Under pressure from the Hirak and army protests, the justice system launched a series of investigations into corruption at the top of the state in 2019.
A former prime minister of the late former Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Noureddine Bedoui, was imprisoned on Tuesday, August 23 by the Algiers court for corruption, joining two of his predecessors in prison, according to local media.
Ahmed Ouyahia and Abdelmalek Sellal, two other prime ministers, arrested in 2019 after the fall of Bouteflika, were sentenced to prison terms in several corruption cases.
According to local media, a judge at the Sidi-M’hamed court in Algiers decided on Sunday to place Mr. Bedoui under judicial supervision with the withdrawal of his passport. But the Algiers court overturned this decision on Tuesday and decided to imprison him pending trial.
Aged 62, Noureddine Bedoui was appointed prime minister on March 12, 2019, by Abdelaziz Bouteflika, then president to replace the very unpopular Ahmed Ouyahia sacked in an attempt to calm the “Hirak”, an unprecedented popular protest movement born three weeks earlier. soon after Mr. Bouteflika’s announcement to run for a fifth presidential term.
Zealous servant
Noureddine Bedoui had held the interior portfolio for almost four years and was seen as a zealous servant of Mr. Bouteflika, and as such hated by the Hirak.
After Bouteflika’s fall on April 2, 2019, under the pressure of the Hirak and army demonstrations, the justice system launched a series of investigations into the cases in which the men around him were involved.
Several former senior politicians, as well as powerful businessmen, have been sentenced, in particular for acts of corruption.
Algeria fell to 117th place out of 180 countries in the world ranking of the corruption perception index, published in January 2022 by the NGO Transparency International.
Mr. Bouteflika, who had led the country for twenty years until the spring of 2019, died at the age of 84 on September 17, 2021.
