President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi appointed on Saturday Hassan Abdel-Shafy Ahmed as the new head of the country's anti-corruption watchdog, the Administrative Control Authority (ACA). According to Egyptian presidency spokesman Bassam Rady, El-Sisi appointed Ahmed as the new ACA chief starting 30 August by presidential decree. Ahmed is replacing Sherif Seif El-Din Hussein, who was appointed as the head of the authority in August 2018. The ACA, the state body responsible for enforcing laws and regulations within state institutions, has been waging a national campaign against corruption in recent years. Last week, the ACA said it arrested two officials from Matrouh's Dabaa municipality on bribery charges, the latest in a number of arrests of state officials on similar charges. The regulator said on Tuesday that it had “caught red-handed” the head of the engineering department at the municipality and a legal researcher in the same city receiving EGP 500,000 ($31,450) in bribes from a representative of real estate company El-Nasr Housing and Development in exchange for services related to a resort managed by the company on the North Coast. The arrest came days after the head of the Old Cairo district was arrested for allegedly accepting an EGP 400,000 ($21,160) bribe from a garbage collection contractor in return for not terminating a contract with several contractors and allowing them to receive late financial dues.
