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The Oversight and Anti-Corruption Authority announced that its president Mazen Al-Khamous signed a memorandum of understanding with Mustafa Kah, who heads Senegal’s National Office for the Fight against Fraud and Corruption, during a ceremony at United Nations headquarters in Vienna. According to the authority’s statement issued on its official account, the agreement seeks to bolster institutional ties through the exchange of information, expertise and best practices in preventing graft and tackling associated cross-border crimes. The authority added that the pact will support capacity building initiatives and the development of specialized tools for protecting integrity while advancing transparency and governance standards in both countries.
Nazaha’s announcement framed the memorandum within the United Nations Convention against Corruption, noting that the document will facilitate coordinated responses to financial crimes that span national boundaries. The two sides explored practical mechanisms for information sharing during the meeting, the authority reported, with an emphasis on cases involving illicit flows that undermine economic stability. Such collaboration builds directly on the convention’s call for international partnerships to address corruption at its source rather than in isolation.
This memorandum extends Nazaha’s established practice of concluding bilateral agreements with counterpart agencies, including a 2022 pact with Kuwait’s anti-corruption body that similarly targeted prevention, enforcement and information exchange, according to records published in the official Umm Al-Qura gazette. The authority has concluded multiple such instruments in recent years to strengthen its ability to trace assets and coordinate investigations beyond Saudi borders. Senegal’s dedicated office, created to confront fraud and corruption domestically, will now have a formal channel for accessing Saudi technical knowledge accumulated since Nazaha began operations more than a decade ago.
According to coverage of the signing by Al Arabiya, the agreement explicitly covers joint efforts to confront cross-border crimes linked to corruption cases while supporting broader goals of safeguarding integrity and embedding principles of transparency. Al-Khamous and Kah reviewed potential areas for future training programs and workshops that could equip officials from both agencies with updated methodologies, the report added. The memorandum stops short of creating new legal obligations for extradition but prioritizes preventive cooperation and data exchange within existing national laws.
Nazaha stated that implementation details will be developed jointly in the coming months, with initial focus on establishing secure communication protocols for sensitive case information. The authority has previously noted in annual summaries that international partnerships have enabled successful asset recoveries in multiple jurisdictions, although it provided no Senegal-specific figures for this agreement. Officials from both delegations described the signing as a concrete step toward aligning their respective anti-graft architectures with global benchmarks.
The pact arrives as Saudi Arabia continues to expand its network of anti-corruption memorandums across Africa and the Middle East, a pattern documented in successive Nazaha performance reports. For its part, Senegal has pursued institutional reforms to its anti-fraud apparatus amid wider economic modernization drives, creating a natural alignment with Saudi initiatives under the United Nations framework. Neither the authority nor Senegalese officials released projected timelines for the first joint activities under the new memorandum.
