Kabul mayor case shows difficulty in fighting graft

KABUL (Reuters) - Days after he was sentenced to four years jail in the biggest case since President Hamid Karzai vowed a crackdown on corruption, Kabul mayor Abdul Ahad Sayebi was still sitting on Thursday in his downtown office.

Karzai's top anti-corruption official says the mayor is free on bail pending an appeal of his case. Prosecutors say he still should be barred from his office. The mayor says he has been framed by enemies determined to get him out of power.

Welcome to Afghanistan's anti-corruption fight, in which fighting graft could be every bit as messy as corruption itself.

International attention has focused on anti-corruption efforts in recent months, with Western leaders increasingly critical since Karzai's re-election in an August 20 poll in which a U.N.-backed probe found a third of his votes were fake.

Karzai has vowed to remove corrupt officials from power and name honest ministers in his new cabinet expected next week. He has announced a new anti-corruption police task force, new courts and special prosecutors.

A U.N.-backed conference on the issue is set for next week.

But the unresolved case of the mayor, the most senior official convicted in years, has left Afghans bemused.

"MUTINY"

Seated in his large, cozy office, Kabul mayor Sayebi insisted he was innocent and said the case against him was fabricated by enemies using the legal process to squeeze him out of office.

"Those people who benefited in past few years, felt their personal gain is in danger in my presence in this post," he told Reuters.

"This sort of move was partly political, (for) personal benefit and personal gain ... I know these sort of movements will continue in future to give a bad name to the system, the government and finally the Afghan people."

Deputy Attorney General Enayatullah Kamal said the mayor was committing another crime just by going to work. His sentence automatically meant he was dismissed from his job.

"All his activities are illegal and his presence in the municipality is a mutiny and this in itself is a crime," Kamal told Reuters.

Sayebi's conviction stems from accusations that he extended a lease for a market in the capital without putting it up for a competitive bid. He says he wasn't personally responsible for extending the lease, and extending it broke no law anyway.

Teasing apart who is crooked and who is straight in the municipal government of Kabul may be a near impossibility.

The capital has possibly doubled its population in the past eight years, with whole mountainsides, once uninhabited, now sprawling with new mud-brick houses of the poor and marble palaces of the rich and powerful.

Millions of dollars have been made in real estate deals involving a byzantine system of permits, leases and ownership records. Records are poor, courts are inscrutable and most of the money that changes hands is cash.

U.S. General David Petraeus told Congress on Wednesday that the Afghan government's expected moves to combat corruption would likely result in "greater turmoil within the government as malign actors are identified and replaced."

(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Peter Graff and Sanjeev Miglani)