Egypt’s President Has A Friend In Washington. His Family Has Property In Miami

As Washington pledges new money to Cairo, the husband of el-Sisi’s niece has amassed millions of dollars of property in Florida.

On Wednesday, at the foreign ministry in Egypt’s New Administrative Capital, American and Egyptian officials signed the first Strategic Objective Agreement between their two countries. Washington committed $125 million to private-sector growth and to opening Egypt further to American business. The US Embassy promised the money would be spent with maximum efficiency and accountability.

It was another good day for Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Donald Trump’s Washington. Trump, who once reportedly called him “my favorite dictator”, met him in Davos in January and again at the G7 in Évian in June. There, seated beside him, Trump told reporters he had fallen deeply in love with the Egyptian leader when they first met in 2016.

Gaza is the foundation of that friendship. Egypt mediated between Israel and Hamas throughout the war, and in October 2025 el-Sisi co-chaired the Sharm el-Sheikh summit at which Trump and other leaders endorsed the ceasefire. That usefulness has brought praise, access, roughly $1.3 billion a year in US military aid, and now fresh American money. It also makes el-Sisi an uncomfortable man for Washington to scrutinize.

A family in Florida

The el-Sisi family’s American ties run much deeper than international diplomacy. Mohamed Safy Wahba, a 34-year-old businessman born in New York, is the Egyptian leader’s nephew via marriage, having wed the president’s niece, Mariam El-Sisi, in 2018. He runs the Al Safy Group, an Egyptian company his father founded in 1985.

Florida property and company records show that between 2020 and 2022 Wahba bought real estate costing about $6.7 million, in his own name or through companies registered in the state. The largest purchase, four lots on West Flagler Street in Miami, cost $3.7 million in February 2022. There is also a warehouse in the suburb of Doral, bought for $802,000, and three Doral homes bought in 2022 for $2.24 million combined. A significant, albeit not domineering, property portfolio.

The companies share one manager, Amgad Arafa, and most share one address: the Doral warehouse. Property have passed fluidly between them. Such arrangements are legal and common. They are also the kind of structure that, since 2016, has led the US Treasury to demand extra disclosure on cash property deals in Miami.

Most of the buying took place in 2022. That year more than $20 billion fled Egypt in a matter of months, the Egyptian pound slid against the dollar, and the country was gripped by severe foreign-currency shortages.

Keeping it in the family

Wahba’s father-in-law is Ahmed El-Sisi, the president’s eldest brother. A senior judge, he chairs Egypt’s Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Combating Unit, the agency charged with examining suspicious money movements into and out of the country. He was appointed during his brother’s first term and has now been in post for over a decade. Official statements usually name him as Ahmed Saeed Khalil, a form that conveniently omits the family name. In 2019, he met the director of FinCEN, the US Treasury’s financial-crimes agency, to discuss closer cooperation.

Nothing in my name

The president has faced questions about money before. In September 2019 Mohamed Ali, a construction contractor who had spent 15 years building for the army, began posting videos from exile in Spain. He described palaces and villas built for the president and his family with public funds, amidst nationwide austerity. He offered no documents, saying police had seized his company’s records.

The videos were watched by millions, and rare street protests followed in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and other cities. The response was what Amnesty International called the biggest crackdown of el-Sisi’s rule, with more than 2,300 people detained. El-Sisi dismissed the allegations as lies and defamation. He did, however, acknowledge building the palaces, insisting they were for the nation: “Nothing is in my name. Everything is in Egypt’s name.”

Seven years later, the suspicion Ali tapped into has not gone away. Egypt still ranks 130th of 182 countries on

Wednesday’s agreement speaks to that suspicion only where American money is concerned, promising that US funds in Egypt will be properly accounted for. It has nothing to say about money traveling in the opposite direction, from the president’s family into American property, an area that will likely find itself subject to greater scrutiny before long.