Corruption case against former Immigration Controller and four others sent to PG

Anti-Corruption Commission has forwarded a case to the Prosecutor General’s Office seeking prosecution of former Controller of Immigration Ilyas Hussain Ibrahim and four other members of the project steering committee at the Department of Immigration and Emigration that handled the controversial border control system project.

The officials have been accused of accepting laptops as bribes from Nexbis, the Malaysian company hired for the boarder control project. The laptops were not listed in the concession agreement that outlined the equipment owed by Nexbis to Maldives, ACC said.

ACC has revealed the identities of the remaining individuals as; Abdulla Waheed of G. Litonia, Ibrahim Shareef of H. Ray, Saeed Mohamed of Male’ Dhaftharu 3281 and Alis Saeed of Ma. Beach House. The commission has accused the men of giving the laptops to staff, with the intention of gaining favour for Nexbis.

The ACC investigation said that the laptops were to be used to test the boarder control modules, conduct trainings on utilizing the boarder control system and improve communication within the project’s stakeholders. However, ACC has argued that all of these tasks could have been carried out with exiting desktop computers.

In February 2013, State raised charges against the former Controller Ilyas Hussain and former Finance Ministry's head of tender evaluation section, Director General Saamee Ageel for conferring undue advantage through corruption, over the same controversial border control system project.