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November 21, 2012 (KHARTOUM) – A report presented on Wednesday by Sudan’s auditor-general revealed that the amount of stolen public money has gone up to more than 175 million Sudanese pounds (SDG) - around $40 million - between September 2011 and August 2012, in the latest indication of the level of corruption in the east African country.
- A Sudanese man shows freshly-minted notes of the new Sudanese pound in Khartoum on July 24, 2011 (Getty)
The report also revealed infractions in transactions involving loans and foreign funds received by certain state institutions.
It cited the example of how the ministry of international cooperation received a sum of 721 million SDG ($163m) from an unknown quarter and did not reveal what was that amount spent on. The report also said that two financial grants from Qatar and Algeria did not appear in the final accounts of the ministry of finance.
Auditor-General Al-Tahir Abdel Gaioum said, while reading excerpts from the report to the parliament, that the amount of public money embezzled from state institutions in the regions outside of Khartoum has reached 19.2 million SDG ($4.3m) in 2012, at a rate of 38.1 percent.
Abdel Gaioum said that cases of overspending were observed in several state projects especially in dam construction projects. His report also warned against the growing percentage of private contractors in state sectors, saying that there are 1,094 private contractors employed by state institutions at a cost of 53.4 million pounds.
Sudan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2011, which ranks the east African nation 177 out of 182.
(ST)
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