The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has burst the bubble that the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) had created to conceal gloss mismanagement of public funds meant for elections.
Following leaked audit reports that revealed MEC officials had misappropriated about 2 billion of public funds, the electoral body engaged mafia-style tactics from intimidation to manipulation to gag the media against reporting on the matter.
Through its spokesperson, MEC said the hundreds of millions which allegedly vanished into MEC workers’ individual pockets were not looted.
Rather, the Electoral Commission claimed that PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PwC) and KPMG, two of the world’s renowned auditing firms that carried out two separate forensic investigations, only failed to reconcile the hundreds of millions of public funds which remain untraceable to-date.
MEC had claimed that this was because the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) and the Malawi Fiscal Police had mishandled “relevant supporting documents” which they collected during investigations into the alleged misappropriation of funds at MEC.
But in an interview with Malawi24, ACB accused the Malawi electoral body of misleading the public.
“The Anti-Corruption Bureau returned all the documents which it collected from Malawi Electoral Commission. It is therefore not true that the Bureau mishandled the documents. The Bureau did not lose any of the documents”, spokesperson for the Bureau, Ms. Egrita Ndala told Malawi24.
The spokesperson further explained that “the Bureau records all the documents it collects and issues a receipt to the relevant person in the institution. It also does the same when returning the documents” suggesting that the auditing files MEC had claimed vanished did so within its premises just like the alleged millions which could have helped support the 20-May tripartite elections .
