Economy

Egypt parliament to appoint new supplies minister

Date: Sep 6, 2016

Egypt's parliament will vote on Tuesday to appoint General Mohamed Ali El-Sheikh as minister of supplies after the resignation of Khaled Hanafi, MP Mostafa Bakri told Reuters.

Hanafi resigned on August 25 amid a corruption probe into whether millions of dollars intended to subsidise farmers were used to purchase wheat that did not exist. The Ministry of Supply is in charge of Egypt's food subsidy programme and main state grain buyer, the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC).

"Parliament will vote today to appoint General Mohamed AliEl-Sheikh as minister of supply. El-Sheikh is the head of the Public Services division at the Armed Forces," Bakri told Reuters over the phone.

Egypt, the world's largest importer of wheat, has been mired in controversy over whether much of the roughly 5 million tonnes of grain the government said it procured in this year's harvest exists only on paper, the result of local suppliers falsifying receipts to boost government payments.

Parliamentarians who formed a fact-finding commission to investigate the fraud have said upwards of 2 million tonnes, or 40% of the locally procured crop, may be missing. The general prosecutor has ordered arrests, travel bans, and has frozen the assets of several private silo owners and others.

--reuters--

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