Foreign News: How Zeezee Made Good

"Idiots," stormed Mme. Mustafa el Nahas at her husband's Cabinet ministers. "You join Cabinets and come out poor. You should make a fortune." Zee-zee, a plump girl with a hard eye, showed them how. In a few years she transformed a miserly monthly inheritance of £4 ($11.50) and her Premier-husband's moderate salary into a fortune in millions, hundreds of fertile acres and a gleaming yacht. Senile Safsaf, as her husband was called, a onetime fellah who rose to boss Egypt's Wafd Party, blossomed out in Sulka ties, hired a valet, vacationed on the Riviera.

Before Cairo's special post-revolution tribunal probing Farouk era corruption, a parade of witnesses itemized Zeezee's climb to riches:

¶5he got the Cabinet to issue a decree that put her and her friends into a position to corner the cotton market. Zeezee netted thousands; the government lost millions.

¶5he had a road and a landing stage built on her estate at government expense.

¶5he smuggled £70,000 worth of diamonds to Palestine on a special government train in 1943, sold them there at a higher price.

¶ On one birthday alone she accepted "gifts" worth £100,000.

¶500n after she "bought" 80 acres from her good companion, Fuad Serag el Din (TIME, Feb. 8), he became a pasha and Agriculture Minister in her husband's Cabinet.

¶5he arranged the firing of overscrupulous Cabinet ministers who interfered with her brothers' shady export-import transactions.

After 14 days of listening to the details, the court this week had heard enough and issued its verdict: seizure of Zeezee's assets, worth about $600,000, plus the fortune accumulated by her two brothers. Zeezee, because she was suffering a nervous breakdown and various other ailments, was excused from attending the trial and allowed to sit it out in her Cairo palace. But the court took the palace, too.