Saudi Arabia: Dozens of employees held in multi-million-riyal graft case

Cairo: A Saudi anti-graft watchdog has disclosed that dozens of government employees had been found involved in a big graft case, the latest unveiled in a crackdown in the country.

The case implicates 24 civil servants at the Health Ministry, 15 others at the General Authority of Meteorology and Environmental Protection, and 14 at the Ministry of Municipal and Village Affairs, as well as two university teaching staff members and 16 employees at a medical waste-handling company, the Saudi Control and Anti-Corruption Commission said.

The suspects had received bribes of millions of Saudi riyals, in addition to travel tickets, hotel reservations, cars and employment of first-degree relatives at the company in return for not applying legal rules and overlooking the firm’s irregularities, the commission added, according to the Saudi news agency SPA.

Another case disclosed by the watchdog involved an ex-judge at an appeals court who had allegedly received a luxury car when he was at work in return for revoking three verdicts earlier passed against a defendant and releasing him. The ex-judge was also found to have paid in cash part of a building price without being able to prove the source of the money.

In a third case, a bank employee had been arrested for taking a total of SR 129,800 from citizens in exchange for processing financing applications using illegal documents.

The commission has recently investigated tens of suspected corruption cases and illegal transactions in different fields.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has stepped up a clampdown on white-collar corruption, nabbing dozens of state employees and entrepreneurs.