CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s public prosecutor has charged three executives from a private petroleum company with embezzling nearly $1 billion from corporate funds, state news agency MENA and a judicial source said on Thursday.
The firm’s former deputy chairman, Mohammed Mahfouz al-Ansari, and two other officials face a criminal trial on charges that they manipulated the company’s books and sent about $960 million into personal foreign bank accounts between 2011 and 2015.
The firm, then known as Tri Ocean, has since been renamed Mog Energy.
MENA and the source did not name the other two executives, giving only their initials, MMA and MFH.
Tamer Mostafa Ragheb, the current deputy chairman of Mog Energy, was questioned during the prosecution’s investigation but was not a suspect, MENA and the source said.
Ragheb’s statements to investigators led them to believe that the three defendants transferred over $18 million to personal bank accounts in Doha and Dubai between Feb. 2012 and September of that year, MENA said.
A receptionist at Mog Energy, when reached by phone, said he had no knowledge about the case.
Reporting by Haitham Ahmed, Ahmed Mohamed Hassan and Ahmed Tolba; Writing by Yousef Saba and Nadine Awadalla; Editing by John Stonestreet, William Maclean.
