News

By Emmanuel Onyango

JUSTICE Minister Martha Karua has dismissed the findings of the Kroll report and instead poured scorn on developed countries for closing doors to efforts to freeze and recover billions of Kenya's taxpayers' money stashed abroad.

"There is nothing for me to talk about the Kroll report. It is not permissible for us to talk about issues that are with the investigator," Karua asserted yesterday. Minister Karua joins Attorney General Amos Wako in the growing list of government operatives distancing themselves from the report and its findings.

Internal Security Minister John Michuki was similarly quoted by in media reports yesterday as supportive of the amnesty to economic crimes committed by public officials who served in the past regime. The international report by risk advisers Kroll and Associates detailed how a corrupt network in the former regime looted approximately Sh130 billion and stashed it in overseas investments.

President Kibaki's administration has been sitting on the report for the last four years and was only made public in an anti-graft web site. A British newspaper subsequently published its details from where it was picked by the local media.

"It would not be possible to start excavation works for offences committed 10 to 15 years ago. The present and future is more important than the past," Karua told journalists, but hastened to add that the new amnesty would not be extended to perpetrators of the multi-billion Goldenberg scandal. Minister Karua accused developed economies of focusing their priorities on international terrorism and drug trafficking compared the lip-service they paid anti-corruption efforts in developing countries.

"The vigour with which suspected terrorists are pursued especially by the western world generally should be equal to the vigour that suspects of corruption in developing nations and their ill-gotten wealth are pursued," Karua said while addressing the Commonwealth Law Conference yesterday.

She added: "They seem to pay lip-service to it (Corruption) by concentrating more on assisting developing countries to set up laws and institutions to fight this vice." The Justice Minister equally indicted local lawyers and multi-national banks for staging vicious defence against disclosing the financial dealings of corrupt clients.