong to the Brotherhood. There are so many unknown stories about that,” El-Naggar told THE REFERENCE.

Answering a question if the Brotherhood’s old guards would comment on the recent leak, El-Naggar said: “They will not comment on that as they do not wish to open the way for exposing scandals that happened whether before or after toppling the Brotherhood”.