Treasury secretary, Muhoro sucked into the NYS scam

The ongoing investigations into the National Youth Service (NYS) scam have taken a new turn as emerging details suck in Treasury Secretary Henry Rotich and CID director Ndegwa Muhoro.

Former deputy director general at the NYS Adan Harakhe on Wednesday said Ben Gethi, one of the architects of the scam, had volunteered to help resolve his password issues at the Treasury.

At the time his account had been hacked into and used to approve fraudulent payments of Sh695,400, 000 without his knowledge.

In his presentation before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Mr Harakhe said there had been numerous attempts from interested parties to block his reversal of the transaction.

“Mr Gethi gave me false and distorted information claiming that he was the point-man of Mr Rotich and that if I cooperated there was no day I would go dry,” he told the PAC.

Mr Gethi, he said, also introduced himself as a friend of Mr Muhoro’s who would help him (Mr Harakhe) survive in the city if he allowed the transactions to go on.

Mr Harakhe appeared before the committee to give a chronology of events leading up to the eventual reversal of the loss of public funds at the NYS.

READ: Agency seeks orders to seize assets in NYS cash theft

He told the PAC that efforts to have a cybercrime team from Treasury look into the hacking of his account were the genesis of his woes at the NYS.

Initial resistance, he said, came from former NYS Director General Nelson Githinji and former Principal Secretary Peter Mangiti who insisted that internal mechanisms had not been exhausted.

On May 25 2015, Mr Mangiti summoned Mr Harakhe to his office and introduced him to Mr Gethi whom he claimed would help in resolving the password hacking matter.

Prior to the introduction, the former PS is said to have confided that the payments were for companies which provided goods and services at Kibera during the slum upgrading projects.

The PAC established that most of the companies involved in the scam are linked to the former NYS director general and his family members are directors in some.

Mr Harakhe said the same companies had been used to defraud the NYS Sh 791 million long before he joined the NYS.