On the last day of his mandate, employees of the Central Auditing Organisation still have no news on whether the ruling military council will renew Mubarak-appointee Gawdat El-Malt's tenure as its head On his last day in office, Gawdat El-Malt, head of the Central Auditing Organisation (CAO), continues to be a source of anger for employees as well as political movements. Protesters who gathered Sunday morning in front of the CAO headquarters in Cairo fear that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will extend El-Malt's mandate for another four years. "Go, go!" Ahram Online heard protesters shouting while talking to one of them by phone. “It is the last day of El-Malt's mandate and no official decision has been made to name a new president of the organisation. That's very uncommon. The name of the new president used to be announced some time before the end of the mandate of his predecessor,” says Tarek El-Guebali, a member of a group called Auditors Against Corruption and formed by civil servants at the CAO. Employees gathered in front of the CAO are pressing for three demands: No renewal for the terms of El-Malt or his advisor Mohamed Wanis, the nomination of a new esteemed figure capable of leading the CAO, and the modification of the law of the organisation. In parallel, the group filed this morning a case in front of the Administrative Court for El-Malt to be removed from his position, for being unfit for it, according to them. The regulators, who have staged a number of protests since Hosni Mubarak's ouster calling for El-Malt's resignation, accuse him of covering up corruption in many public entities. They cite cases in the privatisation programme, corruption in large public banks, and the famous case of the sale of public land for the Madinaty project where a court ruling scrapped the contract of sale, among others. “We filed 12 reports proving El-Malt's involvement in corruption,” says El-Guebali as he protests. Auditors Against Corruptionsay Mubarak and his military predecessors modified the CAO's law in a way that affected the independence and the integrity of the organisation and its president.“The last amendment made to the law of the CAO in 1998 put the organisation under the control of the president while the president is one of the actors supposed to be under the control of the CAO,” said Ibrahim Gad, a supervisor in the governorate of Gharbeya.This change effectively meant that Mubarak would have reviewed and judged any accusations of corruption made against him. The auditors seek to reclaim the CAO's complete independence, in addition to merging it with the Administrative Control Authority and the Administrative Prosecution Authority, allowing them to punish and not only expose corruption. Auditors Against Corruption, formed by CAO employees before the January 25 Revolution, hark back to better days for the CAO. “Before the 1952 coup, the CAO (created in 1942) was independent of the government,” says Gad. He remembers when the head of the CAO resigned in 1950 because the king asked him to omit a contravention concerning LE5,000 against his press advisor. “The CAO also unearthed a lot of facts in the case of fraudulent arms deals in 1948,” adds Gad. The situation started to change when an army man was appointed head of the organisation following the Free Officers' coup. “Now the CAO head has reports of contraventions that reach LE500 billion and he took no serious actions. He said that some issues were politically sensitive; the CAO should not be affected by political sensitivity, he has a role to play.” During the last half century many previously independent organisations lost their independence via modifications of their statutes. Many oversight bodies saw their heads chosen by the president, with the control of the executive increasing considerably in consequence. To date, the ruling military council has not responded to calls for the removal of the two main figures appointed by Mubarak, in addition to El-Malt: Mahmoud Abdel Meguid, Egypt's prosecutor-general, and Farouk El-Oqda, governor of the Central Bank. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/23673.aspx
