A month after Treasury sanctioned a Brotherhood figure in London, Britain has done nothing public
Mahmoud al-Abyari was named by the US Treasury on 23 July. He is resident in the United Kingdom, which has taken no confirmed action, and only one EU state has banned the organisation outright.
Treasury press release SB0572, “Treasury Disrupts Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas Financial Networks,” issued 23 July 2026, named Mahmoud al-Abyari, an Egyptian-Austrian dual national based in London. His assets under US jurisdiction were frozen and his entry to the United States barred. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in the release: “The Trump Administration will relentlessly pursue terrorists and those who finance them.” A month on, The Files found no corresponding British action and no Home Office response. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in analysis published 24 July, argued that Acting General Guide Saleh Abdel Haq and spokesman Osama Suleiman should be designated next, both said to operate from London and elsewhere in Europe. That is advocacy from a group that campaigns for designation, not reporting, and is presented here as such.
The European picture behind the gap is thinner than the volume of European rhetoric suggests. Austria remains the only EU member state to have banned the Brotherhood outright, under the anti-terrorism law passed on 8 July 2021 after the 2020 Vienna attack. France commissioned an entryism report published on 21 May 2025 and its parliament endorsed a resolution on 22 January 2026 calling on the EU to list the group — a resolution is neither a domestic dissolution decree nor an EU listing. Germany has opened a parliamentary debate on a ban without enacting one. A claim by Israel Hayom on 11 February 2026 that Brotherhood assets are being shifted out of Europe toward Asia and Africa through import-trade fronts rests on a single anonymous source in a partisan outlet and should not be treated as established.
Assessment: The interesting asymmetry is jurisdictional, not rhetorical. US designation is cheap for Washington and expensive for the country where the designated person actually lives: it creates a permanent question a foreign ministry must answer, without obliging the designating state to prove anything in a British or European court. Britain’s silence is the predictable response — action would require an evidentiary standard the US measure does not, and inaction costs London nothing until someone asks. Watch whether the second tranche reaches a European chapter. That would convert a bilateral irritant into a policy demand allies cannot absorb quietly, which may be precisely why it has not happened yet.