Egyptian tycoon and Mansour Group Chairman Mohammed Mansour has made a £100,000 ($140,419) donation to support a multi-faith memorial for COVID-19 victims at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Egyptian billionaire who oversees Mansour Group, his family’s global conglomerate in Knightsbridge, London, was moved to make the donation after seeing the grief caused by the pandemic, Daily Mail reported.
“I have been moved by the scale of the tragedy of the death toll from Covid and the 130,000 people who have died, the largest toll since the Second World War. Everyone lost to this battle must never be forgotten – grandparents, mothers, fathers and children,” Mansour said.
The campaign was launched by St. Paul’s Cathedral and supported by Prince of Wales, Prince Charles to raise £2.3 million ($3.2 million) to build a memorial in London to commemorate those who died of COVID-19.
With Mansour’s donation, a total of £1.5 million ($2.1 million) has now been pledged to the campaign, thanks to key donations from faith leaders who have already given their support, especially from Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Sikh organizations around Britain.
Mansour is Africa’s eleventh wealthiest billionaire. His net worth of $2.5 billion makes him the 1,249th richest man in the world thanks to the fortune he has built through Mansour Group. The family conglomerate has 60,000 employees and was founded by his father Loutfy in 1952.
Despite coming from a prominent business family in Alexandria, the third largest city in Egypt, Mansour was forced to rebuild his family’s fortune after it was lost when Egypt’s then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized his late father’s cotton business in 1964.
