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nike dunk shoesForget the allegations that former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his family stashed billions of dollars abroad, much of it in Swiss bank accounts and real estate in London and Manhattan. The ailing Mubarak, reported to be suffering from heart problems, may be much closer to his money as he recuperates in the presidential suite of a pyramid-shaped hotel in the glitzy, sun-splashed Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh. Western diplomats and law-enforcement officials tell NEWSWEEK that many of the secrets of the Mubarak family’s wealth may be revealed along the palm-fringed streets of this town—Egypt’s equivalent to Orlando or Las Vegas, where sprawling Western-style luxury hotels, shopping centers, and Starbucks and McDonald ’s outlets stretch for miles along the coastline of the southern Sinai Peninsula. “You can be certain that—directly and indirectly, legally and illegally—the Mubarak family, especially Mubarak’s sons, have shared in the profits of the boom in Sharm al-Sheikh,” said a European diplomat who was based in Egypt until recently. hermes birkin bag“The family’s cronies own so much of it.” Prosecutors have just gotten started, but they have plenty of material to work with—including evidence emerging almost daily of how Mubarak’s government awarded lucrative contracts and real-estate deals to his closest friends. Investigators appear to be paying special attention to a multibillion-dollar natural-gas deal with Israel handed to a company run by a man often described as Mubarak’s best friend. The 82-year-old Mubarak, who preferred to spend his time in Sharm al-Sheikh instead of smoggy, overcrowded Cairo in his final years in office, fled to the Red Sea resort town once and for all after he was forced from power in February. He was rushed to a modern tourist hospital last week after complaining of chest pains that began—conveniently, perhaps—as he was being interrogated by Egyptian anti-corruption prosecutors. cheap coach handbags Investigators cut the interview short but also announced that Mubarak is now effectively under house arrest. (He was transferred to a military hospital late last week.) Over the years, Mubarak has made his home in Sharm al-Sheikh in a spacious villa in a large beachfront hotel complex, close to a championship golf course and hidden from street view by 30-foot-high whitewashed walls. Among his neighbors: Bakr bin Laden, a half-brother of Osama and scion of the family’s multibillion-dollar construction fortune, whose home is much larger and flashier than the ousted Egyptian leader’s. When the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt from Israeli control in 1982 under the Camp David peace accords, “Sharm,” as it is known to many Western tourists, was a sleepy fishing village boasting three small Israeli-owned hotels and a snack hut. Coach Boots Today, there are nearly 200 hotels and resorts, many of them owned by close friends and confidants of Mubarak, whose government made development of the tourism industry in the southern Sinai a national economic priority.