ACA arrests 3 defendants for seizing LE 25M using fake documents

CAIRO – 19 December 2018: A tourism company owner, a lawyer and a mechanic who claimed to be a lawyer were arrested by Egypt’s Administrative Control Authority (ACA) on Wednesday for seizing LE 25 million using fake documents. All three defendants were arrested pending investigations.

In a Wednesday statement, the ACA stated that the three defendants managed to fabricate documents that allowed them to drop the debt of the tourism company amounting to LE 25 million at one of the private banks.

In a similar incident, the ACA also announced that several officials of South Cairo Electricity Distribution Company and Omrania neighborhood in Giza were arrested as a result of receiving LE 200,000 as a bribe.

Earlier in November, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi met with Major General Sherif Seif El-Din, chairman of the ACA, to discuss the national anti-corruption strategy.

The Egyptian leadership realizes that corruption can cause deviation of authority, provide an opportunity for organized crimes to occur, and would lead to inequity among citizens and mistrust of government. Thus, the country is committed to taking positive steps to promote transparency and to establish a sound anticorruption framework.

These positive steps include ratifying the U.N. convention against Corruption (UNDAC) in 2005 and the U.N. convention against Transitional Organized Crime (UNTOC). In 2014, Egypt became a state party in the Arab League pan-Arab anti-corruption instruments, the Arab Convention to Fight Corruption.

Egypt has also implemented institutional reforms and deepened its partnerships with the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) on anti-corruption and anti-money laundering. Cooperation efforts with the EU and UN include providing technical and institutional support, training prosecutors to fight corruption, research, data analysis and enhancing global and regional cooperation in this area.