CAIRO: Egypt's Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri held a meeting on Tuesday March 13th, to examine effective measures needed to restore Egypt's looted and smuggled money from abroad. According to Egypt's State Information Service, the Justice Minister, the Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt and the Finance Minister also attended this meeting. During a press conference after the meeting, Minister of Finance Momtaz el-Saeed said that this comes in a series of follow-ups to recover the smuggled money abroad, asserting that the government is keen to restore all smuggled funds. Saeed emphatically stated that all officials concerned were entrusted to work towards this end and to achieve satisfactory results, in typical flourish of Egyptian rhetoric. Some jailed figures of the former regime are proposing financial reconciliation in return for cancelling some charges of corruption against them, Saeed said. The issue of returning the funds for lighter sentences is still under consideration and not settled yet, Saeed added. During the meeting, Ganzouri requested that Saeed “speed up the activation of the recovering money file,” pointing out the ongoing communications between the Justice Ministry and the judicial authorities abroad to restore the money, especially in Switzerland and the UAE. Egyptians in the streets, bars and cafés are eager to see the looted funds returned from abroad to give a cash infusion to the anemic economy, which has stalled since the uprising that ousted Mubarak, but there is also a vocal call to see corrupt officials of the deposed regime punished severely. Elected officials, from both houses the new parliament, are reluctant to take a declarative stance on either side of the issue, since public opinion swings pendulously between the calls for reconciliation and the calls for executions. If the funds are indeed returned remains to be seen, as do the actual executions for the corrupt officials on trial. Bringing the corrupt officials to justice has been an elephantine and dramatic process. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/C4zPR Tags: Corruption Trials, Egypt, featured, Looted Funds, Reconciliation Talks Section: Egypt, Latest News, Op-ed
