The billionaire and the pandemic
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mohamed Mansour is a household name in Egypt. The billionaire head of the multinational conglomerate Mansour Group has been involved in business and politics in Egypt and abroad for decades, as the BBC’s Mohamed El Aassar explains. Mansour himself sat down to speak with Manuela Saragosa about globalisation, the long-term impact of coronavirus and donating to the UK conservative party.
(Picture: Mohamed Mansour. Picture credit: Mansour Group.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Saragossa. In this edition, |
| 0:07.0 | the billionaire and the pandemic. Are we up this year? No, we're down 20%. So are we losing money? |
| 0:14.2 | No, we're making money, but we're not making as much or as well as we did before. It's not, |
| 0:19.6 | it's not going to be a great year. |
| 0:21.4 | Muhammad Mansour is the billionaire owner of the Mansour Group. We hear what it's like to run an |
| 0:26.8 | international business empire as the COVID pandemic wreaks havoc on the world economy, plus how |
| 0:32.7 | he mixes with politics. Money in the time of the coronavirus. Coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:42.9 | The Mansour Group's business empire is a pretty big one. Its portfolio includes the car industry, |
| 0:49.0 | real estate, healthcare, tech, logistics and food distribution, among others. all of which means this conglomerate is well |
| 0:55.3 | placed to describe the impact global trade tensions and the pandemic are having on the world |
| 1:00.4 | economy. We'll hear from Mohamed Mansour, the group's co-chair in just a moment. First, though, |
| 1:06.1 | over to BBC Monitoring's Middle Eastern North Africa specialist Mohamed El-Assar. |
| 1:12.9 | What's the background on Mr. Mansour? |
| 1:16.4 | So Mohammed Mansour is as big a deal as they come. |
| 1:21.6 | The Mansour family, him, his brothers, their father before them have always been in business in Egypt. They managed to survive regime change in 1952 when the country went to a socialist |
| 1:26.7 | economist and they rebuilt their fortune when the country went to a socialist economist and they rebuilt their |
| 1:28.6 | fortune when the country opened up again in the 70s. So he's a household name there? |
| 1:33.3 | Definitely and across the Middle East because he is an employer. He has a lot of charitable |
| 1:37.8 | endeavors. One publication I read described him as a tarnished captain of industry. Why would that be? |
| 1:44.8 | I think his biggest mistake was really accepting a post in the mid-2000s with the former |
| 1:52.4 | president, Hosni Mubarak. He accepted a postadminister of transport. And he was part of a team |
| 1:57.9 | that was brought in to bring economic reform |
... |
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