In a retrial ordered by the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest court authority, South Cairo Criminal Court has acquitted former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros Ghali from corruption charges in the case known as the License Plates Case.
In a case that goes back to the so-called Arab Spring year of 2011, Mr Ghali was accused, together with former Prime Minter Ahmed Nazif and Interior Minister Habib al-Adly—all of whom had been in office pre-Arab Spring—of squandering public funds by granting a contract for licence plates to a German firm through direct order, thus violating the tenders and auctions law.
In 2011, the court sentenced Mr Ghali in abstentia to 10 years in prison—the maximum sentence is given to in absentia defendants. it also sentenced Mr Nazif to a one year prison suspended sentence, and Mr Adly to five years. Both Mr Nazif and Mr Adly appealed the verdict; they were retried and acquitted.
Mr Ghali’s recent acquittal came after a change in the law that allowed in-absentia defendants to be represented by their lawyers.
Youssef Boutros Ghali served as Finance Minister from 2004 till 2011 in the government of Ahmed Nazif, which resigned at the onset the Arab Spring uprising in January 2011.
Mr Ghali earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics at Cairo University in 1974. He then earned a PhD of Philosophy in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. Throughout his career he worked with the International Monetary Fund, the Central Bank of Egypt and the Egyptian government. In 2008 he became Chair of the IMF’s policy setting committee, the first chairman from an emerging market economy.
As Finance Minister, Y. Boutros-Ghali headed the Ministerial Economic Committee in charge of overseeing the design and implementation of Egypt’s economic reform programmes. He is credited with implementing a series of reforms that helped modernise and reinvigorate the Egyptian economy and deepen its global integration. Chief among these is a major income tax and trade reforms, coupled with deregulation and liberalisation in key areas of economic activity. The tax reform programme was hailed as one of the most successful reforms among developing countries, which earned Egypt the position of top reformer among developing countries in 2007 by the World Bank.
He accelerated the privatisation programme begun in 1996, opened up the Egyptian market, and promoted the country to international investors with enthusiasm.
Mr Y. Boutros-Ghali received the Emerging Markets Award for Finance Minister of the Year for the Middle East Region twice (2005 and 2006).
Following the 2011 unrest in Egypt, Mr Ghali and his family left the country to Lebanon, and later settled down in the UK.
Watani International
11 November 2022