Ministers on trial

Last month, former finance Minister Mohieddin El-Gharib was sentenced to eight years in prison with hard labour. The case is being seen as a turning-point in the continuing battle against official corruption, reports Gamal Essam El-Din
On 22 February, or two days after the overcrowded Upper-Egypt-bound train caught fire killing almost 400 people, Transport Minister Ibrahim El-Dumeiri was forced to submit his resignation. But El-Dumeiri's resignation, which aimed to appease intense public anger at the enormity of the train inferno, did very little to calm the tempers of enraged MPs in parliament.
They insisted that El-Dumeiri should face trial on negligence and corruption charges. "From now on, we should no longer wait until cabinet ministers leave office to taking them to court. The law regulating the trial of cabinet ministers should be amended to allow parliament to refer them to trial while they are still in office," a leftist MP said on Saturday.
The MP's sentiments were echoed on Saturday, at the first meeting of the fact-finding committee which was formed by parliament to investigate the reasons behind the 20 February train inferno.
But those who wanted harsher legal checks on corrupt ministers were gratified a week later, when they were given a taste of exactly that.
On 28 February, MPs and economic observers were pacified and surprised by the harsh verdict handed down by the Supreme State Security Court against the former finance minister Mohieddin El-Gharib. After an on-and-off trial which dragged for two years, the Supreme State Security Court finally sentenced El-Gharib to eight years in prison with hard labour. The Court ordered that El-Gharib, 65, be dismissed from his job as a public finance professor at Cairo University's Economics and Political Sciences Faculty. El-Gharib was also ordered to pay back LE16 million to the state treasury and to pay an additional fine of LE16 million.
El-Gharib's case included nine other defendants: five former high-level Customs Authority officials and four businessmen. Only three defendants -- two customs officials and one businessman -- were acquitted of all charges.
The remaining six, three customs officials and three businessmen, were sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to 11 years with hard labour.
El-Gharib and the former Customs Authority officials were found guilty of three offences: profiteering, misappropriation of public funds and depriving the state treasury of LE29 million in customs duties. El-Gharib, in collusion with the three officials, allowed a group of tycoon importers to evade payment of customs duties in return for personal favours during his tenure in the Finance Ministry.
They illegally let three major businesses -- Mohamed Mahmoud (MM) Group, Aka International Group and American House Company -- get away with evading up to LE29 million in customs duties.
It was also found that El-Gharib's two sons were business partners with Adel Agha, a Syrian-Egyptian-American businessman. The list of convicted Customs Authority officials includes Ali Taha, a former chairman of the Customs Authority, Omneya Afifi, the former manager of Taha's Technical office and Ahmed Omar El- Sayed, a researcher with the Customs Authority. Taha was sentenced to 11 years in prison with hard labour and fined LE36 million. Afifi was sentenced to three years in prison with hard labour and El-Sayed to one year in prison with hard labour.
The list of the convicted businessmen is headed by Adel Agha himself, who owns and runs American House Company, which is an import- expert business. Ali Khalil, manager of Aka International Group, and El-Sayed Ibrahim, an importer of equipment and machines, also faced jail terms. Agha and El-Sayed were sentenced to three years in prison with hard labour, while Khalil was sentenced to five years with hard labour.
The defendants were found guilty of supplying officials with favours and hefty bribes. The bribes took the form of more than LE2.5 million in cash, as well as free shipments of de luxe marble.
El-Gharib's case began in November 1999, one month after he left office in a cabinet reshuffle. In November 2001, he was remanded in custody by the presiding judge Gamaleddin Safwat. El-Gharib and his co-defendants still have the right to file a final appeal for retrial with the Cassation Court. After listening to the Court's harsh verdict, El-Gharib protested his innocence. "I was not involved in any wrongdoing. I am fully confident that the Cassation Court will annul this harsh verdict," he said.
The case is the first of three high-profile cases against officials charged with corruption. The other two cases, which are being heard by the Supreme State Security Court, involve a former minister, a former provincial governor and a mix of former parliamentary deputies, banking officials and businessmen.
Maher El-Guindi, a former governor of El- Gharbiya and Giza provinces, faces bribery charges in one of the cases. In addition, as many as 31 businessmen and leading public figures -- such as Tawfik Abdou Ismail, a former minister of tourism and civil aviation -- are implicated in what has come to be dubbed by the local press as "the loan deputies" trial.
They face charges of banking fraud and misappropriation of public funds, involving sums of more than LE1.5 billion.
El-Gharib's case, together with the dismissal of Transport Minister Ibrahim El-Dumeiri, prompted several MPs to push hard for accelerating discussions, in parliamentary committees, about laws to regulate the trial of cabinet ministers suspected of illegal practices. These MPs believe that it is a high time to amend an old law about bringing ministers to trial.
One of them, independent MP Mohamed Khalil Qiwita, told Al-Ahram Weekly that "in the past we used to hear about undocumented accusations being levelled against former ministers once they had left office, died or abandoned their political careers."
Over the last few years, Qiwita said, Egypt had been swamped by an unexpected rash of well-documented accusations levelled against former cabinet ministers. So the current law "is no longer acceptable and we have to change the law if we are really serious about stemming the tide of proliferating corruption in this country," Qiwita said.
The existing law on bringing ministers to trial for their errors in office dates back to the 1958- 1961 merger between Egypt and Syria and requires the approval of parliament to refer a cabinet minister to trial.
El-Dumeiri is expected to be summoned before parliament's fact-finding committee on the train disaster. In last year's parliamentary session, while debating a loan agreement aimed at upgrading train coaches, MPs charged that the money allocated for this purpose was an exaggerated sum, and utterly unjustified. The then chairman of the Railway Authority, Moustafa Maher, agreed with the MPs. This angered El- Dumeiri who decided one week later to fire Maher. MPs, recalling this incident, now want to hear from El-Dumeiri about the train inferno, and how exactly last year's loan was spent.
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