A fact-finding parliamentary committee concluded in a 78-page report on Sunday that outgoing supply minister Khaled Hanafi and officials in the ministries of agriculture, industry, and foreign trade should be referred to prosecution for alleged rampant corruption and graft in the wheat supply sector.
“Minister of supply Khaled Hanafi should be held responsible for all forms of corruption and graft in the wheat procurement sector, including supply, storage, mills and production of bread,” reads the parliamentary report.
Accordingly, the report recommended that “the minister of supply and other senior officials should be referred to prosecution authorities and the Illicit Gains Apparatus should be investigated for corruption and misuse of public funds and to determine whether they made huge [illicit] profits from their influential posts.”
The parliament was set to discuss on Sunday nine interrogations that led to accusations of corruption, graft and misuse of public funds against the minister of supply, though Hanafi resigned following a cabinet meeting on 25 August.
Hanafi said Thursday in a press conference that the accusations against him are “exaggerated” and that he decided to resign for the sake of transparency and to allow prosecution authorities question him.
MPs said they would use the report prepared by the fact-finding parliamentary committee to cross-examine Hanafi and recommend that he should be referred to prosecution authorities.
Magdi Malek, the head of the fact-finding committee and an MP from the Upper Egypt governorate of Minya, told reporters that the report, which is backed by hundreds of documents on corruption in the wheat sector, will be sent to prosecutor-general Nabil Sadek and the Illicit Gains Apparatus to investigate officials affiliated with different ministries.
Sadek also indicated that the report recommends that all citizens and low-ranking officials who testified before the committee on corruption in the wheat supply sector should be given special protection in order to not face retribution.
The report is divided into seven parts that cover all stages of wheat supply operations, with part four focusing on the alleged "irregularities" surrounding the supply minister.
“Minister Hanafi refrained from exercising tight control on wheat supplies – which found their way onto the black market – or taking legal measures against owners of bakeries who used ration cards to obtain hundreds of tonnes of subsidised flour without the knowledge of the card owners,” read the report.
“The cost of these corrupt practices reached EGP 11 million.”
The report also states that owners of wheat silos, especially those on the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, paid more than EGP 700,000 in bribes to a number of supply ministry officials to look the other way on their corrupt practices.
The report also claimed that Hanafi exploited his influential position as minister by allowing private mills to obtain large quantities of wheat at the expense of public mills.
The report will be discussed in a plenary session on Monday.
