The bank is supposed to be the most important financial intermediary in the economy because it connects surplus and deficit economic agents and hence playing an important role in the growth of an economy.
However, of recent Ugandan banks have proved to be a den of thugs that not only grab their clients’ properties but share their accounts details with unscrupulous people to rob them.
Last week while addressing the media, the Inspector General of Police Gen. Kale Kayihura noted that there is a big racket of mafias that have infiltrated Uganda’s security and intelligence agencies and commit refined crimes including financial fraud.
According to Gen. Kayihura, the racket connives with bank employees and target majorly accounts owned by foreigners and rob them.
Last year, the Eritrean national Daniel Weldu Okbamichael who had accounts in four local banks with savings balance amounting to over Shs7 billion was kidnapped on October 27, 2016 by the alleged mafia racket and forced to sign off cheques to them before he was shot and his body dumped at a farm in Busia, Kenya.
Stanbic Bank and EcoBank are implicated in the robbery of Okbamichael, now Stanbic’s Ruth Okullo is under custody alongside her husband UPDF Captain Hakim Mangeni and another suspect, Christopher Kusera.
Although the core activities of the three suspects are not known, preliminary research suggests that Weldo contacted them in their quest for a visa to Germany.
TheUgandan investigations show that the there is indeed a systematized plan of executing these robberies and it involves lawyers, some people in the security circles and bank officials. The Eritrean’s encounter with an organized syndicate put their lives in danger.
“Lawyers in this city have become real thieves and unfortunately their clients open up too much especially foreigners who seek legal aid to help them carry out their operations in the country legally but their counsels instead abuse their clients’ trust and connive with unscrupulous people in security and banking institutions and end up robbing them,” an operative in the Uganda Police flying squad that preferred anonymity told TheUgandan.
Indeed, the Police arrested billionaire city lawyer Benon Duncan Lumu who is reportedly a serial draftsman in account hackings in the country and over the years has reportedly hacked into various accounts and made off with billions.
How Police arrested the mafias
Police spokesman Andrew Felix Kaweesi said that the Eritrean Weldo, 32, had moved to Kampala because of the unstable situation in southern Sudan, where he ran businesses. Until his kidnapping and eventual killing, he had saved up to 2 million euros in an account here.
“Since October 2016 police mounted serious overt and covert operations to recover him alive. Sadly, this was not the case. When he was kidnapped, he was taken and killed in Kenya in Busia district Kenya. His body was dumped in a swamp. And when we arrested one of the suspects, he brought us to where the body had been dumped. We have so far arrested three people. ”
Kaweesi says that previous investigations uncovered the syndicate involving the two banks so far and their people who could have connived to eliminate businessman to obtain his savings.
He added that the trio had accomplices in the banks that they worked in the hope that there will be no claimant to the money when the owner is eliminated.
Kaweesi says it’s not the first time; It is an attempt on the life and economy of a foreigner of the two banks and suspects.
The police is busy investigated two other banks where the late also had accounts.
Killer secretly released
After Police following a complaint from Eritrean diplomats and got a printout of the murdered man’s telephone and other leads and thereafter arrested Ms Katuramu and the UPDF officers but unconfirmed reports say that with intervention of top officers in security agencies, she was secretly released from Nalufenya on Friday 23rd November 2016 in the night.
The mafia syndicate is deeply entrenched in Uganda Bankers Association (UBA) as well according to sources. The powerful body has since never come out to explain how financial institutions in the country were safeguarding customers’ money in light of the unsettling revelations by Gen Kayihura.
This could explain why the frauds have been protected by UBA to the extent that over hundred billion Shillings have been through fraudulent transactions from as near as 2013.
