CAIRO - A Fire broke out on Wednesday in a second-floor room at the Central Auditing Agency's (CAA) building, an influential State-run watchdog. Earlier on Wednesday, most of the agency's staff had protested, demanding that the agency's chairman Gawdat el-Malt leave his post. “Our efforts to uncover corruption went in vain. The chairman was satisfied only with issuing reports. El-Malt preventing us from informing the attorney prosecutors,” said Salah el-Badri, one of the agency's staff. “El-Malt turned a deaf ear to the staff's demands. The chairman's policy deprived the agency of its role ��" monitoring the local institutions and protecting the peoples' interests,” Shadi Fathi, another member, claimed. “Astonishingly, el-Malt described us as 'mental' patients,” he added. For his part, el-Malt accused the protestors of setting fire to the room. “An anti-chairman group of staff rallied, causing the fire,” el-Malt told the Middle East News Agency (MENA). “Hence, I ordered that the CAA be closed.” The auditing agency is set to prepare, together with other monitoring agencies, files about former officials' wealth and deviations. The files notoriously include former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly; former Housing Minister Ahmed el-Maghrabi, former Trade and Industry Minister Rashid Mohamed Rashid.
