By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has told to Politico that it has launched an investigation into the Sierra Leone Cable Network Limited (SALCAB). The Director of Public Education and External Outreach, Patrick Sandy said the investigation is looking into several issues all bordering on misappropriation of public funds.
“The commission has already instituted an investigation into the series of allegations against the Sierra Leone Cable Limited, and even before the allegations on social media, we had started a systems review into SALCAB and a huge work is going on,” Sandy said.
SALCAB is locked in a bitter turf war with its parent ministry - Ministry of Information and Communication. The Ministry has outlined a plan to unbundle the agency, thereby limiting the current function of some officials by outsourcing of them to a private company.
Information Minister, Mohamed Rahman Swarray, said in a press conference almost three weeks ago that the current model at SALCAB is not yielding much dividend for the country, hence the move for its unbundling.
A probe by Parliament into how the SALCAB unbundling decision was made was extremely heated and led to the sudden resignation of the Chairman of the Transparency and Accountability Committee, Ibrahim Tawa Conteh, who alleged that his decision was been influenced by the parliamentary leadership.
Reports on social media last week suggested that authorities at SALCAB were receiving thousands of dollars in funds from the ACE Consortium for hosting its cable landing station in the country.
The report also alleged that SALCAB annually pays up to US$300,000 to a media consulting firm for media and publicity.
SALCAB has since denied the claims, labeling them as “false” and “unfounded”.
In a press statement released on September 14th, SALCAB said: “ACE never pays any money into any consortium member’s local account for operation and maintenance expenses or any other activity. As a result, the allegations made on social media that certain members of SALCAB’s management team embezzled monies from ACE are totally false and unfounded as there is no money received from ACE from any consortium members.”
Sandy did not reveal specifics about the timeline of the investigation, noting that it was too early and that no arrests have been made.
A systems review into SALCAB, which started over three months ago, led to the ACC intervening to settle debts owed to SALCAB.
“This came in the wake of the systems review wherein we realized that there are institutions who are supposed to pay SALCAB. They haven’t paid them even though they have been benefiting from the service. As a commission, we believe it is part of our mandate to get involved so we called the debtors in a meeting and we made a payment plan,” Sandy said.
The meeting resulted in five of the debtors agreeing to a payment plan with the Preventions Department of the ACC to pay over Le5 billion in arrears.
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