IGA probes fortunes of 140 officials accused of ‘wheat corruption’

CAIRO – 12 May 2019: Egypt’s Illicit Gain Authority (IGA) will probe the fortunes of a total of 140 out of 300 people accused of corruption in buying subsidized wheat.

The IGA asked for the final reports on the investigations conducted by the Ministry of Justice concerning the case, which is dubbed in media as “Wheat Corruption” and into the officials’ fortunes.


A farmer harvests wheat crop on a field in the El-Menoufia governorate, north of Cairo, Egypt May 1, 2019. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

The defendants are officials from the Ministry of Supply, the Ministry of Agriculture, the General Organization for Export and Import Control and owners of wheat silos. The case includes 38 lawsuits.

The 140 persons submitted reconciliation requests to the government's IGA as they can refund an amount of money in return for dropping the charges against them. Thus, the IGA asked for the final reports concerning their fortunes for scrutiny.

The case of Wheat Corruption dates back to 2016, when the Parliament appointed a fact-checking committee to probe into claims of manipulating the subsidized wheat supply and selling it for high prices in the black market.

It was revealed that owners of storage houses and silos reported larger quantities of consumed wheat than those that actually existed which resulted in an overpayment by the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade.

As per Ministry of Justice experts, who were tasked to investigate into the case, a huge deficit of up to LE 600 million ($33.38million) was detected in 18 silos, a barn and a bunker in six governorates.

The owners have been accused of also mixing both local and imported kinds of wheat, which have different weights, in order to make the quantities weigh more.





Additional reporting by Ibrahim Kasim