Al Khalifa Scandal: Former Officials, Ministers Will Be Brought Before Algiers Supreme Court

Justice Minister entrusted Sliman Brahimi, the General Manager of Judicial and Legal Affairs at the Justice Ministry, with personal monitoring of Al Kahlifa corruption case, which has been reopened by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Supreme Court.

Al Khalifa case will bring the names of former ministers and senior officials for the first time to the investigating adviser after they were witnesses in the case that was issued in 2015, such as the Secretary-General of the General Union of Algerian Workers Sidi Said, the former Finance Minister of Finance, Mohamed Djallab, and the former labor, Employment and Social Security Minister, Abou Djarra Soltani as well.

In this context, Echorouk sources revealed that the appointment of the official in the Justice Ministry to oversee and launch a personal follow-up on the file which is known as the “scandal of the century”, which involved Abdelmoumene Khalifa or the “Golden Boy”, as he is called, came against the background of the reopening of the file’s details and secrets because the man who is entrusted with the follow-up was the Prosecutor of Republic in Algiers Cheragua Court, who led the investigations in the file of “Al Khalifa Bank”, as the concerned served as the undersecretary of the Republic in the same court in the years 2002 and 2003, and he personally oversaw the investigation with the senior personalities of the state at the time including the ministers, directors, officials of public companies and institutions.

Echorouk sources added that four years after the closure of the file of Al Khalifa case, in which the Criminal Court of Blida sentenced the main accused, Abdelmoumene Khalifa, with 18 years in prison, before he challenged the court’s decision at the level of the Supreme Court. Ministers and senior officials and personalities who have been excluded from the list of the accused will be summoned, because of their involvement in the case, which cost the state treasury more than $ 5 billion, but the investigating judge in charge of the case listened to them as witnesses and not as suspects, including Said Bouteflika, the former Prime Minister, Ahmed Ouyahia, and the former Transport Minister, Ammar Ghoul and Abdessalam Bouchouareb.

The Chancellor of the Supreme Court is expected to call for other names, such as the Secretary-General of the General Union of Algerian Workers Sidi Said, the former Minister of Finance, Mohamed Djallab, as the legal liquidator of Al Khalifa group, and the former Labor, Employment and Social Security Minister, Abou Djarra Soltani, to listen to them in the same corruption case.

Al Khalifa case is considered as one of the largest corruption cases in Algeria’s history and began following the discovery of loopholes in the financial dealings of Al Khalifa group, which included a group of branches, most notably a bank and an airline company. The bank offered a record of 17% interest rate, prompting a number of officials and ministers to issue instructions to withdraw the funds of a number of state agencies and institutions from public banks and pumped them in the bank of the “Golden Boy” (Al Khalifa) using illegal methods.

The case caused a loss worth billions of dollars after the collapse of Al Khalifa group and its bankruptcy. It lasted for many years and ended with more than 4,000 people being investigated, including 124 defendants and 111 public bodies, and 300 other victims, most of whom were state ministers and officials and a large number of citizens and official bodies and private companies, and ended in 2015 with an 18-year prison sentence against the director of the company, Abdelmoumene Rafik Khalifa, after handing him over to Algerian justice by Britain, where he escaped to after the scandal broke out in 2003.