Former Egyptian minister and Conservative Party donor receives UK knighthood
A former Egyptian government minister and high-profile donor to Britain’s Conservative Party has been given a knighthood by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Mohamed Mansour, who served as a treasurer to the Conservative Party, was included in the list on Thursday by Sunak for his services to business, charity, and political service.
Before coming to the UK, Mansour served as transport minister in Egypt under President Hosni Mubarak between 2005 and 2009.
Last year, Labour called on the government to return a £5m donation Mansour had given to the Conservative Party after it emerged that one of his family’s companies continued to operate in Russia after it launched its invasion of Ukraine.
Mansour set up his family office, Man Capital, in London in 2010, after his stint as transport minister under Mubarak.
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Born in 1948 to a merchant family in the northern Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, Mansour studied engineering at North Carolina State University and graduated in 1968.
His father, Loutfy Mansour, founded the Mansour Group in 1952. Now overseen by Mohamed, the family conglomerate employs 60,000 people and is among the largest in Egypt.
For a long time, the Mansour family was associated with a litany of international brands, for which they worked as agents.
These included Chevrolet, Marlboro, General Motors (GM) - the Mansour Group established GM dealerships in Egypt in 1975 - and Caterpillar, for which the family has exclusive distribution rights in Egypt and seven other African countries.
Some of the Mansour family’s other interests included Metro, Egypt’s largest supermarket chain, and McDonald’s franchises in Egypt. Mohamed himself was known as “Mansour Chevrolet”.
Mansour's ministerial career came to an abrupt end on 27 October 2009, when he was asked by the prime minister to submit his resignation.
Three days earlier, two passenger trains had rammed into each other in El Ayyat, a city around 45km southwest of the Egyptian capital Cairo, leaving at least 50 people dead and 30 injured.
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