The High Court in Lilongwe has given Cashgate suspect Alexander Kauwa Banda one last chance to appear for trial or else the court will commence trial on Kauwa separately.<\/p>\n
Kauwa and five others \u2013 including the former Malawi Defence Force commander Henry Odillo- are answering charges relating to arranging a contract with Thuso Group to supply military equipment, which was never delivered.<\/p>\n
Last week the state through its Prosecutor, Kamudoni Nyasulu, applied that Kauwa be tried separately from the other suspects to avoid delaying proceedings further.<\/p>\n
But in his ruling yesterday, Judge Edson Kapindu said even though the suspect is a resident of South Africa it is paramount that the case should progress in the court.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s clear that if the court forms opinion that the matter be brought before it has not been committed to the lower court, the court has discretion on matters of criminal proceedings and under special circumstances the court can depart from such, I thus put a waiver and the matter shall proceeded and tried by the court,\u201d he told the court.<\/p>\n
The judge also stressed that if the suspect will not attend trial on a date to be fixed by the court, the court will not hesitate but proceed to entertain the application by the state on trying the suspect separately.<\/p>\n
The suspect is said to have absconded court appearance for three times now on April 4 and May 27 as well as yesterday, and according to the court, no valid reasons were provided by his counsel on his absence.<\/p>\n
The court has also softened bail conditions for all the suspects as now they will be reporting to police once every three months and the first accused Odillo will from now onwards be reporting to Anti- Corruption Bureau (ACB) offices and not police.<\/p>\n
The state is keeping under wraps the money involved in the case but a document we have seen shows money totalling about K2.3 billion paid to Thuso Group, which is owned by Kauwa Banda. The payments include R30, million (about K1.4 billion) and K929.7 million.<\/p>\n
Apart from Odillo and Kauwa Banda, other suspects in the matter are retired Lieutenant General Clement Kafuwa, Nelson Kauwa Banda, Ganizani Kuchombo and former Accountant General David Kandoje.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The High Court in Lilongwe has given Cashgate suspect Alexander Kauwa Banda one last chance to appear for trial or else the court will commence trial on Kauwa separately. Kauwa and five others \u2013 including the former Malawi Defence Force commander Henry Odillo- are answering charges relating to arranging a contract with Thuso Group to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27516","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\/27516","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=27516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27520,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27516\/revisions\/27520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}