CAIRO, Jan 28 (Aswat Masriya) - Egypt’s prosecutor general referred on Saturday, two employees at the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and a businessman to the criminal court over bribery charges. 

The prosecution accused EGPC employees of requesting a bribe of EGP13 million in exchange for services to the businessman.

According to the prosecution, one of the defendants received EGP5.4 million while the other received EGP7.8 million. The businessman is accused of bribing public service employees. 

Several cases of governmental corruption have surfaced in recent months. 

Earlier in January the adviser to the finance minister over accusations of receiving a bribe worth EGP1milion.

This comes few weeks after the head of the procurement department at the State Council Gamal Ibrahim El-Laban was arrested while receiving a bribe and detained pending investigations.

The police seized EGP 24 million, $4 million, EUR 2 million and SAR 1 million from Laban's house, in addition to gold accessories and gifts.

The council’s secretary general Wael Shalaby was arrested over involvement in the case. He was found dead in his cell after having hanged himself on Jan 2.

In August 2016, former supply minister Khaled Hanafi resigned after a corruption case involving domestic supplies of wheat was discovered in the ministry.

Transparency International said on Wednesday that  “corruption levels in Egypt are still high in the absence of a real political will to fight it”, in its Corruption Perception Index 2016. 

Egypt ranked 108 out of 176 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index 2016 with a score of 34 on a scale where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.

The score marks a deterioration from the year before when Egypt scored 36 and ranked 88 out of 168 countries.