Egypt: Corruption

(asked on 12th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the UK Action Against Corruption Programme in Egypt.


Answered by
James Cleverly Portrait
James Cleverly
Home Secretary
This question was answered on 17th March 2020

The National Crime Agency, which delivers the UK Action Against Corruption Programme (UK ACT), makes independent decisions about which cases to work on. We are not aware that the programme has a significant case load in Egypt, although the programme did fund the Egypt Asset Recovery Task Force between 2013 and 2016.

DFID commissioned and published, in October 2019, an evaluation of the effectiveness of the programme, available at https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-201021/documents. This does not assess the effectiveness of the programme in Egypt.The evaluation concluded: “Overall evaluation evidence shows that the UK ACT Programme has made a contribution to reducing, to some extent, the incentives of corrupt individuals from developing countries to use the UK to launder money and reducing the incentives of UK companies and nationals to engage in bribery in developing countries”.

Since DFID starting funding the National Crime Agency and its predecessors in 2006, the programme has frozen, confiscated or returned almost £800 million of assets stolen from developing countries. DFID also publishes annual reviews of the progress of the programme, also available on DevTracker.

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