Former Amman mayor indicted, detained

Former Amman mayor, Omar Maani, spent his first night in detention Tuesday after a prosecutor indicted him for “failure to perform his official duties”.A judicial source said that the Amman Court of First Instance turned down a bail request filed by Maani’s lawyers after Deputy Attorney General Judge Rami Salah ordered the detention of the former mayor for 14 days, pending more investigation in the case. One of his lawyers, Mohammad Nsour, told the Jordan News Agency, Petra, that he will try again to bail his client today. Maani, a prominent businessman running a multimillion industrial firm in Amman, was appointed as mayor of Amman in 2006 until 2011. During his term, he proposed the Amman Master Plan and was the engine behind the troubled Amman Rapid Bus Transit Project, a multimillion public transportation scheme that was expected to bring about a solution to one of the capital’s major challenge: traffic congestion, before the former government halted the project after its one-year first phase was completed.The detention of Maani came after several files of Greater Amman Municipality were under scrutiny by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and Parliament. The attorney general office is expected to summon several former top officials, including three premiers, over other cases that triggered public anger.Prosecutors will reportedly hear testimonies of former premiers Marouf Bakhit, Nader Dahabi and Samir Rifai in addition to former chief of Royal Court Bassem Awadallah over the “casino file”, a four-year-old suspected corruption case in which one former minister was impeached by the Lower House.The indictment of Maani also came days after His Majesty King Abdullah met with officials and civil society activists concerned with the anti-corruption efforts and encouraged them to cooperate to bring “the corrupt and the negligent” to justice, stressing that “no one is above the law and no one enjoys immunity”.Within the same context, the ACC expected that authorities will be able to restore tens of millions in public funds, as a result of its recent decision to ban travel for more than 35 leading businessmen suspected of involvement in corruption, a senior ACC official told The Jordan Times yesterday.The ban was announced a day earlier by ACC chief, Samih Bino.The cases range from exploitation of authority, especially in shareholding companies, to manipulation of laws and regulations in order to gain illegal direct financial benefits for themselves or their relatives, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.The commission also decided to put the properties and assets of the suspects under court custody until the probe is completed.The travel ban was part of a “broader effort to uncover alleged corruption in over 23 cases that are under investigation”, the official said.In a related development, Petra reported that the Jordan Securities Commission (JSC) Board of Commissioners on Tuesday referred a case involving Jordan’s Amwal Invest company to court for suspected violations, including misleading information in the company’s documents submitted to the JSC and internal trading.The JSC suspended trading in the company’s shares at the Amman Stock Exchange in May this year in light of auditing reports.