The United States said Tuesday it would ban the entry of two former government ministers from Namibia whose alleged acceptance of bribes caused a political uproar in 2019.
The State Department said that former fisheries minister Bernhard Esau and former justice minister Sacky Shanghala - as well as their immediate family members - would not be allowed into the United States.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said:
The two ministers resigned and were arrested in 2019 on allegations that they accepted $10 million in bribes from one of Iceland's biggest fishing firms, Samherji, in return for awarding quotas on horse mackerel from the sparsely populated southwest African nation.
The scandal, triggered by the publication of documents by WikiLeaks, came shortly before elections in which President Hage Geingob won another term but with a sharply reduced majority.
President Joe Biden earlier this month ordered a review on how better to fight corruption globally, calling the issue a national security interest of the United States as graft "rots democracy from the inside" and boosts authoritarians.