by Rod Hughes

Remember the Egyptian businessman accused of dumping the excrament from his 2,000 dairy cows into the river from which two sizeable towns take their drinking water for the past three years? (See newsfeed #1384) Welll, it appears he wasn’t quite candid with the Costa Rican Immigration authorities when he came to this country.

Granted, when Mohamed Ibrahm Elghanam, 45, applied for residency in 2002, he presented a document that said he had no criminal antecedents in his native Egypt, which may or not be true, he failed to mention something: Before coming to Costa Rica he had lived in the United States where, according to the newspaper La Nacion, he was convicted of four felonies, defaulting 14 court-ordered payments and took out bankruptcy three times. Little details like that.

Since coming to this country, Elghanam has been a busy little boy: He bought several farms including the one in Coronado accused of polluting the Rio Macho upriver from the Water and Sewer Institute’s (AyA) water intake for both Tibas and Moravia. He created 11 bearer-share corporations and has a dozen lawsuits against him. And now Immigration director Mario Zamora has asked his department do do plenty of digging into how Elghanam obtained his residency.

The dairy was found to be endangering water quality for more than 60,000 persons and was ordered closed by the Coronado Municipality and the Ministry of Health but the Egyptian allegedly tore down the seals and went right on with the operation. The Environmental Ministry is now preparing criminal action against him for defiance of court orders, allegedly using falsified doctuments, endangerment of public health and natural resources. But, other than that, he has been an absolute Boy Scout during his Costa Rican residency.

Last August, San Jose’s Second Circuit Court ordered the dairy closed again but Elghanam appealed. Last week, the courts rejected the appeal. Now it is time for the Environment Ministry lawyers to file criminal accusations.

As for his three counts of writing bad checks in Florida and the other pesky details he failed to tell Immigration about, the Egyptian breezily told La Nacion that he didn’t understand the question because of his bad Spanish. Asked by reporters about the three unfinished structures on the Coronado property he told them equally as breezily that he intends to build a treatment plant for the tons of ordure produced by the cows. Sometime.

Although all the cows are female, the authorities might well call his excuses bulls–t.