Special thanks to Twitter user “Fustat,” who alerted to this story, which we might have otherwise missed.
There isn’t much to say about this, since the whole bit about the forum is not really interesting except that it includes the tidbit that Gamal Mubarak is going to Washington, and the only way to move the story forward at this point is for someone to figure out which US officials Mubarak plans to meet, other than those mentioned in the article. We’ve taken the liberty of putting the interesting parts in bold.
From al-Shorouk’s Wednesday, October 28 edition:
Gamal Mubarak in Washington on December 7
Gamal Mubarak, who heads the National Democratic Party’s Policies Secretariat, will visit the US capital on December 7 and 8 to attend the first session of the Arab-International Forum.
The forum’s program, which was labeled “secret” but a copy of which was obtained by al-Shorouk, that Egypt will send a large delegation of government officials to the Forum, headed by Minister of Trade and Industry Rachid Muhammad Rachid, Minister of Telecommunications Tareq Kamel, Minister of Health Hatem al-Gebali, and the president of the Egyptian Company for Telecommunications, Aqil Bashir. Joining them will be several Egyptian business tycoons, along with Dr. Abd al-Moneim Said, al-Ahram’s Chairman of the Board.
The forum is being organized by two teams. The first, headed by businessman Shafiq Gabr, is the Egyptian International Economic Forum. The second is Swiss consulting firm “Simadia” [TBE: Not sure about that name or spelling (صماديا in Arabic), as several searches yielded no results], which has a branch in New York. As mentioned on its website, the Forum is “By Businessmen, For Businessmen, In the Service of Businessmen” It is expected that Gamal Mubarak will speak during lunch on the second day of the conference, December 8, between 12:30 and 2 pm.
Among the US officials set to attend are former Energy Secretary and current Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, head of the UNDP Helen Clark and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The forum will be held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC.
3 Comments
10/28/2009 at 9:10 pm
Thanks – this is interesting!
10/29/2009 at 2:08 pm
Yeah, good catch.
10/29/2009 at 3:19 pm
Interesting indeed. Anything labelled “global forum” will be dreadfully boring, but surely that’s not the only item on his DC agenda…