Government of Egypt President
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Hosni Mubarak is Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century and one of the longest-serving leaders in the Arab world. Following the assassination of President Sadat by militants in 1981, Mubarak became the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Chairman of the National Democratic Party (NDP). He is a great survivor, having escaped no fewer than six assassination attempts.

At 77, he gained a fifth consecutive term in presidential elections in September 2005. The poll was the the first under a new system which allows multiple candidates to stand. In previous elections Egyptians voted yes or no for a single candidate appointed by parliament.However, the only opposition organisation which has broad public support, the Muslim Brotherhood, is banned from open political activity and could not field a candidate.

As a military man he modernised the air force after Egypt's defeat in the six-day war with Israel in 1967. He helped to plan the 1973 Yom Kippur War - an Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israeli forces on the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights.

The president is an economic liberal and his government has promised economic reforms. But Egypt remains plagued by high unemployment and low standards of living.

Mr Mubarak has pursued friendly relations with the West. He broke the isolation imposed on Egypt by Arab countries opposed to peace with Israel.

A dramatic drop in support for Mubarak occurred with the news that his son Alaa was favoured in government tenders and privatization. With both of his sons directly and indirectly owning shares in a large number of companies and minor projects, Mubarak's corruption is leading a series of corruption cases among his cabinet of minor governmental employees.

Corruption at the Ministry of Interior and Police is also very obvious, on a wide scale of the infinite powers of police departments as in the later events of executing criminals without trials, hidden prison cells from the DA, etc... and also on an individual level, as each individual officer can violate any simple citizen's privacy, making unconditioned arrests, resulting in the sight of a police captain being as a danger instead of safety. Transparency International (TI) is an international organisation addressing corruption, including, but not limited to, political corruption. In 2005, TI's Corruption Perceptions Index report assessed Egypt with a CPI score of 3.4, based on perceptions of the degree of corruption from business people and country analysts, with 10 being highly clean and 0 being highly corrupt. Egypt ranked 70th out of the 159 countries included in the report.

Recently he has come under criticism for extending Egypt's Emergency Law (the country has been under a state of emergency since ex-president Sadat's assassination in 1981). Under that "state of emergency", the government has the right to imprison individuals for any period of time, and for virtually no reason, thus keeping them in prisons without trials for any period. One justification presented by the government and certain members of the international community to keep that state of emergency going is to fight terrorism.

Hosni Mubarak was born in 1928. He and his wife Suzanne, who is part Welsh and part Egyptian, have two sons, Ala and Gamal.

(Information found at wikipedia.com and bbc.co.uk)