By Alpha Abu
The Principal Legal Consultant in the Attorney General’s Office has told journalists that 85 people named in last year’s Commissions of Inquiry reports have appealed against the submissions by the three Judges who vetted their various roles during the previous All People’s Congress party administration from 2007-2018.
At the weekly press conference yesterday at the Ministry of Information and Communications in Freetown, Lahai Momoh Farma recognised the rights of the individuals to appeal but warned that losing one’s case would invoke not just swift execution of the COI recommendations but also the levying of further penalties.
That, he said, would include paying with interest monies that were to be turned in by those persons of interest as recommended in the COI Report.
The judges who sat on the Commissions had asked that those persons that were to pay back monies to the government do so within 30 days but that President Julius Maada Bio extended that to a 90-day period in the White Paper which elapsed on the 24 December 2020.
The whole process contained three implementing orders: confiscation, revocation or forfeiture of real assets. According to Farma they have exhausted 20 of those orders with summonses heard and 15 rulings delivered. He said the rulings are now being put in the form of orders for the Master and Registrar to sign, after which they will contact the Information Ministry for permission for government to gazette them. He said they were guided by law and dismissed the idea of prematurely and illegally revealing identities. “When that time comes to publish we will publish everything because there is going to be complete transparency about it”, he emphasised. He however hinted that the first completed work would focus on 20 houses and plots of land scattered all over the country that would be made public.
Farma disclosed that 136 will face refund orders after it was proven that they were culpable in the unlawful acquisition or misappropriation of funds. He sounded an alarm after revealing that such was the scale of amount involved that their computers were unable to interpret the figures and had to turn over the process of computing and collating the figures to the Accountant General’s Office, for them to present a transparent and credible statement to the people.
He indicated that key government accountability departments like the Anti-Corruption Commission and the Financial Intelligence Unit had played an integral role in seeking out and identifying monies lodged surreptitiously and said those who ignored all appeals to pay up before the December deadline, apart from other penalties, now risked the freezing of their bank accounts, an order which he then confirmed had begun.
Farma argued that they had all legal means at their disposal to recover monies stolen. Sounding a bit conciliatory he said: “These are our brothers, what we want is not themselves, it is the money.
Copyright © 2021 Politico Online
