Doha

A number of corruption and bribery cases have been heard by Qatar courts this year in an effort by the government to maintain transparency and integrity across various sectors.

Opening the 44th ordinary session of the Advisory Council last week, HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani said that the state will not tolerate financial and administrative corruption or abuse of public position for private gain or abandoning of professional standards for personal interest.

Local Arabic daily Arrayah reported a number of cases, highlighting the government's keenness to bring to book the guilty.

For instance in July, the Criminal Court sentenced an Indian expatriate and a GCC man each to five years in jail after convicting them of demanding and accepting a bribe of QR3mn to renew an insurance contract . Both convicts were senior officials at a government entity. The court also ordered their dismissal from service and jointly pay the sum of QR3mn as fine.

On October 24, a superior court reviewed the case of three engineers (GCC, Greek, and Lebanese) convicted of requesting and accepting a bribe of QR220mn for favours in the Doha Expressway project. The Court of Cassation overturned the ruling of a lower court against them and ordered a re-trial.

On June 16, the Criminal Court reviewed a case in which an American businessman and a Jordanian executive were accused of offering a bribe of 15mn euros to a local bank manager in exchange for issuing them a letter of guarantee to an auto company.

On June 10 the Criminal Court sentenced an Egyptian man to three years in jail and fined him QR10,000 for asking a bribe of QR20,000 from a decoration company to award them a certain tender. The court also ordered his dismissal and asked him to pay back the sum of the bribe.

On March 22, the Criminal Court sentenced in absentia a Syrian man to five years in jail, and ordered his dismissal from service for abusing his position at a local bank for seizing QR132,000 from the accounts of the bank's clients through fraud. The court also ordered the man to pay back the sum.

During this year , the courts have among others, reviewed cases of 14 defendants, nine of them public employees and the others representatives of local companies. They were accused of embezzling the sum of QR4,885,564 of public money and damaging public property.

A similar case involving three bank employees accused of transferring QR10mn from clients' accounts to their own accounts is also being heard by a Doha court. Last month, the court heard the case of a GCC government employee who seized 350 iPhone 6 sets worth QR927,000 through counterfeiting official documents.

Meanwhile, some government bodies have ordered the halt of some public projects being executed by major contracting companies to investigate allegations of corruption and non-compliance with the set standards.