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| Prime Minister Hisham Qandil |
Cairo: Dr Hisham Al Nashwi, Chief Engineer of Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (MWRI), accuses Prime Minister Hisham Qandil of leaking information, studies and confidential data about revenues and flooding of the Nile River in Egypt to a Dutch company developing the design of Ethiopian Renaissance.
Al Nashwi, who is member of
Unesco’s International Hydrologic Programme (IHP), said that Qandil, as
he was Minister of Irrigation in 2011, helped the Dutch company Deltares
to expedite the completion of the design.
Deltares, according to its
website, is an independent institute for applied research in the field
of water, subsurface and infrastructure. Its main focus is on deltas,
coastal regions and river basins. It works closely with Dutch
government, international governments, knowledge institutes and market
parties.
Deltares launched in March
2011 its programme DEWFORA, Improved Drought Early Warning and
Forecasting to strengthen preparedness and adaptation to droughts in
Africa. DEWFORA kickoff meeting and General Assembly was held at the
premises of Deltares, in the city of Delft the Netherlands, in March
2011. The meeting was attended by representatives from all consortium
partners. They include Nile Forecast Centre of Egypt’s MWRI.
DEWFORA Project has held also two meetings in Sharm Al Shaikh and in Cairo.
Al Nashwi revealed in an
interview on the private channel Sada Al Balad on Monday that Qandil
provided the information to Deltares according to an agreement between
the European Union and the Dutch company, upon which the EU sponsored 16
governmental and non-governmental organisations with 4.5 million Euro
in return of information.
“According
to the agreement, the Dutch company received important studies and
confidential information from Qandil, the then Minister of Irrigation.
The Ethiopians have used the leaked information, which poses a grave
danger to Egypt’s national security, in construction of the Renaissance
Dam,” Al Nashwi revealed.
He added that Ethiopia
resorted to Deltares to gather long-needed data, essential for
construction of the dam, because it hadn’t qualified experts who could
prepare such studies.
Al Nashwi affirmed that
Qandil approved the agreement and ordered his aides to prepare its
financial regulations without submission to the Supreme Council of the
Armed Forces (SCAF) or the Parliament, according to the practice in such
agreements. The Ministry already has gained the money after Qandil’s
approval in 2011.
“The agreement made
information about wind and floods and other confidential data available
to the Ethiopian side easing the construction of the Renaissance Dam,”
he continued.
Qandil denied the allegations
and threatened to file a lawsuit against a newspaper published the
written text of Al Nashwi’s interview, if it didn’t publish a denial
over what he described as “groundless fiction”.
The PM said in a statement
that “all what published relying on the interview with an engineer from
Irrigation Ministry is baseless”.
The PM statement didn’t point
out to Al Nashwi himself, who vowed to publish all the documents he has
and to file a lawsuit against Qandil.
Meanwhile, Water resources
experts claimed that the Prime Minister has excluded certain experts
from a government-formed committee which studied the consequences of
constructing the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
Nader Nour Al Din, a
professor of Water Resources at Cairo University’s Faculty of
Agriculture, said that the government excluded irrigation experts, who
warned against Ethiopian dams, from the committee.
Nour Al Din accused Qandil of
failing to address the dam issue. He added that Qandil was a member of
the former Irrigation Minister Mahmoud Abou Zaid’s team when Ethiopia
built its first dam over the Tekeze River, which joins the Atbarah River
in Sudan. The Atbarah River is a tributary of the Nile.
Prime Minister Hisham Qandil
Prime Minister Hisham Qandil
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