A special court in Senegal has charged four former government ministers from ex-president Macky Sall's cabinet with corruption and embezzlement related to the management of Covid-19 funds – under a wider anti-corruption campaign by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye.
The court on Thursday indicted Moustapha Diop, who was the industrial development minister under Sall. He is accused of misusing some $4 million dollars from the West African nation's fund for combating the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Wednesday, the Dakar court charged Aissatou Sophie Gladima, Sall's former mining minister, with embezzlement and placed her under a detention order, a source close to the case told French news agency AFP.
She is accused of embezzling more than 193 million CFA francs (approximately €295,000) from an aid fund intended for miners affected by the pandemic.
On Tuesday, the court charged former justice minister Ismaila Madior Fall with taking bribes and on Monday charged former women's minister Salimata Diop with "complicity in embezzlement". Diop was released after paying bail of about $97,750, according to a source close to the case and local media reports.
Former minister for community development Amadou Mansour Faye, Sall's brother-in-law, is also accused of diverting around $4.5 million from a fund set up to tackle the effects of the pandemic in the west African nation in 2020-21, according to a national assembly report.
The High Court of Justice, a special court that began operating earlier this year and is empowered to try presidents and ministers for acts committed in the exercise of their functions.
For the director of the NGO 3D, Moundiaye Cisse, these cases demonstrate the proper functioning of institutions.
"It's positive, because we have a justice system that tries to put everyone on an equal footing," he told RFI's correspondents in Dakar. "It's a good instrument."
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who was voted in last year, vowed to crack down on corruption, particularly by the previous administration under Sall.
He decided that Senegal would summon former president Sall himself to court after the country's audit office unveiled irregularities in the treasury's bookkeeping on his watch, a government spokesman said on 28 February.
Sall led Senegal from 2012 to 2024 and is accused of having presided over "catastrophic" mismanagement of the public purse, after an independent report invalidated official figures under his stewardship, revising both debt and the public deficit sharply upwards.
Sall, who has lived in Morocco since leaving office last year, has rejected the row over the report as "political".
(with AFP)