President Peter Mutharika Tuesday lambasted Commissioners of the Malawi Electoral Commission (Mec) over reported financial mismanagement at the electoral body.<\/p>\n
A special investigative audit into Mec in October 2015 revealed gross financial mismanagement and flouting of procurement and recruitment procedures at the institution which took place between July 2012 and December 2014.<\/p>\n
Speaking at State House when the Commissioners called on him to formally present the 2014 Tripartite Elections report, Mutharika expressed shock and annoyance over the reported mismanagement.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very concerned and disturbed with those reports because such things will erode the Commission\u2019s credibility. People who manage elections should at all cost avoid having doubtful credibility. People must have total faith in Mec, but when such things crop up you tend to lose people\u2019s trust which is very bad,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But speaking after meeting the President, Mec Chairperson Justice Maxon Mbendera dismissed the allegations and said Mutharika was simply going by what people have been saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cI must put it here and now that it\u2019s not true. The audit was leaked to a South African whom we believe is a Malawian using a pseudo name. How an audit report would have been leaked before it was even presented to us, we don\u2019t know,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
However, Mbendera confirmed that the allegations have put the Commission in a tight corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not having the troubles in giving responses and we didn\u2019t see any change in the heart of government or the auditors relating to whether our responses are adequate for purposes of answering the allegations. We have now put our responses on the website and we accounted for every allegation made against us,\u201d Mbendera said.<\/p>\n
He also trashed reports that he bought a Mec vehicle at an under-valued price of K1.4 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can check at our regional office and you will find the vehicle being referred to, parked there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A summary of the audit findings which were conducted by the Central Internal Audit Unit of the Ministry of Finance indicates that Mec had poor financial management controls and that the Commission procured and spent resources outside its budget; recruited staff without following procedures; made procurements without following regulations and disposed of 26 vehicles in a non-procedural manner.<\/p>\n
The findings also show that the Commission made bank transfers amounting to K118, 667,404.44 to some unknown accounts; and paid out K15,422,756 in external travel allowances to Commissioners and senior officers for trips that were not undertaken.<\/p>\n
Further findings included personal loans paid from operation accounts without evidence of repayment, amounting t o K39,922,286.00 which were reportedly paid to Commissioners and other senior managers at the Mec secretariat.<\/p>\n
In 2010, the then president Bingu wa Mutharika closed Mec due to similar audit failures totalling K1.4 billion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Peter Mutharika Tuesday lambasted Commissioners of the Malawi Electoral Commission (Mec) over reported financial mismanagement at the electoral body. A special investigative audit into Mec in October 2015 revealed gross financial mismanagement and flouting of procurement and recruitment procedures at the institution which took place between July 2012 and December 2014. Speaking at State […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16371,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16368\/revisions\/16371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}