County government officials suspected of stealing and stashing cash offshore forced the Kenyan investigative agencies to seek foreign assistance
in recovering the loot.
A report on Kenya’s fight against illicit financing disclosed that the government made at least three requests for mutual legal assistance (MLA) from foreign governments in a bid to recover funds suspected to have been stolen from the devolved units.
The increase in the number of requests points to how counties are increasingly turning into a corruption flashpoint with perpetrators hiding the stolen funds in off-shore accounts.
All the requests were made by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) with the largest cases involving the alleged diversion of some Sh213.3 million from the accounts of one of the 47 counties.
The report did not name the specific counties or the county executives under investigation.
The EACC in November 2020 requested legal assistance from the US authorities.
“The EACC requested legal assistance to obtain evidence of corrupt diversion of Sh213,327,300 from the accounts of a county government, using a fraudulent procurement scheme,” reads the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group (ESAAMLG) that monitors how the region is tracing dirty cash.
No information had been provided by the US, according to ESAAMLG.
The EACC also requested legal assistance from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to obtain evidence that a public officer imported and registered a private vehicle but paid for it using diverted county funds.
In this case, as well, no information has been provided.
In May 2020, there was another mutual legal assistance request touching on suspected embezzlement by a county official.
Siphoning funds
“Authorities requested legal assistance to investigate and obtain evidence that a county official had been siphoning or stealing county funds from 2013– 2017,” reads the report that covering between 2017 and 2021.
An official at the EACC, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they have had several success stories from the mutual legal assistance steps.
Since counties were born in 2013, the EACC opened more regional offices to bolster the war on economic crimes in the devolved units.
Several former governors are facing corruption charges instituted by the EACC.
According to government statistics, between 2017 and 2021, Kenya made 145 requests to the UK, US, China, Hong Kong, Italy, Jersey, Malaysia, Mauritius, Turkey, Poland and Switzerland.
The report notes that Kenya received a suspect Sh72.2 billion in cash in the four years.
The agency has now asked the Kenyan government to strengthen its strategy in the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing or risk being grey-listed, a decision that would hurt the standing of Nairobi as the financial centre of the region.
