Yemenis Accuse Houthis of Plundering ‘Heritage and Culture’ Revenues

Arab World

June 10th, 7:26am

Sanaa – Asharq Al-Awsat

A woman walks on a bridge in the Old City of Sanaa, Yemen. (Reuters)

Houthi militias in Yemen are leading an active and organized theft campaign on revenues collected from the culture, heritage and development fund in the insurgency-run capital, Sanaa, well-informed locals told Asharq Al-Awsat. The Iran-backed militias are evading regulation on which the fund was established by merging independent resources deducted from significant companies and factories with their so-called state’s general budget. Houthi leaders are spending money reaped from the merger away from the interests and objectives of the fund, sources who requested anonymity reported. Since 2015, Houthis have been plundering over 80 million rias from the fund each month. On average, the dollar trades for 600 rials. Sources working in the Houthi-run heritage and culture sector named four culprits guilty of graft: Abdullah al-Kabsi al-Maeen, the heritage minister in the Houthi self-proclaimed government, Ahmed Haider, who is al-Maeen’s first deputy, Ibrahim al-Moushki, the heritage fund director in Sanaa, and Salim al-Matari, who serves as the fund’s senior accountant. For more than seven years, these four officials have looted an estimated 6,197,000,000 rials. Some 117 million rials from the overall sum were already deposited in the fund’s treasury before the 2014 Houthi coup. In the aftermath of the coup, Houthi leaders entrusted with running cultural affairs have frozen the salaries of public servants serving in the state department for culture. Since 2015, public culture workers have only received two months worth of salaries. Observers anxious over what has become of the cultural scene in Yemen accuse Houthis of threatening the sector with their policies, sources told Asharq Al-Awsat. Sources pointed out that the fund was mainly established to support artists, art houses and other aspects related to cultural heritage, and should not be used for personal agendas by anyone. Moreover, specialists revealed that the fund is one of 40 public funds that receive money through contributions from the commercial sector and foreign grants. All of them have been taken over by the Houthis to finance their war effort.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3019391/yemenis-accuse-houthis-plundering-%E2%80%98heritage-and-culture%E2%80%99-revenues