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Egypt's panel refutes claims of USD 77 bln corruption in 2015

Xinhua, January 13, 2016 Adjust font size:

An Egyptian committee formed by order of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi refuted on Tuesday statements of head of official auditing authority claiming money corruption of over 600 billion Egyptian pounds (about 77 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015 alone.

Displayed on the Egyptian state TV, the report of the panel said the statements of Hesham Genina, chief of the country's Central Auditing Authority (CAA), "lack credibility," and referred to his accusations of state institutions of huge money corruption in 2015 as "misleading and exaggerated."

"The CAA reports deliberately arranged and gathered cases dating back to tens of years ago and stated them as continuous without correcting them to be tendentiously included in the 2015 corruption study," the panel said.

The committee raised suspicion about the purpose behind the CAA chief's statements, warning they might harm the country's political and economic atmospheres "at a time when the state is trying all possible means to attract investments to provide job opportunities and decent lives for its citizens."

Media reports quoted Genina in December as saying that corruption in state institutions exceeded 76.6 billion dollars in 2015, but the man corrected them in later interviews that the reports he referred to covered from 2012 to 2015 and that they were done in cooperation with the ministry of planning.

Genina has been facing accusations of belonging to the now-blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood group of former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was removed by the military in early July 2013 in response to mass protests.

"It's obvious that they will keep raising accusations against me until I leave the CAA, which is the main purpose behind these campaigns," Genina told a TV show in late December.

"All I care about is to stop the bleeding of public funds," the CAA chief added, praising President Sisi for forming a fact-finding panel to investigate his statements as "the beginning for real treatment."

Corruption has been deep-rooted in Egypt over the past few decades. Earlier in January, an Egyptian court confirmed a three-year jail sentence against ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons for squandering 125 million Egyptian pounds (about 16 million dollars) of the budget allocated for the presidential palaces. Endit