The U.S. State Department on Thursday announced that it is returning 100 million dollars to the U.S. treasury earmarked for an energy infrastructure project in Afghanistan due to corruption in the Afghan government.
A statement by the U.S. State Department in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The project is aimed at building five substations and transmission systems between Ghazni and Kandahar and Kajaki of Helmand and Kandahar provinces.
The statement added that the State Department would also withhold a planned 60 million dollars in funding for the Afghan government due to its failure in meeting the required level of transparency.
According to the statement, financial assistance to the Afghan government’s monitoring and evaluation committee will also be arrested by the end of the year for the same reasons.
However, the Afghan government was not immediately available for comment.
The statement, however, called on the Afghan government’s leadership to be transparent to its people and utilise foreign funding properly.
dpa/NAN
