Egypt is denying the authenticity of newly revealed audio recordings that purport to show that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) helped the Egyptian Defense Ministry build the protest campaign that led to the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

An Islamist satellite channel called Mekameleen released the recordings from its base in Istanbul.  They’re the latest in a series of sensational reports about the removal of Morsi that have come out only through Islamist news sources.

The recordings supposedly contain the voices of a top general on the phone with another general, discussing a bank account controlled by senior defense officials, but which had been used by Tamarod – a grassroots movement that called for Morsi’s ouster.  The generals discuss the arranging of protests on 30 June 2013.

“Sir, we will need 200 tomorrow from Tamarod’s account – you know, the part from the UAE, which they transferred,” the general says.  The other general’s side of the conversation cannot be heard.

The boss of those two generals at that time was Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, now the President of Egypt.  He has long maintained that the military ousted Morsi at the behest of millions of protesters.  The outpouring of anti-Morsi sentiment at the time seemed genuine, and even in retrospect doesn’t seem to have been the work of a couple of guys spreading some cash around.  Millions of Egyptians had very real concerns about Morsi’s ignoring of economic issues in favor of moral crusades, such as shutting down liquor stores.

But getting back to the conspiracy theory, it’s also true that once Morsi was arrested, the UAE and Saudi Arabia quickly signaled their approval by funding the new government.