Usually, the Engineers Syndicate doesn’t hold its general assemblies on a working day. 

But on Tuesday, nearly 24,000 engineers gathered at the syndicate headquarters in Nasr City, many of them brought in on buses owned by the government institutions that employ them, to cast their ballots in a vote of no-confidence on the syndicate’s independent head, Tarek al-Nebrawy.

By night, the preliminary vote count indicated that an overwhelming majority of the assembled engineers had voted in support of Nebrawy retaining his position. This, however, flew in the face of the wishes of the syndicate’s board, a body dominated by members of Nation’s Future Party, which holds a majority in both chambers of Parliament.

Before Nebrawy’s victory could be announced, dozens of people stormed the hall where votes were being counted and smashed the ballot boxes, trampling on papers cast in favor of Nebrawy.

Now, the matter has been raised to legal authorities, with Nebrawy directly accusing the party of inciting the assault, and the party denying any responsibility for the events of Tuesday night. 

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Voting was meant to close at 7 pm on Tuesday, but a 30-minute extension was granted before the polls were closed and counting started, syndicate member Manal al-Molla tells Mada Masr.

“The count was not difficult, as it was a simple choice between “agree” or “disagree,’” Molla says. And within the first hour of counting, the observers monitoring the 40 ballot boxes had a clear sense of the result, according to Molla. Disagree. Disagree. Disagree. About 90 percent of the vote was in favor of Nebrawy remaining head of the syndicate, she estimates.

As the crowds pushed forward toward the judicial committee supervising the elections to hear the announcement of the results, security forces entered the hall and asked everyone to leave. 

While engineers were being ushered out of the hall, a dispute broke out between the judicial committee and members of the syndicate board. The board members insisted that they should take possession of the ballots to announce the results themselves.

According to Egyptian Social Democratic Party MP and syndicate member Maha Abdel Nasser, the judicial committee delayed announcing the result. Amid the delay, board members and prominent syndicate members known to oppose Nebrawy’s leadership began to arrive in the counting hall. 

“They were not present at first, and they entered suddenly: board members Ahmed Sabry and Al-Moataz Billah Barakat were accompanied by engineer and MP Iman al-Agouz,” Abdel Nasser says. While Sabry and Barakat are members of the Nation’s Future Party, Agouz was appointed to the House of Representatives by presidential decision.

“They went to the podium to stand with the judicial committee. I heard them asking about who will be entrusted to make the announcement and saying they will appeal against the results.”

As the argument carried on, Yousry al-Deeb, the syndicate secretary-general who has clashed publicly with Nebrawy in the past, arrived with syndicate undersecretary Ihab Khedr. They made a request for all of the syndicate members, except Nebrawy’s delegates, to exit the hall, according to Abdel Nasser. 

“At about 10:30 pm the hall was empty,” says Molla. 

“Five minutes later,” recalls Abdel Nasser, “we saw the engineers run back in with thugs coming after them.”

“Suddenly we heard sounds of commotion coming from outside,” Molla says. “Around 30-40 people stormed in, destroying everything in their way” and purporting to be supporters of Nebrawy with chants of “Tarek is chief.” 

To try to preserve the results, some engineers moved to protect the ballot boxes, but the men rampaging through the hall assaulted them and smashed the boxes, leaving at least one of the engineers injured, Abdel Nasser continues. 

While chaos played outside in the election hall, the police force that had been stationed outside the hall since the morning sat quietly. Emergency services only responded to complaints about the assault at around 2:30 am on Wednesday morning, Abdel Nasser says.

In a video streamed live to social media in the aftermath of the assault, the MP tells her Facebook Live audience: “No country can function like this. No country can develop like this. Thugs cannot come and assault engineers, destroy the ballot boxes and intimidate the counters until they leave. Why are we having the National Dialogue? Why are we sitting down and talking to each other if this is the result?”

Two fact-checking outlets, Saheeh Misr and Don’t Believe, were able to identify several leading Nation’s Future Party MPs and members among the attackers by comparing footage of the assault posted on social media to public photos of the party figures. 

The party members identified by the two accounts include: MPs Eid Hammad, Ihab al-Omda, Abanob Ezzat Aziz and Mohamed Abdel Rahman Abdel Rady, as well as Nation’s Future Sharabiya youth chapter coordinator Kareem Gomaa, his assistant Mohamed Kolkasa, along with other party members — none of whom are engineers or had a reason to be at the counting hall that day.

The party, for its part, claimed in a statement that only Nation’s Future members who are members of the syndicate were present in the conference hall on Tuesday. It threatened to take legal action against those who try to “offend the party and spread malicious accusations.”

In a Wednesday public statement Nebrawy explicitly described the attackers as “thugs of the Nation’s Future Party,” affirming in a statement to Mada Masr that he had a commanding lead in the count and that, even if the judicial committee does not announce the result, he will remain syndicate head.

The Public Prosecution announced on Wednesday that it will open an investigation into the incident.

Following Tuesday’s assault, according to a source close to Nebrawy who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, Nebrawy filed several complaints at Nasr City Police Station against syndicate board members, including Omada and Hammad, as well as the party’s chapter in the Shabariya district.

Members of the syndicate board have turned Nabrawy’s accusations back against him in retaliatory complaints filed with law enforcement, says a second source close to the syndicate head.

While Tuesday’s assault may be unprecedented in its blatant violence, it comes in the context of a tussle for influence that has played out within the Engineering Syndicate for more than two decades.

In 1994, the syndicate was placed under judicial guardianship to end “the control of the Muslim Brotherhood,” the state said at the time. It wasn’t until 2011 that a collective, founded in 2004 with Nebrawy’s involvement and named “Engineers Against Guardianship,” managed to regain the syndicate’s independence via a court ruling.

The Muslim Brotherhood dominated the board’s 2011 elections, with Maged Kholousy defeating Nebrawy’s leadership bid.

Nebrawy remained the leader of the syndicate’s pro-independence current. In 2013, the bloc worked to collect signatures for a no-confidence vote against the board and its head, eventually succeeding in removing them in January 2014, and, with state backing, taking the chair and control of the board.

Nebrawy sought to assert his independence from the government, voicing his opposition to transferring sovereignty over the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, supporting maintenance engineers during the power outages in Cairo International Airport when they were accused of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, forming a legal support committee for engineers detained in political cases, and declaring solidarity with the Pharmacists Syndicate in 2015 after it was placed under judicial guardianship.

In the next round of syndicate elections in 2018, Nebrawy competed against the government candidate, former Transport Minister Hany Dahy, and his “Engineers for the Love of Egypt” electoral list. Dahy won the syndicate head seat after a run-off, with clear support from the state.

However, despite this board’s proximity to the state, it underperformed on its mandate. According to sources who spoke to Mada Masr at the time, it failed to instate a new training program, sabbatical allowance bills or amendments to the syndicate law that would allow it to increase its financial resources. It also started hiring people to the syndicate committees based on proximity to the board members instead of accumulated experience. 

When the board’s term ended in 2022, Nebrawy ran again for the top seat, winning this time, but without the rest of the pro-independence candidates. Instead, he found himself sitting at the helm of a board dominated by officials in state-owned companies who were hostile to him.

Board members brought in via the 2022 election include Major General Yousry Salem, assistant education minister for affairs of the General Authority for Educational Buildings; Major General Hossam Eddin Rizk, who is also the head of the General Authority for Building and Housing Cooperatives; Major General Ihab Khedr, a board member of the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater; and Major General Mahmoud Arafat, an advisor to the military production minister.

At times this hostility has played out behind closed doors, but, at other times, it has come out into the open.

Most visible in recent months was a struggle over the Rehab al-Tahiwi law firm, which had filed the 2022 lawsuit that barred the state-aligned candidate Ahmed Othman Ahmed Othman from running against Nebrawy. 

In a telling act of retribution, Deeb, the syndicate’s secretary general, issued a letter to Nebrawy instructing him to revoke power of attorney from the law firm, which was acting as the syndicate’s legal adviser. For Nabrawy, this was an infringement on the authority of his position, so he called for an urgent meeting during which he demanded Deeb’s dismissal.

Tensions came to a head in March, when some engineers submitted proposals to the syndicate board for discussion during a general assembly meeting. However, when the meeting took place, the board refused to present any of those proposals, deciding instead to distribute them to the subcommittees for study. In the opinion of union activist and former board candidate Iman Allam, in doing so the board imposed its authority to discuss only what it deemed appropriate.

The board’s choices did not sit well with Nebrawy. In defiance, he decided to unilaterally announce the proposals that had been submitted to the board, open the floor for a vote and announce their approval by a majority of attendees.

In addition to removing Deeb from his position and a series of other programmatic matters regarding the syndicate’s organizational politics, the March decisions ushered in a major change that, for Nebrawy’s fellow board members, was tantamount to a declaration of war. 

At the heart of this war are the syndicate’s stakes in several companies, including Mohandes Insurance and its 30 percent stake in the paint company Mohandes Jotun S.A.E., according to Molla. 

For Nebrawy, these companies serve as an important source of income for the services provided by the syndicate to its members, but for his fellow board members with Nation’s Future stripes, the syndicate’s stakes in the companies represent a potential cash grab in a sale to an Emirati buyer.

This was a key issue in the March general assembly, where one of the key proposals approved prevented those sitting on the syndicate’s board from also sitting on the board of companies in which the syndicate has stakes. 

According to Molla, it has been customary for syndicate board members to be appointed as representatives to the companies’ board of directors.

“Tarek al-Nebrawy rejected this custom and changed it in his electoral program, and this created a large gap between him and the rest of the board members,” says Molla.

In a long video explaining his rejection of the March decisions, which Nebrawy’s fellow board members have contested in court, Rizk, the head of the General Authority for Building and Housing Cooperatives, said that syndicate board members had already signed a waiver to address the potential conflict of interest, forfeiting to the syndicate’s social fund any payouts they would receive as company board members.

But that did not allay concerns that members’ business and syndicate interests could clash. 

Following the March meeting, Nebrawy issued a decision to halt cooperation with syndicate representatives in both Mohandes Insurance Company and Jotun, while also announcing that deliberations were underway to select new representatives to the Pensions and Relief Fund as board members of the two companies.

In April, Jotun requested a $60 million loan from its Norwegian parent company during a general assembly meeting attended by the syndicate’s new representative, who approved the company’s request for the loan.

According to Molla, the approval stemmed from a belief that the company could still turn things around to reap profits. Nonetheless, the syndicate’s board rejected the decision, which Molla attributes to the desire of some syndicate board members to demonstrate that Jotun’s current management was beyond salvaging in order to justify selling the syndicate’s share in it to an Emirati buyer. 

UAE investors have demonstrated a desire to gain a foothold in Egypt’s paint industry, with the government’s entire stake in the Paints and Chemical Industries Company (Pachin) bought earlier this month by an Emirati company.

It seemed that the board and its chair had reached a dead end, or, at least, in Allam’s opinion, cooperation between them in service of the syndicate’s members had become very difficult. In the midst of this deadlock, about 330 engineers petitioned the syndicate board to convene an emergency general assembly to withdraw confidence from the board in its entirety. 

In one of the board’s sessions, which Nebrawy did not attend, the motions of no confidence were discussed. But the 300 motions were not alone, as hundreds of other motions “suddenly appeared,” says Allam. The board members said that these requests had been submitted by 1,960 engineers, calling for the syndicate to withdraw confidence from Nebrawy alone.

While the 338 members who had called for a vote of no confidence in the board were public, the identities of these 1,960 engineers calling for Nebrawy to be removed were not disclosed. 

Nonetheless, the board approved the petition to put a vote of no confidence in Nebrawy to the general assembly scheduled for May 30, and cast aside the petitions for a referendum on the entire board, according to Allam. 

Tuesday’s turnout in favor of Nebrawy was a stern rebuke of the state-aligned board members, many of them Nation’s Future Party members, to interfere in the affairs of the syndicate, Molla believes, even if that doesn’t mean there is an endorsement of Nebrawy himself. 

Now, however, the matter is out of the hands of the syndicate members. The Nation’s Future assault on the democratic practice means that it will remain for a court to decide whether to approve the state’s attempts at engineering the syndicate.