The slow pace at which the K236 billion Cashgate case is being investigated by the
\nNational Audit Office (NAO) has been described by the Malawi Economic Justice Network (Mejn) as a recipe for corruption.
\nMejn Executive Director, Dalitso Kubalasa, said delays in such audits encourage corruption, adding that audits should not be conducted just for the sake of it but to produce tangible results.
\n\u201cThe first question should be why we are conducting the audit. Audits should not be done just to be seen working or to make people forget the thefts. The money which was allegedly stolen belongs to Malawians and the audit must be finalised so that people should know what happened to their money,\u201d he said.
\nKubalasa said it is painful that some of the money were loans which will be inherited by posterity.
\nHe said if the report from NAO is released on time, it will help the country to recover the money.
\nInitially, the amount was pegged at K577 billion but the NAO\u2019s initial report reduced the figure to K236 billion. Probe into the Cashgate earlier stalled when NAO claimed that it had money until the UK government released K500 million for the investigations.
\nVice Chairperson of Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, Kamlepo Kalua, drew the wrath of President Peter Mutharika when he insisted on several occasions that seven Cabinet ministers were involved in the looting of the funds.
\nNAO spokesperson, Rabson Kagwamminga, said they expected to finish the investigations by November last year but they missed the deadline because the work involved several offices.
\n\u201cThe investigations stalled last year because we did not have funds for the exercise. We only resumed in May when we got funds from DfID. We expected to
\nfinalise everything by November last year but it did not happen because the exercise involved several offices including banks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The slow pace at which the K236 billion Cashgate case is being investigated by the National Audit Office (NAO) has been described by the Malawi Economic Justice Network (Mejn) as a recipe for corruption. Mejn Executive Director, Dalitso Kubalasa, said delays in such audits encourage corruption, adding that audits should not be conducted just for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58790","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\/58790","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=58790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58794,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58790\/revisions\/58794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}