CAIRO - The head of the Central Agency for Auditing (CAA), Gawdat el-Malt, stressed that officials asked him several times in the era of the outgoing Government of Ahmed Nazif to stop issuing reports about financial and administrative corruption in governmental bodies. However, el-Malt refused to comply with their demands. According to him, the CAA issued as many as 1,000 monitoring reports condemning corruption and the squandering of public money, as well administrative irregularities, under Nazif's Government that served from July 2004 until the recent troubles. He added that the previous reports should be aired once again because they represent a step on the road to reform. El-Malt sent the reports to the former presidential chamberlain, Cabinet, People's Assembly (Lower House of Egyptian Parliament), the head of Administrative Control Authority, individual ministers, governors and chairmen of companies in the public enterprise sector. He told the People's Assembly that ministers in the outgoing Government were guilty of bad practices and were grossly out of touch with reality and the people's problems. “The Government of the former regime didn't have a strategy. It lacked co-ordination and control and wasn't monitored,” said el-Malt, adding that most ministers resorted to the media blackout to deny there was any crisis. The result was low-income people becoming very angry, because the Government ignored their problems. El-Malt told Al-Wafd opposition newspaper that the economic situation of most citizens deteriorated greatly under Nazif's Government, while the problem of goods of unknown provenance being dumped in the local market grew more apparent and substandard commodities flourished. Meanwhile, the number of people living below the poverty line increased, especially in Upper Egypt. El-Malt said that Nazif's Government earned LE52 billion (about $8.8bn) from privatisation, 37 per cent of which was used by the Ministry of Finance to reduce the budget deficit. Successive governments have failed to do anything about the negative effects of the privatisation programme: rising unemployment and inflation, and the creation of new types of monopoly, he added. Furthermore, the monitoring reports issued by the CAA pointed out that the outgoing Government failed to develop the education system and compounded Egypt's scientific research crisis. It also failed in the area of healthcare and medical services, whose standard declined. El-Malt noted that the Agency highlighted the former Government's failure to deal with crises like the bread and gas cylinder shortages; bird flu; the high rate of road accidents; fires that hit vital institutions such as the Shura Council (Upper House of Egyptian Parliament) in August 2008; and the sinking of El-Salam ferry in February 2006. Other crises included the floods that hit several parts of Egypt, the black cloud over Cairo every autumn and the mountains of garbage that accumulate from time to time in the capital.
