{UAH} Egyptian Estimate Of Mubarak's Wealth Soars To $700 Billion

Back in February, former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's vast wealth started to attract widespread press scrutiny, with outlets like the Guardian and ABC News estimating his fortune at as much as $70 billion. At the time, FORBES went on the record calling that number exaggerated and unproven. We don't include heads of state in our annual Billionaires List valuations, and their fortunes are often impossible to pin down -- although a few, like Chile's Sebastian Pinera, are billionaires via businesses or investments and just happen to be political leaders. So while we've never calculated Mubarak's net worth, we felt confident that the $70 billion figure being thrown around was high. Why? Well, for starters, it would make Mubarak the second richest person in the world, right behind Carlos Slim and way ahead of Bill Gates. It'd make him richer than the King of Thailand, Sultan of Brunei and King of Saudi Arabia combined. That $70 billion figure seemed to have been pulled out of thin air, with mention of "secret bank accounts" in European banks. As my colleague Kerry Dolan said at the time: "It's easy to speculate about how much cash might been stashed away in Swiss banks accounts. But it's much harder to prove that it's there."

That outlandish-seeming $70 billion figure has now been dwarfed by a new estimate of the Mubarak family's fortune. On Saturday the Washington Post's investigative team wrote that they'd been privy to documents published by top Egyptian lawyers claiming that the former president's clan may have squirreled away $700 billion in "cash, gold and other state-owned valuables." This $700 billion haul is said to include "75 tons of Egyptian gold held by the U.S. Federal Reserve." To put that figure in perspective, Egypt's GDP is about $500 billion.

The Post's reporters admit their skepticism about this new estimate. From Saturday's story:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/04/11/egyptian-estimate-of-mubaraks-wealth-soars-to-700-billion/?fbclid=IwAR00qJDjqwgqQOEUcttq24c-NWYTMUtq8rN75yjLr5F77CTJ7Rb87ndJtQ4#99d504242d2a  

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"When a man is stung by a bee, he doesn't set off to destroy all beehives"

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