Nobody disputes that a licence exists. Two Egyptian companies disagree, in writing and on television, about what that licence settled.
On 17 October 2010, Starz for Artistic Production, owned by producer Mohsen Gaber, signed a contract granting the state-owned Sawt Al-Qahera for Audio and Visual Recordings the right to exploit Umm Kulthum’s recorded masters. Four years of litigation followed over what that contract meant for ownership, and the two sides still read the same court rulings in opposite directions. In January 2024, Sawt Al-Qahera’s own chair added a complication neither a judge nor a press release had mentioned before: heirs holding a combined 80 per cent of a 30 per cent inheritance share in the recordings had, by her account, sold their interest to Gaber anyway.
Umm Kulthum died in 1975. Her recordings are still generating a live dispute over who can license them, fifty-one years later, and this is what the documents show.
What the 2010 contract actually was#
Starz granted Sawt Al-Qahera the right to exploit Umm Kulthum recordings under the October 2010 contract. That much both sides state consistently. What they do not agree on is whether that grant means Starz owned the recordings and licensed them out, or whether Sawt Al-Qahera already owned them under older contracts from the singer’s lifetime and the 2010 agreement was something narrower.
Sawt Al-Qahera’s account, given by former chairman Mohamed El-Amry and legal adviser Hossam Lotfy, starts earlier: a 2008 dispute over sales the company says exceeded what it had licensed, a change of leadership in 2015 when El-Amry took over and moved to halt further sales, and a 2017 Cairo Economic Court ruling, in cases numbered 1957 and 2482 of that year, that the company says confirmed its ownership outright.
Starz appealed. On 16 June 2020, the Cairo Economic Court of Appeal rejected that appeal, numbered 385, and upheld the first-instance ruling. Sawt Al-Qahera’s representatives called the result final: enforceable, not open to further challenge, and proof that the company alone holds the rights.
The same ruling, read the other way#
Mohsen Gaber does not accept that reading. Speaking in his own name and, on at least one occasion, for Mazzika Group, the company built around the Mazzika TV channel he launched in 2003, Gaber has said publicly that the June 2020 ruling did not grant Sawt Al-Qahera ownership of anything. His account: the court rejected Starz’s specific appeal only because Starz itself had granted Sawt Al-Qahera exploitation rights under the 2010 contract. On that reading, Starz still owns the underlying recordings, and Sawt Al-Qahera’s position is that of a licensee, not an owner. “The songs of Umm Kulthum in the law are my property,” he told one outlet in September 2020.
Neither side’s lawyers have produced, or this desk has been able to locate, an actual text of the ruling to settle which account is accurate. Both characterisations come from named representatives speaking on the record, and they cannot both be literally true.
The disagreement did not stay in the courts. Gaber told the Egyptian entertainment site Filfan, in a statement published in his own name on 29 September 2020, that a separate Starz suit against Sawt Al-Qahera, over the terms of the 2010 contract, had produced a different result weeks earlier: a 31 August 2020 ruling, he said, terminated the contract for Sawt Al-Qahera’s breach and ordered it to pay Starz 1.5 million Egyptian pounds in damages. No source independent of Gaber’s own statement reports that ruling. This record carries it as his claim, not as a verified fact, because that is what the sourcing actually supports.
Egypt’s administrative apparatus sided, publicly, with Sawt Al-Qahera. On 8 March 2021, the Ministry of Culture’s Central Administration for Censorship of Artistic Works wrote to the company confirming that government departments should not issue licences or disposition certificates for Umm Kulthum recordings without its approval. Sawt Al-Qahera’s chair, Nadia Mabrouk, told local press at the time: “Any dealing with Umm Kulthum’s songs is only done through Sawt Al-Qahera.” In January 2024, the head of Egypt’s National Media Authority, which Sawt Al-Qahera is reported to sit under, publicly backed the same position.
Then the company’s own chair complicated it#
That same January 2024 interview, given by Mabrouk, is the most recent dated statement from either side that this desk could locate, and it does not describe a clean win. She told Egyptian television that a contract gives Sawt Al-Qahera ownership of Umm Kulthum’s “heritage” while allocating a 30 per cent share to her heirs collectively, split among them according to their individual inheritance entitlements under Egyptian law. Heirs holding a combined 80 per cent of that 30 per cent share, she said, have since sold their rights to Mohsen Gaber. The remainder stays with heirs still aligned with the company. “Mohsen Gaber has a right no one denies,” she said, limited to what he actually bought.
That is not a reversal of the court rulings. A private sale of inheritance shares by individual heirs to a buyer is a different transaction from a licensing dispute between two companies, and nothing in the record ties the two together as a single proceeding. But it means that four years after Sawt Al-Qahera’s side was calling the ownership question settled, its own chair was publicly describing a catalogue with more than one rights holder in it, one of whom is the man the courts were supposed to have ruled against.
A claim that does not hold up#
Mazzika Group’s English-language Wikipedia entry states that the company acquired the entire catalogues of Alam El Phan, Soutelphan, Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Mohammed Abdel Wahab outright after EMI’s 2013 break-up in the Arab world. That sentence is footnoted to an August 2015 article about rare Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez recordings surfacing on YouTube, an article that does not describe an acquisition of anything. This desk found no document supporting an outright Mazzika acquisition of the Umm Kulthum catalogue, and every court filing and press statement in the actual litigation names Starz, not Mazzika, as Gaber’s vehicle in the fight with Sawt Al-Qahera. Whatever the real relationship between Mazzika, Alam El Phan and Starz, and no source states one plainly, the specific claim that Mazzika owns Umm Kulthum’s masters is not supported by the source cited for it.
A separate, more recent dispute is worth distinguishing from all of this because it looks similar and is not. In May 2023, composer Amr Mostafa released an AI-generated recreation of Umm Kulthum’s voice. Her family filed a complaint with Egypt’s prosecutor general; Gaber publicly criticised the release on television, calling it “playing with fire”; and the complaint was withdrawn after Mostafa agreed not to use her voice, name or image without the family’s permission. That dispute is about personality and image rights held by living heirs. It has nothing to do with who owns the recorded masters, and conflating the two, as some coverage at the time did, obscures rather than clarifies who controls what.
What this means for artists#
The clearest lesson here has nothing to do with Egypt’s courts specifically and everything to do with what happens to a catalogue after the artist who made it is gone. Umm Kulthum signed contracts during her lifetime that her own estate’s representatives still cannot agree on the meaning of, more than five decades after her death. A government ministry had to step in and tell its own departments which company to deal with, and even that intervention did not stop a rival claimant from buying a stake directly from heirs three years later.
For any artist building a catalogue today, the practical takeaways are specific: a licensing contract is not the same instrument as an ownership transfer, and conflating the two in casual language, including in your own contracts, is exactly the ambiguity that produces disputes like this one; heirs inherit fractional shares under local succession law whether or not a label’s paperwork anticipates that, and a buyer willing to approach individual heirs can acquire a real stake in a catalogue without the company managing it finding out until a journalist asks; and a dispute that looks over, because a court of appeal has ruled and a ministry has written a letter, is not actually over until every party with a plausible legal claim has stopped making one. None of that happened here. Fifty-one years after her death, it still has not.
