Ex-minister arrested on arrival in Kuwait over graft
Top court to rule May 30 on appeals against jail sentences in the case
Cairo: A former Kuwaiti minister was arrested on arrival at the home country in connection with a corruption case in which he was earlier convicted and handed down a jail sentence.
Mubarak Alarou, who served as minister of social affairs from December 2021 to August 2022, was arrested Thursday upon landing at the Kuwait International airport and is kept in custody pending a ruling from the country’s top appeals court, reported Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas.
In November, another court sentenced Alarou to seven years in prison on charges of profiteering through a business contract, harming public money and influence peddling, media reported at the time.
The court, hearing cases involving government officials, handed down similar sentences to a former ministerial undersecretary and an ex-head of the Federation of Cooperative Societies in the same case linked to assigning a tender to a company without following legal procedures to make personal gains.
At the time, the court gave a similar sentence to the owner of the company involved in the case and ordered his deportation, being a Gulf national.
The Court of Cassation on Thursday set May 30 for ruling on appeals filed against the imprisonment terms issued against the defendants in the high-profile case.
The court refused requests from lawyers to release the defendants pending the final verdicts. Alarou, 46, also served as a lawmaker in 2020.
In recent years, Kuwait has stepped up anti-corruption efforts and uncovered several such cases.
Last October, a Kuwaiti court sentenced an Egyptian expatriate to 15 years in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of KD1 million after he had been convicted of embezzling money of the Kuwaiti Teachers’ Association where he had worked as a financial manager.