Dubai: Qatar’s Attorney General and Chairman of Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Center (ROLACC), Ali Bin Fetais Al Marri, has a relatively long list of expensive properties in Europe that are difficult to be explained with his official income, a French magazine reported this week.
Le Point, which is weekly political and news magazine published in Paris, said 53-year-old Al Marri, who holds the rank of minister, comes from a family that “is not very wealthy”.
Yet, he bought “himself a three-story mansion at 86 Avenue d’Iéna, just a stone’s throw from the Arc de Triomphe, for 9.6 million euros in October 2013.
The capital of real estate company IENA 86 is divided into 100 shares, which are owned by Ali Bin Fetais Al Marri (98 shares) and by two of his sons, Hamad Ali, born in 2002 (1 share), and Tameem Ali, born in 2013 (1 share),” wrote Le Point.
The magazine quoted the French journalist Emmanuel Razavi, who worked in Doha and wrote a book “Qatar, Prohibited Truths”, as saying, “contrary to popular legend, wages are not extravagant in Qatar’s public service. They rarely exceed 12,000 dollars a month. The Attorney General is probably a little better paid, with a house, company car, driver.”
Neither Al Marri, nor Abdul Mohsen Hamad Fetais, Secretary General of ROLACC, responded to questions from the magazine.
Al Marri is also a main founder of a GSG company in Geneva, which was created on October 26, 2015.
According to the press report, Al Marri, who owns 99,000 shares, declares “curiously”, he lives in Cologny, an upscale municipality in the canton of Geneva, and Mrs. Maha Ali M.A. Fetais, 1,000 shares, who is a student in Doha.
A few days after its establishment, GSG acquired a property for the amount of 3.321 million euros (14,854 million dirhams), which is the premises of the Geneva’s Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Center (ROLACC).
“In other words, the premises belong to the its chairman, Ali Bin Fetais Al Marri,” the magazine said.
Moreover, Al Marri also acquired a dwelling on the chemin de Bonnevaux in the town of Cologny, a few steps from the shores of the lake, on 26 August 2013 for 6.345 million euros (28,379 million dirhams), the Le Point said.
The magazine said it is “surprising” that a Qatari organisation dedicated to fight corruption doesn’t have its headquarters in Qatar.
According to the Transparency International ranking, Qatar’s rank in the fight against corruption has fallen from 22nd in 2015 to 31 in 2016.
