CAIRO – Minister of Finance Hazem el-Beblawi has asked the Chairman of the Central Auditing Agency, Gawdat el-Malt, to find out what's happened to the insurance funds and whether they really have been added to the State budget or been stolen and squandered by the Ministry of Finance. This request might sound shocking, but Minister el-Beblawi, who doubles as a deputy prime minister, says that he wants to discover the truth and to highlight the transparency policy of the Government of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf. A number of specialists suspected the Ministry of Finance of squandering the funds, long before the January 25 revolution, when the former regime merged the two ministries of finance with that of social insurance. At the time, they warned that LE135 billion – the money in a saving fund for pensioners – had been used by the State as a loan to bridge the budget deficit and to pay off other local loans. The Chairman of the Pensioners' Association, Saeed el-Sabaagh, noted that the State has stopped paying the interest on the insurance funds, since the borrowing started in 1987, noting that these funds could have earned LE11 billion in interest. Does the Minister of Finance need such an investigation to find out the facts and how much money was squandered by former minister Youssef Boutros Ghali? Or he does already know and does he want the CAA to get involved for not previously issuing a report about this case of wasted public funds? If investigations do indeed prove that the State has wasted this insurance money, this will mean another charge against Nazif's Government, especially his minister of finance. If this happens, the public will also wonder why the CAA didn't tell them earlier about the pensioners' money being stolen.
