Step up assets forfeiture, recovery in war on graft

What you need to know:

The perpetrators will always find a way of hiding the stolen funds, making it costly for the State agencies to investigate, trace and bring to book the culprits.
This calls for constant monitoring and scrutiny of public servants through regular lifestyle audits.
For businesses, the government should blacklist owners and their associates from participating in public procurement — including through proxies.

Assets seizures from individuals, especially public officers implicated in graft or are found with wealth they cannot account for, is proving to be an effective strategy in the war on corruption.

The latest case involves a former chief accountant of the Treasury linked to the Anglo Leasing corruption scandal who forfeited assets worth Sh80 million, including five cars, four apartments in Nairobi, a residential home and nine parcels of land in Machakos and Kajiado, to the State.

This is the first seizure of property linked to the Anglo Leasing scam, which involved the award of State contracts worth Sh70 billion to non-existent firms.

We applaud the efforts by the Assets Recovery Agency and Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) to pursue and recover looted public funds.

However, the two State agencies mandated to tame economic crimes should up their game to ensure substantial recoveries of assets suspected to have been acquired illegally.

For example, in 2015 the EACC recorded the worst asset recovery and forfeiture of only one out of every Sh25 worth of public assets that it set out to recover. The anti-graft agency seized assets worth Sh140.2 million fraudulently amassed by individuals out of a total of Sh3.86 billion put under investigation in the year to June 2015, translating to a dismal recovery rate of 3.6 per cent, the worst since its establishment in 2011 at the time.

The forfeiture of Sh80 million in assets from the former Treasury official out of the Sh70 billion lost in the Anglo Leasing scandal highlights the need to tighten the noose on the theft of public resources.

The State and the two agencies should work proactively to detect and deter economic crimes before they happen.

The perpetrators will always find a way of hiding the stolen funds, making it costly for the State agencies to investigate, trace and bring to book the culprits.

This calls for constant monitoring and scrutiny of public servants through regular lifestyle audits. For businesses, the government should blacklist owners and their associates from participating in public procurement — including through proxies.

The government should enforce the relevant laws to the letter. There should be no sacred cows in the war on corruption.