Prosecutors Put 1.13 Billion Birr on a Forged Competency Certificate Scheme

Ethiopian prosecutors have charged a former senior official at the Ministry of Labour & Skills over a scheme they say produced fraudulent competency certificates and generated more than 1.13 billion birr, with hundreds of millions of that sum traced into Addis Abeba property and a luxury vehicle.

The charges

Birr Metrics reports that the charge sheet covers certificates issued to workers who had not been assessed, and that prosecutors have tracked proceeds into real estate in the capital and at least one vehicle purchase. A separate charge implicates a former official in the deployment of more than 64,000 workers to Jordan on forged visa documents.

The two counts describe the same pipeline from opposite ends. A competency certificate is the document that makes an Ethiopian worker legally placeable abroad; the visa is what gets them on the plane. If both were being manufactured, the paperwork that is supposed to protect a migrant worker was the product being sold.

The investigation is not finished

A court has granted police a further 11 days to investigate document fraud and corruption allegedly committed by ministry officials, Tikvah Ethiopia reported. Suspects named on that file are accused of sending more than 30,000 workers to Jordan on fake visas inside a six-month period, using bank accounts opened in false names.

Labour export is not a side industry. Remittances from workers in the Gulf and the Levant are one of the few reliably hard-currency flows into the Ethiopian economy, and the certificate regime is the state's only instrument for knowing who left, through which agency, and on what terms. A fraud at the certificate layer is also a data failure: the official count of Ethiopians working abroad rests on documents some of which were sold.

Open

The two counts carry different figures — 64,000 in the charge now before the court, 30,000 in the file police are still working — and neither prosecutors nor police have explained whether the periods overlap or the cases are separate. No defendant has been named publicly, and no plea has been reported. The Ministry of Labour & Skills has not said whether certificates issued through the implicated offices are being reviewed or revoked, which is the question facing any agency or employer holding one.

Sources: Birr Metrics, 21 October 2026 · Tikvah Ethiopia, 21 October 2026