Businessmen jailed in crackdown in Egypt

CAIRO: Egyptian authorities were holding the founder of the country’s largest dairy products and juices producer and his son in conditions that amounted to torture because of their refusal to cede their assets, Amnesty International said yesterday.

There was no immediate response to a request for comment to Egypt’s state information service.

The arrests of Safwan Thabet, founder and former chief executive of Juhayna, in December, and of his son Seifeldin two months later, shook Juhayna, a household name in Egypt.

The authorities accuse them of belonging to and financing a terrorist group – commonly a reference to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood – according to state media. The Thabet family have denied any wrongdoing.

Such charges had been widely deployed in a crackdown that has swept up dissidents from across the political spectrum, and were now being used to target business people, Amnesty said, adding that authorities had failed to produce evidence for the alleged affiliation.