As the Parliamentary probe committee to explain their role in the Shs6b oil cash bonanza continues to unearth shocking revelations, President Yoweri Museveni is said to have received the interim report of the investigations possible existence of deep-rooted corruption within the Doris Akol-led Uganda Revenue Authority with an order for the arrest of all indicted persons in the scam.
According to reliable State House sources, a middle-level URA manager (names withheld), overseeing the customs at one of the borders was recently exposed to be stinking rich, something that left President Museveni in utter shock.
Unearthed by Namanve-based investigative journalist John Sserwaniko, the officer who has been on the watchlist of State House’s freshly reinstated Economic Monitoring desk. The body’s operatives got a tip from disgruntled URA colleagues that the young man had just hit a jackpot.
They further revealed to the operatives that there was a wider ring of officers close to Ms Akol who are engaged in grand corruption tendencies which made Museveni’s spies become interested. They trailed the young man’s banking activities in one of Kampala’s commercial banks. They were shocked to find that only a few days earlier, the young man with a modest salary had accumulated a whooping Shs8.5 billion on his bank account.
The State House Economic Monitoring desk spies included this in their daily report to Museveni for that fateful day. As Museveni perused through the brief, he was shocked to the marrow when he found such colossal sums of money being deposited on the young man’s account.
Sources say Museveni ordered for the young man to be brought before him for interrogation because he feared asking his security agencies to take up up the matter as they are known to be easily bribed and when the URA officer was taken to Entebbe, he could not answer the President’s questions about where he got all that money from.
An insider said; “He (Museveni) kept asking him how did you get this money? What did you sell to get someone to deposit so much money on your account?
It is said that the President’s assessment and conclusion was a bribe from one of the big tax evaders in the manufacturing sector. He was also shocked about how the URA top bosses were availed with the same information about showing existence of untouchables in the manufacturing sector dodging taxes but no action was being taken.
Museveni was told the young man, like many others at URA, was able t successfully deposit his lot because of connivance with top commercial banks’ managers who are famously involved in this syndicate.
At this point, sources say, Museveni was very disappointed with URA boss Doris Akl and her ineptness of not netting these dubious actors who he called ‘crooks‘.
He has decided to raise his URA graft-related grievances with his trusted Finance Minister Matia Kasaija to whom he subsequently wrote an angry letter on 17th January 2017, calling for decisive action against the grand corruption in the government body the elderly minister supervises.
Museveni in the letter directs Kasaija to commission an international audit inquiry dating back to six years to establish the extent of non-compliance by some manufacturing companies especially in the steel and plastic sub-sectors were Uganda loses in excess of Shs300 billion in well-collaborated tax evasion schemes.
The angry letter was also copied to Ms Akol, Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, Trade minister Amelia Kyambadde, Secretary to Treasury Keith Muhakanizi and UMA board chairman Amos Nzeyi.
Museveni is said to have told Doris Akol to immediately show him how she intends to clean up or else juicy job and she has since been embroiled in crisis meetings soliciting for ideas how she can circumvent the scandal which was whistleblown by President Museveni himself.
John Sserwaniko can be reached at 0703 1664755
