There has been growing evidence of the role played by Mahmoud son of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the management of behind-the-scenes operations to stabilize his father's rule and ensure its sustainability to the very latest.

Sisi repeated that he did not like "modesty and favoritism," and that he never intervened to appoint one of his sons to a prestigious position. But it is not about a job or a job, but about building and maintaining the state, as the president sees it.

Egypt's lobbying for amending the constitution has begun since Sisi said the constitution was "written with good intentions" and that "countries are not built by good intentions."

According to several press reports, Mahmoud, a senior officer in the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, has for months been managing the file of constitutional amendments allowing his father to remain in office until at least 2030, which the Egyptians are supposed to vote on within a few weeks after being passed in parliament .

The latest reports from The Times, which said this week that General Mahmoud, the eldest son of Sisi, reportedly oversees an informal committee monitoring the progress of amending the constitution.

"Sisi is recruiting his sons to help him stay in power until 2030," the report said, referring to the role of the president's sons in establishing their father's authority. Al-Sisi has three sons, Mahmoud, Mustafa and Hassan, and one daughter, Aya.

Mustafa is the middle son, and is described as the second man in the administrative control body, which has become de facto dominant over the rest of the country's oversight bodies.

Hassan, the youngest son, is believed to be an official in the communications department of the General Intelligence Service. His older brother, Mahmud, is helping to manage vital files inside the body. He was an employee of an oil company and joined the intelligence service two months later. His father's inauguration in June 2014.

In the hands of intelligence
In December 2018, Mada Egypt, a prominent news website blocked by the authorities in Egypt, published a lengthy report on constitutional amendments and the role of Mahmoud al-Sisi in managing this file, weeks before the amendments were unveiled in a document approved by parliament In principle in February 2019.

According to the report of Egypt, which was quoted by the New York Times later, the Egyptian intelligence headquarters held almost daily meetings between intelligence officials and the office of the president to get out the constitutional amendments document and agree on a date for holding the referendum after passing them in parliament.

The head of these meetings was Mahmud al-Sisi, who played this role under the supervision of the director of the General Intelligence, General Abbas Kamel, who is described as the sisi and his confidant, who himself participated in some of those meetings.

Mahmoud, who was known by the Egyptian public as a senior general in the General Intelligence in 2014, lived up to the rank of lieutenant colonel and colonel until he became dean in about four years.

This is how the elections were run
This is not the first time that Mahmoud al-Sisi has been hesitant about highly dangerous files in governance, politics and security.

In the period 2015-2016, which witnessed the first parliamentary elections in Egypt after the coup of July 2013, the "election operations room" was also held inside the headquarters of the General Intelligence, according to press reports, and the testimony of a former participant in the Sisi presidential campaign.

The new al-Arabi newspaper quoted political sources as saying that Mahmoud al-Sisi was one of four people in the operating room, which ran the election scene through daily meetings at the intelligence headquarters, and produced a list of "in love with Egypt" pro-Sisi, which dominated the parliament.

Political activist Hazem Abdel-Azim, currently imprisoned for incitement to state institutions, said in a testimony to social networking sites how he was involved in one of those meetings because of his previous activity as the youth commissioner of the first Sisi presidential campaign.

Abdul-Azim, who later turned into an opponent of Sisi, said sitting at the head of the table at that meeting in February 2015 was "an intelligence agent with four intelligence men (three of them young people between 30 and 40 years old)."

These arrangements, believed to have been conducted by the General Intelligence Service in coordination with officials of the Head of State, reflected the PA's concerns about the parliamentary elections and the keenness to produce an obedient parliament that did not depart from the text. The 2014 constitution gives the parliament too much power.

Other files
In addition to running the parliamentary elections and amending the constitution, Mahmoud al-Sisi is believed to be close to several security files, especially in the context of the dominance of the General Intelligence on some files that traditionally belonged to the national security apparatus.

The Italian magazine Spreso said in a report published in 2016 that it does not exclude that Mahmoud al-Sisi is one of the insiders of private information about the Italian researcher killed Julio Regini even before his disappearance. Reggini disappeared in January 2016 while studying and working in Cairo, and his body later emerged to explode a complex case that was blamed on senior officers of the Egyptian security apparatus.

She said she had seen disturbing details about the role of Mahmoud al-Sisi, which she had posted on Reginilix's electronic platform to highlight Reggini's death, but said she was reluctant to publish the details because the issue was sensitive and because the details had come from unknown sources.

On the foreign policy front, the New York Times quoted a former US State Department official as saying in January 2018 that Mahmoud al-Sisi had visited Washington at least once, accompanied by then-CIA director Khaled Fawzi in a visit to discuss with Barack Obama's administration.

These and other reports called for similarities between the sons of Sisi and the sons of Hosni Mubarak who overthrew the January 2011 revolution.

Despite the difference between the role of children in both cases, both have raised concern about the country's situation and fate, as "semi-state" as Sisi described it, seemingly far from a democratic republic.