Al-Watan obtained the text of the statements of Counselor Hisham Geneina, former head of the Central Auditing Organization, before the Supreme State Security Prosecution in the case of declarations of the cost of corruption in Egypt, in which he was referred for trial, and his first trial session took place and was postponed to the June 21 session.

The text of the investigation with Geneina came as follows: The record was opened today 3/27/2016 at 7 pm at the headquarters of the Attorney General's office We Khaled Diaa, the General Advocate, where Mr. Counselor / First General Advocate of the Supreme State Security Prosecution came to us with the question of Hisham Ahmed Fouad Geneina in Case No. 75 of 2016 The Supreme State Security confined this, and on the occasion of his presence outside the investigation room, we took him inside it and proceeded to ask him as follows:

Name: Hisham Ahmed Fouad Genena.

Age: 62.

Q: How long have you assumed your duties as head of the Central Auditing Agency:

A: On 6/9/2012, my appointment was issued as head of the agency.

Q: What are the specializations that the law has conferred upon you in that capacity:

A: The head of the agency is charged with submitting reports prepared by the relevant departments of the agency, each according to its supervisory competence, to the concerned bodies subject to oversight and also preparing studies that are assigned to the agency.

Q: And for which party is affiliated with the Central Auditing Agency?

A: According to the established law, it reports directly to the President of the Republic, and the new amendment to the constitution abolished this dependency and became financially, technically and administratively independent.

Q: What is the goal of establishing the Central Auditing Organization?

A: Control over public money and its expenditures in a manner consistent with applicable laws and financial regulations, and has three types of control

First, financial control, both financial and legal.

Second: Monitoring performance evaluation.

Third: legal oversight.

Q: What is the mechanism of work within the agency in the framework of carrying out the tasks assigned to it?

A: Each department has a different nature of work according to the nature of the entity subject to oversight. Accountability for government agencies differs from corporate accountability, but in the end, all is done within the framework of periodic reports that are submitted to the head of the agency for submission to the concerned authorities according to the level of communication.

Q: What is your role as head of the agency in preparing these periodic reports?

A: I do not have any technical or supervisory role on the technicians specialized in preparing reports, and every periodical is limited to submitting these reports to the concerned authorities.

Q: Does the technical office of the head of the agency have a role in reviewing these reports?

 

A: The role of the technical office is to fulfill the notes of the reports and review the work methodology in the written and presented reports from the departments.

Q: In the context of work within the Central Auditing Organization and preparing periodic reports, what are the facts that those reports are supposed to know about?

A: All that is related to the violation of spending public money in a manner different from the financial regulations that control the spending of public money or the laws that regulate the organization, so a member of the agency has to prove all the observations he gets on such behavior.

Q: Are any legal descriptions of any of the incidents in the reports included?

A: If the examining member sees any suspicion of behavior involving a waste of public money, he may prove, according to his opinion and diligence, the existence of this suspicion without proving any legal description of it. Rather, it is recommended to inform the investigation authority as the relevant person in this matter.

Q: What is the extent of confidentiality of those reports prepared by your presidency?

A: Reports are considered confidential between the agency and the agency concerned with the report, but reports can sometimes be leaked from the authorities that are addressed by the agency.

Q: Is it permissible to publish these reports with the knowledge of the Central Auditing Agency?

A: Reports in the original may not be published in order to preserve national security and confidentiality of information, but according to the constitution it is permissible to publish some details without entering into the content as headlines or warnings about professional bodies or actions, especially in the absence of a law yet to regulate the circulation of information.

Q: Explain to us the circumstances of your statement regarding the cost of corruption in 2015.

A: This is false and incorrect news, and what happened is that it was on this specific day for the opening of a branch of the National Bank inside the headquarters of the Agency, and the Chairman of the Bank’s Board of Directors, Mr. Hisham Okasha, was participating in the ceremony. There was press coverage of the event and two journalists attended there and after they finished their dialogue with Professor Hisham Okasha On the occasion of the opening of the bank, he requested a dialogue with me, so I told them that the event does not require conducting a dialogue and asked to find out the truth about news that reached their knowledge. I don’t know from where it means that there is a study prepared on the analysis of the cost of corruption, so I told them that there is a study prepared jointly with the Ministry of Planning on analyzing the cost of corruption during The period from 2012 to 2015, so he asked for the details of this study, so I told them that it is not allowed to publish the study in addition to that it is not in front of me at the time of the statement, so they decided that they had heard about large numbers that they were not aware of their validity or not. I told them that the study included the period from 2012 to 2015 and that the numbers are not present in front of me but exceed The amount of six hundred billion pounds during that period, and that is all that happened.

Q: And where did you issue that permit?

A: Inside the headquarters of the Central Auditing Organization and a room attached to my office.

Q: What is your basis for issuing that permit?

A: The study prepared by the agency for the period from 2012 to 2015, which contained numbers exceeding six hundred billion pounds.

Q: What is the validity of the statement, according to what you said and what you gave to the journalists?

A: The validity of the statement is that the time scope of the study is from the period 2012 until 2015 and that the number of six hundred billion pounds is not attributed to one year only. This is incorrect and I want to clarify also that even the 2012 reports may contain in their content violations prior to this year are cumulative and have not been corrected or corrected. It is recorded in subsequent reports year after year until the violation is corrected, and then it is raised from the reports.

Q: And why did you not clarify this in the context of your statements?

A: Because I didn’t want to go into details and it was an address that would have triggered the appetite of journalists, so I only gave them the address.

Q: Were the annual reports for the fiscal year 2014-2015 among what was assigned to the study conducted by the agency, which was assigned to it in the statement attributed to you?

A: There is no doubt that it is necessary to return to it, but I know if they did return it or not.

Q: Were these reports were already finished and presented to you for the fiscal year 2014/2015?

A: Some of them were presented to me and some were sent to the authorities.

Q: Explain to us how you, as head of an agency, did not have knowledge of whether or not the study prepared by the agency was based on the study for the fiscal year 2014/2015.

A: Because I cannot be certain that the study covered all sectors of the agency for the fiscal year 2014/2015.

Q: But you made a statement guaranteeing whether it was true or false for the fiscal year 2014/2015.

A: Because according to what was presented to me, there are sectors that have completed the periodic reports for the fiscal year 2014/2015 and the study did not include all sectors of the apparatus.

Q: What is the share assigned to the agency assigning your leadership to any activities outside the scope of periodic reports in accordance with the law?

A: All studies requested from us by the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, or the Speaker of Parliament have a request or assignment to the Agency with a specific matter, and the Agency may, on its own initiative, carry out any studies and send them to those responsible.

Q: Is it permissible to publish these works without referring to the requesting or commissioning party?

A: It is permissible to publish the headlines of a petition without going into details. It is a constitutional obligation under the text of Article 217 of the Constitution and in the absence of a law prohibiting this.

Q: Is there not in the law establishing the Central Auditing Organization something that prohibits all the organisation's work and surrounds it with complete secrecy?

A: The prohibited publication is for all the details of the reports as for the headlines related to general matters to uncover corruption or highlighting the role of state institutions in combating corruption and protecting public funds and in accordance with the International Anti-Corruption Convention and Egypt has become obligated to implement this agreement and it is applied in its degree to local laws. This agreement will bind states The signatory should provide disclosure and transparency in the reports it prepares to protect public funds and combat corruption.

Q: Does the agency, your employer, basically have meaning to determine corruption?

A: So, the apparatus is concerned with corruption, and it must refer to the areas of corruption, uncover them, and take measures to inform the concerned authorities to investigate corruption.

Q: Explain to us the content of what you were assigned to do in your capacity within the framework of the study prepared by the Ministry of Planning?

A: The assignment was mentioned in the letter of the Ministry of Planning regarding this study by requesting two members from the agency to prepare part of Derara, which is their request by name because they had previously participated in previous work to prepare part of a study on the costs of corruption in Egypt and I did not know because of the selection of these two members by name, which is what they asked for. I sold them.

Q: Within the framework of the assignment, has a specific time period been specified for conducting the study during it?

A: So, he specified a period of time that I do not remember specifically, but it is a period prior to the period during which the second study was prepared. Q: What is the purpose of preparing that study?

A: According to what was reported to me, there is an analysis of the cost of corruption in Egypt during my time, I do not remember raising it to the President of the Republic.

Q: To whom did you entrust to conduct and implement the part of the study that the Central Auditing Agency is assigned to implement?

A: I entrusted him to Dr. Muhammad Sami and another, whose name I do not remember now, and it was done at the request of the Minister of Planning himself to choose these two members.

Q: Did you see the part of the study prepared from the membership of the device?

A: I did not see it, but I was informed through the technical office that they looked at it and found that there are unreliable facts, some of which were made ??? Through the media without verifying its share, which is contrary to the nature of our work in the apparatus.

Q: Has the part of the study prepared by the agency met with acceptance by the authority that has the mandate?

A: What is evidence that she sold it to me for approval and documentation and ??? If there was another point of view, she would not have sent it to me while she was hoping for numbers that exceeded the number originally mentioned by studying the second device.

Q: Did the Ministry of Planning and the Center for Governance indicated any negatives or errors that marred the first study in the part prepared by the authority, your presidency?

A: No, I did not receive any comments from the Ministry of Planning or the Director of the Governance Center on this part of the study prepared by the two members of the agency.

Q: What is the procedure that you took before the part of the study received from the Ministry of Planning?

A: I sent to the Minister of Planning and told Dr. And derived from data from the media, so I asked her and the Minister of Planning to re-audit the study through the Central Auditing Organization and the Director of the Governance Center, she proposed the participation of other bodies in the study bodies prepared with the knowledge of the Central Auditing Agency, and I refused because no party may be informed of the organ’s work for the confidentiality of its work.

Q: What are the controls and criteria for selecting the committee that you formed to audit the first study, and what is your role in that?

A: First, I would like to clarify that the technical office to me is the one who suggested checking the first study after they read it because it is not documented, and the technical office suggested forming a committee from some of the apparatus’s fourteen sectors to audit this study, and the technical office addressed the departments according to the mechanism used in the agency to nominate each department Its representative in the committee and I had no role in choosing any of the committee members or nominating any member in it.

Q: You decided in advance to hurry up preparing that study and that your role was limited to that, so what prompted you to agree to conduct a new study?

A: I agreed with the first study in the first place because it is inaccurate and therefore I could not assume its responsibility. Accordingly, I requested to prepare a serious study with a complete formation of the apparatus.

Q: Was the new study conducted based on your request?

A: Yes, when the agency’s technical office told me that the first study does not rise to the level of the Central Auditing Organization, and therefore it may not be approved.

Q: What is your way to ensure the proper progress of work in preparing the study in order to avoid the negatives that marred the first study?

A: Follow up with them through the technical office of work methodology without documentary examination.

Q: Are the members of the agency used to describe corruption in any work related to their technical work in the agency in their reports?

A: So what has been done is to release the description of corruption in facts contained in their reports?

Q: Is this legally permissible?

A: There is nothing to legally prevent them from using corruption and the facts presented to them, but in the end, they are not an investigation or an accusation party.

Q: And were you offered the study in its final form?

A: The head of the technical office in the agency informed me of the completion of the study and that it is a good study and a sound methodology was followed in it. After reviewing it from the technical office, I see that it is sent to the Minister of Planning and the review of the technical office is not done as a document, but a review of the methodology for preparing the study and its conformity with the scientific and professional principles.

Q: Was it offered to you?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you read it? A: Quick read.

Q: And did you make sure that it was reviewed and conformed to its intended purpose?

A: The technical head of books assured me that it is a good study and that the technical office reviewed it and made sure that it was conducted according to a sound scientific method and recommended that it be submitted to the Minister of Planning.

Q: Have you been presented with any recommendations from the study preparation committee or your technical office regarding that study?

A: No, as soon as I was notified of the technical books that it was a good study, it promoted the level of work in the device and suggested that it be sent to the officials, I sent it accordingly.

Q: To whom did you send this study?

A: To the Minister of Planning and the President of the Republic. Q: What is your support for that? A: As the requesting party, the Presidency of the Republic is directly affiliated with the Presidency Institution.