Freddy El-Bayadi, a member of Egypt’s House of Representatives and deputy leader of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, submitted an urgent parliamentary briefing request to Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Wednesday, 14 October. He called on the government to provide a “clear accounting” of the results of its announced anti-corruption strategies, the public funds recovered, and the accountability of those implicated in wasting public money, according to a statement received by Zawia3.
The request comes eight months after Transparency International released its 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index on 10 February 2026, leaving Egypt at 30 out of 100 and 130th among 182 countries and territories, unchanged from the 2024 edition. The score is seven points below Egypt’s highest result under the index’s current methodology: 37 in 2014, when it ranked 94th out of 175 countries. That amounts to a fall of 36 places over eleven years, the same period in which the state launched its National Anti-Corruption Strategy in December 2014 and advanced to its third phase, covering 2023–2030. Egypt’s score is below the Arab average of 34 and the global average of 42, according to the Egyptian National Competitiveness Council’s reading of the 2025 edition.
What the index measures, and what it does not
Transparency International has published the index since 1995. It brings together assessments by experts and businesspeople from thirteen independent sources to measure perceived public-sector corruption, rather than count it, on a scale from zero, the most corrupt, to 100, the cleanest.
The index does not measure the number of corruption cases, judgments or sums misappropriated. A score of 30 does not mean that “corruption is 70 percent.” It remains, however, the most widely used international tool for comparing countries and tracking their trajectory over time.
Egypt’s trajectory is clear: 32 points in 2012 and 2013, then 37 in 2014, 36 in 2015, 34 in 2016, 32 in 2017, 35 in 2018 and 2019, 33 in 2020 and 2021, and 30 in 2022. A temporary improvement to 35 in 2023 lifted it to 108th place, before it lost five points and 22 places at once in the 2024 edition, falling to 30 points and 130th. Both the score and ranking remained unchanged in 2025. In the regional analysis accompanying the 2024 edition, Manuel Pirino and Kinda Hattar, the organisation’s regional advisers for the Middle East and North Africa, cited Egypt as an example of secrecy in public life because of a “lack of transparency in public procurement.” The regional average was 39, an improvement of just one point in twelve years.
The 2025 edition recorded the first decline in the global average in more than a decade, to 42 points. A total of 122 of the 182 countries remained below 50, while the number scoring above 80 fell from twelve a decade earlier to five. The organisation linked the deterioration to shrinking civic space: of fifty countries whose scores had declined significantly since 2012, 36 had experienced restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and association. It said that more than 90 percent of journalist killings worldwide occurred in countries scoring below 50.
A parliamentary demand for an accounting
In his request, El-Bayadi asked how Egypt could deteriorate in this way more than ten years after launching its national strategies. “Combating corruption is not measured by the number of strategies, conferences and statements,” he said, adding that “public money is not the government’s money, but the people’s, and the people have a right to know how it is spent.” He described corruption as extending beyond individual bribery to damage the economy through inflated project costs, growing public debt, weaker investment and fewer job opportunities. Citizens pay that bill through the quality of health, education and utility services.
The MP asked the government to explain the loss of 22 places in a single year and to account for public funds wasted and recovered over the past five years, the number and outcome of cases and judgments, and the action taken on observations made by the Central Auditing Organisation. He requested that government representatives and the relevant authorities appear before parliament with documented information. His proposed measures began with an independent review of anti-corruption policies since 2014 and an annual report submitted to parliament. They also included safeguarding the independence of oversight bodies, protecting whistleblowers, publishing public-spending and tender data, expanding access to information, and tightening scrutiny of conflicts of interest, illicit gains and officials’ asset declarations.
Direct awards and absent local councils
Malek Adly, director of the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights, sees Egypt’s declining position as inseparable from structural weaknesses in the oversight of public funds. These include diminishing press freedom, changes to government contract-award rules, weak parliamentary and local oversight, and the absence of effective rules to curb conflicts of interest. He tells Zawia3 that journalism and citizens’ complaints have served as means of exposing violations and identifying institutional failings. Restricting the press’s ability to investigate public affairs weakens that scrutiny, because no oversight body can monitor every employee and institution on its own.
He adds that expanding the direct award of contracts reduces competition among companies and weakens the procedural safeguards that allow technical and financial bids to be compared. Raising the financial thresholds for direct agreements widens the range of contracts awarded without tenders. Article 7 of Law No. 182 of 2018, governing contracts concluded by public entities, permits direct agreement as an exception to open tendering through a reasoned decision by the competent authority. A committee of technical, financial and legal experts must assess whether the prices are appropriate in relation to market rates.
On parliamentary oversight, Adly argues that the House has not achieved the necessary effectiveness despite attempts by some MPs to raise matters of public interest. Briefing requests remain of limited value unless translated into actual accountability and discussions that produce results, he says, noting that some parliamentary activity has shifted to social media while activity inside the chamber remains limited. He connects this to an imbalance between the branches of government in favour of the executive, and to the presence of businesspeople in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, without a clear accounting of former officials who move into commercial activities.
He considers the absence of elected local popular councils a fundamental gap in the oversight system. Since their dissolution by court order in 2011, citizens have lacked an elected instrument for monitoring expenditure in cities, neighbourhoods, villages and governorates. This has left a void that central agencies cannot easily fill. No local elections have been held since 2008, and the new local administration law remains disputed over the electoral system it should adopt.
Adly values the capabilities of the Administrative Control Authority and the Administrative Prosecution Authority and what he regards as their professional competence. He nevertheless says their effectiveness remains limited unless complemented by parliamentary and community oversight and citizens’ complaints. Limited access to information is another factor in Egypt’s assessment, he adds, citing the difficulty of obtaining poverty data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics. This restricts journalists and researchers seeking to track institutional performance and evaluate policies. Finally, he links the financial crisis to low incomes among government employees and staffing shortages in public services. He points to large numbers of teachers retiring without adequate replacement and the low pay of some newly recruited staff as problems of resource management, not merely insufficient funding.
Law 89 and Article 18 bis
Appeal lawyer Mohamed Fattouh tells Zawia3 that Egypt’s decline in the index is linked to the legislative structure governing oversight. Foremost is the absence of a law regulating the right of access to information, despite its guarantee under Article 68 of the constitution, a constitutional obligation left unfulfilled since 2014. In August, MP Maha Abdel Nasser of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary bloc submitted a bill requiring public bodies to respond to information requests within seven working days and exempting journalists from the request form.
Fattouh points to Law No. 89 of 2015, which empowered the president to dismiss the heads of independent authorities and oversight bodies, as a measure that affected perceptions of those institutions’ independence. The law was issued in July 2015. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi relied on it to dismiss Hisham Geneina as head of the Central Auditing Organisation on 28 March 2016, months after Geneina announced an estimate of the cost of corruption in Egypt.
He adds that the expansion of settlements in offences involving public funds, under Article 18 bis (b) of the Criminal Procedure Code, raises questions about the deterrent effect of accountability, even when money is recovered. The provision allows proceedings to be terminated following repayment at any stage, even after a final judgment. It remains in force because the new Criminal Procedure Code, Law No. 174 of 2025, originally due to take effect on 1 October 2026, was postponed until October 2027 by a decision published in the Official Gazette on 1 October this year. Fattouh also highlights the widening exceptions for directly awarded contracts and the lack of public access to officials’ asset declarations. He acknowledges, on the other hand, the national strategy, cases uncovered by the Administrative Control Authority and the digitisation of services. Improving the perceptions of experts and businesspeople, he says, requires measurable transparency and genuinely independent oversight.
A counterargument: the index is not a verdict
Appeal lawyer Mahmoud El-Rouby argues that assessing corruption indices should begin with examining the organisation producing them, its methodology and its data sources. International indices should not be treated as definitive judgments on the state’s performance, he says. He tells Zawia3 that Transparency International is a non-governmental organisation, not an official oversight authority or a United Nations body. Its varied funding sources, including governments and donors, warrant examination of its published governance and funding rules, while distinguishing legitimate questions from evidence that establishes bias.
El-Rouby points to allegations and investigations involving the organisation in Hungary and Brazil, urging a distinction between accusations and established legal findings rather than treating allegations alone as proof that it lacks credibility. The two incidents were an investigation launched in June 2024 by the Sovereignty Protection Office under Viktor Orbán’s government into the organisation’s Hungarian chapter, which Transparency International described as targeting civil society organisations, and an investigation ordered in February 2024 by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli into its Brazilian chapter in connection with the Lava Jato case. Neither had produced an established judicial finding against the organisation.
El-Rouby says the index measures the perceptions of experts and businesspeople, not the number of offences or judgments. It has faced academic criticism over the limits of relying on perceptions and reducing a complex phenomenon to a single number. He cites Article 218 of the constitution, which obliges the state to combat corruption and requires coordination among oversight bodies, alongside Articles 215 and 219, which establish the framework for oversight institutions and the powers of the Central Auditing Organisation. He considers reports by the Administrative Control Authority and the Central Auditing Organisation the primary reference for assessing these efforts. International indices should be placed in context as supplementary tools, rather than substitutes for national data. Yet he also says the effectiveness of the national strategy cannot be measured by announcing plans. It requires assessing implementation rates, publishing regular information on oversight results and addressing shortcomings. Egypt’s investment image will not improve by objecting to indices, he argues, but through a legal environment in which investors can trust the clarity of the rules, the protection of rights and equal opportunities.
What other indicators show
Transparency International is not alone in measuring the issue. As part of its Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank publishes a Control of Corruption indicator drawing on around 35 data sources to assess the use of public power for private gain, including state capture by elites. The bank’s updated Systematic Country Diagnostic, published in 2021, documented that Egypt remained between the 20th and 25th percentiles globally on this indicator throughout 2004–2019. In other words, between 75 and 80 percent of countries performed better. It linked weak governance to diminished prospects for successful reform of state-owned enterprises. In July 2025, the International Monetary Fund’s fourth review of Egypt’s programme counted 97 military-owned companies. It said competition from the armed forces could deter private investors because of the privileges enjoyed by their companies, and that progress towards a level playing field had faced “significant delays.”
The World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index adds a third dimension, measuring the absence of corruption in the executive, judiciary, police and legislature through a survey covering more than 215,000 households and 4,100 legal practitioners. In the 2025 edition, released on 28 October 2025, Egypt ranked 135th out of 143 countries overall and last among ten countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It placed 106th out of 143 on the absence-of-corruption measure.
At company level, the World Bank Enterprise Survey, conducted between September 2025 and January 2026 among around a thousand Egyptian firms, provides the latest picture from inside the market. Corruption was the second most frequently cited major obstacle: around 15 percent of firms identified it as the biggest obstacle to their operations. The incidence of bribery requests was 3 percent, compared with 13 percent across the region. Around 17 percent of firms that applied for construction permits reported being asked for gifts or informal payments.
What oversight agencies announce, meanwhile, consists of specific enforcement cases rather than comprehensive statistics. On 19 February 2025, newspapers published an Administrative Control Authority statement reporting the arrest of the head of a new city’s development authority on suspicion of colluding with contractors and overlooking violations when accepting works in return for bribes estimated at EGP 3 million, approximately USD 62,000. The suspects were referred to prosecutors and payments for the non-compliant works were halted. The statement also reported the prevention of an attempt to seize 400 feddans of state land using forged documents, and the arrest of a shop-licensing director in a Cairo district on suspicion of requesting a bribe in exchange for licences for five shops. These are specific arrests and investigations, not a comprehensive annual count of cases, judgments and recovered funds, which is precisely the accounting El-Bayadi seeks in his request.
A strategy in three phases
On 9 December 2014, International Anti-Corruption Day, El-Sisi launched the National Anti-Corruption Strategy at a ceremony at the Administrative Control Authority’s headquarters. It implemented Article 218 of the constitution, which tasks oversight bodies with developing the strategy and monitoring its implementation. As Zawia3 documented in an earlier analysis, the strategy rests on three pillars: legislation supporting the fight against corruption; stronger oversight and judicial institutions; and “political will,” which the authority describes as the driving force behind the other two pillars and says is clearly present in the political leadership. The first phase ran from 2014 to 2018, and the second from 2019 to 2022. Madbouly launched the third phase on 15 December 2022, saying at the ceremony that Egypt had “succeeded in achieving many of its targets through the automation of government services.” In 2017, the authority established the National Anti-Corruption Academy to train its members and organise conferences and seminars on integrity and transparency.
Between the initial launch and the third phase, the law moved in contradictory directions. An academy was established and digital service platforms were launched. At the same time, Law 89 was issued and used to remove the head of the Central Auditing Organisation, settlements in public-funds offences expanded, the access-to-information law remained unpassed, and local councils remained unelected. When the next edition of the index is released in February 2027, four of the third phase’s eight years will have elapsed. If the score does not move, Egypt will have remained at 30 for three editions.
