Egypt’s prime minister, Cabinet resign amid corruption probe
The Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, accepted the resignation of his prime minister and Cabinet on Saturday after a series of high-profile accusations of corruption.
The resignation underscored the deep challenges of governance facing Egypt’s leaders just weeks ahead of the country’s first parliamentary elections since the military deposed the elected Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in 2013.
Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb offered the resignations in a meeting with el-Sissi on Saturday, the Egyptian president’s office said in a statement. El-Sissi instructed Sherif Ismail, the petroleum minister in the departing Cabinet, to form a new government within a week.
Earlier in the week, Mehleb’s Cabinet was rocked by allegations of corruption. The country’s agriculture minister, Salah Helal, resigned Monday and was arrested in connection with a corruption investigation. The state prosecutor’s office said it was investigating Helal and other ministry officials on charges of accepting bribes in exchange for land licenses.
On Tuesday, Mehleb abruptly walked out of a news conference in Tunisia after a reporter asked a question about reports that he had been implicated in a separate corruption inquiry. Mehleb has been accused of involvement in a case in which former President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons were convicted of embezzling funds earmarked for the renovation of presidential palaces.
“The minister of agriculture resigns after a corruption case, and you appointed this minister. You are one of the accused, the main accused, in the corruption case known as the presidential palaces,” the reporter said in a video of the incident before Mehleb headed toward the door.
The Cabinet’s resignation also illustrated a political dilemma facing el-Sissi, the former armed forces chief who took power during a wave of nationalist fervor following the military’s removal of Morsi. In spite of the significant cult of personality around el-Sissi, his government has failed to resolve a number of problems facing Egypt.
Those troubles include a steady deterioration in its security. The government has been unable to end a violent insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula in which militants have been carrying out ever more brazen attacks.
Egypt also faces deep economic uncertainty, disappointing hopes raised at a much-promoted international investment conference in March and the opening of an expansion of the Suez Canal in August. The stock market has swooned since the conference, which had been billed as a move to restart the economy after years of instability in the wake of the 2011 uprising that ejected Mubarak from power.
The government gave no specific reason for the Cabinet’s resignation, nor did the president’s office return calls seeking comment.
Hisham Kassem, a political analyst, said the timing of Saturday’s announcement was puzzling, with parliamentary elections scheduled in October.
“This is making things very obscure,” Kassem said. “Is Sissi going to form the next Cabinet or is it going to be formed by the parliament?”
He added, “It doesn’t make sense unless there was something really drastic.”
This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 1:26 PM with the headline "Egypt’s prime minister, Cabinet resign amid corruption probe."