Contract scandal: Kenyan finance minister to be charged over graft allegations- prosecutor
Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich
The Director of Public Prosecutions Noordin Haji has ordered the arrest of Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich among other top government officials over the multibillion-shilling Arror and Kimwarer dams scandal.
Top government officials are said to have bent the rules, and misled the public about the state of national finances, in order to award the tender to the bankrupt Italian firm CMC Di Ravenna.
The company was to finance the Arror and Kimwarer dams project but the Kerio Valley Development Authority (KVDA) and the National Treasury went ahead to spend Sh20.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on the ghost projects.
Kenya’s chief prosecutor said on Monday that the finance minister will be arrested and charged over allegations of corruption related to the construction of the two dams.
The auditor general says his reports on corruption are routinely ignored. A previous auditor general said up to a third of the budget was unaccounted for.
The charges against Henry Rotich stem from a police investigation into the misuse of funds in a dam project overseen by the Italian construction company CMC Di Ravenna. Rotich denied any wrongdoing in a large newspaper advertisement in March. The company has also denied any wrongdoing.
“They broke the law on public finance management,” Noordin Haji, the director of public prosecutions, told a news conference.
The indictment of Rotich is likely to send shock waves through the Kenyan political elite, who are accustomed to lurid graft scandals resulting in little official action.