On a problem related to the Vandermonde determinant

This short note describes new properties of the elementary symmetric polynomials, and reveals that the properties give an answer to the conjecture raised by El-Mikkawy in [M.E.A. El-Mikkawy, On a connection between the Pascal, Vandermonde and Stirling matrices—II, Appl. Math. Comput. 146 (2003) 759–769].