[ 2014-11-18 ]

From left: IEBC chairman Issack Hassan, suspended IEBC chief executive James Oswago and Energy Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir

UK court exposes corruption ring at Kenya poll agency
Kenya’s election officials pocketed millions of
shillings in bribes to award lucrative printing
contracts to a UK company over a two-year period,
prosecution documents filed in a London court
show.

In a legal battle that has left in its wake one of
the best-documented cases of an international
corruption network in Kenya’s history, the UK
prosecutors have filed in court loads of written
evidence implicating senior election officials in
the corruption ring, including Independent
Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)
chairman Issack Hassan.

Court documents show that the Kenyan taxpayer paid
dearly for the illicit dealings between senior
Smith & Ouzman (S&O) officials and the senior
managers and commissioners in the defunct Interim
Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), putting
to shame Kenyan prosecutors and the
anti-corruption agency officials who have yet to
nail anyone for the offences.

“The scale of the corruption alleged by the
prosecution is worth £349,057.39 (Sh50 million)
in Kenya,” prosecutor Mark Bryant-Heron says in
court filings.

For many of the printing contracts, costs were
inflated by up to 38 per cent mainly to cater for
the kickbacks — commonly referred to in the mail
as "chicken" — to senior election officials, the
UK prosecutors say.

The prosecutors say “the corrupt payments were
built into S&O’s pricing of the printed
materials so that the inflation in the price as a
result of that corruption was passed onto those
funding the institutions that contracted with
S&O”.

Forensic investigations by the UK’s Serious
Fraud Office (SFO) show that top officials at the
IIEC, the predecessor of IEBC, variously asked for
bribes, code-named "chicken", to facilitate
S&O’s winning of seven tenders to supply
election materials such as ballot papers, voter
registration forms, voter ID cards and nomination
forms.

Energy Cabinet Secretary Davis Chirchir, who
worked as a senior manager at the IIEC, tops the
list of senior government officials named in the
corruption racket.

The list includes suspended IEBC chief executive
James Oswago, former Judiciary registrar Gladys
Boss Shollei (deputy CEO), lawyer Kennedy Nyaundi
(commissioner), Kenneth Karani (senior procurement
officer) and the finance director.

Source -

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