CAIRO — The dismissal of former Agriculture Minister Salah Helal, and his referral to the public prosecutor Sept. 7 on charges of accepting bribes to facilitate the takeover by businessman Ayman el-Gamil of 2,500 acres of state-owned lands in Wadi Natrun, sparked a debate about the Egyptian state's efforts to combat corruption.

In this context, Egyptian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb submitted his Cabinet's resignation Sept. 12, and several analysts attributed the resignation to an order by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, based on the background of the abovementioned issue. However, the most pressing question remains whether corruption among ministers will end with the departure of Mehleb’s Cabinet.

The first indicator suggesting the continuation of corruption is that the same control authorities (Administrative Control Authority, Central Auditing Agency and Illegal Earning Authority) that examined the files of the candidates for Mehleb’s Cabinet — which was formed upon Sisi’s order after he assumed the position of president in June 2014 — were assigned to examine the CVs and files of candidates for ministerial portfolios in the Cabinet of Sharif Ismail, who was assigned by Sisi to set up a new Cabinet on Sept. 12 following Mehleb’s resignation. In this respect, the corruption activities by Helal may be attributed to the control authorities’ poor performance in investigating him, especially since he was a leading figure in the ministry in the era of former Minister of Agriculture Ayman Farid Abu Hadid in 2013, and numerous complaints were filed against Abu Hadid on charges of squandering public money and abusing his public position, which probably required further investigations into Helal’s possible connection to corruption as one of Abu Hadid’s former assistants.

In this context, Ahmed Sakr, representative of Transparency International in Egypt, told Al-Monitor, “It is difficult to examine the biography of candidates to the ministry since their careers extend over decades and it is difficult to discover these candidates’ corrupt activities since such corruption may take the simple form of mediating in favor of relatives to be assigned work or recruiting them in certain positions.” Sakr added, “It is also difficult to uncover financial corruption crimes committed a long time ago, given the accumulation of documents, files and procedures in governmental authorities in a way that makes it impossible to examine all transactions executed in one of these authorities under the supervision of a person nominated for a given ministerial portfolio.”