A Ugandan anti-corruption court has sentenced a government official to 40 years in prison and ordered him to pay $5.4 million in compensation for looting a donor-funded programme to help rebuild the country’s conflict-battered north.
Godfrey Kazinda was accused of embezzling $26.4 million from a scheme funded by the governments of Ireland, Sweden and Denmark to help northern Uganda recover from the ravages of a decades-long insurgency by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army, local media said.
A former Principal Accountant at the Office of the Prime Minister was jailed after being found guilty of “the offences of illicit enrichment, forgery, causing financial loss and conspiracy to commit felonies”, Justice Margaret Tibulya said, sentencing him to 40 years in jail.
“You are ordered to compensate the government to a tune of 19,171,476,505 shillings,” she added.
The government has now also seized Kazinda’s properties, including a 20-room mansion valued at one million dollars, as well as four luxury sports cars worth $218,000, court documents showed.
Kazinda used the proceeds to fund a life of luxury, living in a suite at the Sheraton Kampala for about 10 months at one point and travelling to high-end tourism destinations all over the world.
Police also found huge amounts of foreign currency stashed away while conducting a search of one of his Kampala properties, including GBP 200,000 ($273,700) in cash.
Corruption and the embezzlement of donor funds have been persistent problems in the eastern African country,
In 2013, a report found that none of the senior Ugandan government officials who had been implicated in the theft of €4 million of Irish Aid money in 2012 had been held to account for their actions.
The report, compile by Human Rights Watch and Yale Law School said that the theft of the Irish Aid money was just the latest in a long line of development aid corruption scandals, and that not a single high-level government official had gone to jail for their crimes over the years.
Entitled ‘Letting the Big Fish Swim: Failure to Prosecute High-Level Corruption in Uganda’, the report details how the country’s anti-corruption institutions faced political interference, harassment and threats.
Other scandals in Uganda included the diversion of $45 million from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2010, and the theft of $12 million from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations in 2006.
Ireland paused funding to Uganda in 2013, and the Ugandan government returned the Irish Aid money in the same year, after finding it was diverted by personnel in the Office of the Prime Minister.
Despite this, Irish Aid said that they committed to an aid budget of more than €100 million to Uganda in the most recent 5 year period. “The total investment by Ireland in Uganda is estimated to amount to over €100 million,” they reported.