National Youth Service Deputy Director General, Clare Chaddah Lwali in a court after she pleaded not guilty before Nairobi Anti-corruption on Tuesday November 15, 2016.
BY SAM ALFAN.
National Youth Service Deputy Director General, Clare Chaddah Lwali was ON Monday Morning charged before the Nairobi Anti-corruption.
Lwali appeared before senior principal Magistrate Lawrence Mugambi was charged with two counts of corruption related charges and pleaded not guilty to abuse of office and willful failure to comply with the law relating to procurement.
The court heard that she used her office as the NYS Deputy Director General to improperly confer a benefit to M/S Naro Moru River Lodge for provision of accommodation and conference facilities at sh 4.4 million.
The benefit was through a letter dated September 26, 2015 and was without the approval of the Ministerial Tender committee.
She was further accused of willfully failing to comply with the law relating to procurement by improperly conferring sh 4.4 million to the said hotel.
According to the charge sheet, the money was beyond the threshold limit contrary to section 26(3) (b) of the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2005.
Magistrate Mugambi released her on a bond of sh 1 million with one surety of a similar amount or a cash bail of sh 600,000.
Few hours later, Parliament expanded investigations into the theft of Sh1.6 billion NYS cash after fresh details indicated 17 more banks handled money for suppliers since 2013.
PAC chairman Nicholas Gumbo said at Parliament buildings on Tuesday that the committee will request the DCI and EACC to look into the transactions.
“More than 100 firms were involved in the NYS scam. The total number of banks involved was 28 but 11 have been already cleared,” he said.
The chairman said Equity, Diamond, Standard Chartered, I&M, Chase, Bank of Africa, Jamii Bora, Fidelity and Guarantee banks were among the financial institutions that received money.
“We will write to the DCI to know if they have investigated the banks’ involvement in the scandal,” he said, but noted they were at the tail end of investigations.
The PAC said it needs to question the companies and banks to establish if any impropriety was committed in their transactions.
“It is important to emphasis at this point that at the moment, because we have just received this information, while obvious impropriety is implied on the part of these banks at this stage, the same cannot be discounted for certain unless and until investigations are conducted to ascertain what business the companies did that received billions through the banks for the people of Kenya and whether value for money was realized,” said PAC Chairman Nicolas Gumbo.
This comes after the Financial Report Centre (FRC) at the beginning of this month reckoned that 15 of the country’s 41 banks raised 42 alerts over suspicious transactions relating to the NYS funds that were stolen through fictitious tenders
