By Mahmoud Mostafa
The Administrative Prosecution Authority (APA) announced there were 100,000 cases of financial and administrative corruption in government bodies between January and November 2014, according to APA spokesman Abdel Nasser Khattab on Tuesday.
The prosecution also demanded a new law to expand the administrative prosecution’s power over all administrative public entities and services. The new law would remain in effect as long as they are under Central Auditing Organization (CAO)’s supervision, according to Khattab’s statement.
Khattab added that the prosecution’s role is not only to carry out investigations of administrative and financial violations, but also to find out the flaws causing them. It will also provide legal and viable solutions to these flaws.
APA Vice President, Judge Abdel Ghafar Soliman, told Daily News Egypt that some public entities refuse to be under the Prosecution’s jurisdiction. He said: “There are two factors defining the jurisdiction of administrative prosecution: public sector and public money.”
Soliman said some public business sector companies conditioned investigations of their staff by administrative prosecution to the approval of the company’s CEO.
Under Law 203/1991, the APA has to apprise the minister or official under investigation of his or her authority before investigating. This is unless the investigation is upon the request of the minister or official.
As an example of the APA’s work, Soliman said the prosecution cannot investigate any university staff without the approval of a university president. In October, the APA could not refer four university professors working for the National Center for Educational Research and Development accused of administrative and financial violations. This was due to their not being under the prosecution’s jurisdiction.
A fellow Vice President of the APA said in an interview with Egyptian satellite channel LTC, that some public authorities demanded immediate and full-bodied investigations, covering all governmental authorities. He added that “it is not reasonable that CAO investigate violations then leave it to the entities to penalise”.
Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranked Egypt 94th of 175 countries. The organisation said, however, that Egypt “achieved one of the highest levels of improvement in its fight against corruption this year”. However, the country’s integrity score is still lower than the Middle East and North Africa average at 38 out of 100.
Global Financial Integrity issued a study Tuesday on the amount of illicit financial flows from developing countries between 2003 and 2012. The research and advisory NGO ranked Egypt 23rd out of 145 countries, with a yearly average of $3.7bn over the period of the study, with the biggest illicit flows in 2008 at $6.1bn and a cumulative amount of illicit financial flows of $37.6bn.
