Kampala, Uganda – Uganda’s top accountant and eight senior finance ministry officials were arrested Tuesday over the theft of nearly $16 million intended to repay loans to the World Bank and African Development Bank, police said.
The East African country’s Accountant General Lawrence Semakula was among the nine officials taken into custody following an investigation into the fraudulent diversion of $15.7 million from the Bank of Uganda, police spokesman Kituuma Rusoke told AFP.
“They will appear in court once investigations have been concluded,” he added.
Late last year, the Bank of Uganda’s deputy governor Michael Atingi-Ego revealed that two lots of funds had been suspiciously diverted elsewhere.
More than $6 million which had been allocated to pay off a loan to the World Bank was diverted to a Japanese entity in mid-September.
A couple of weeks later, $8.5 million intended for the African Development Bank was diverted to a UK account.
At the time, Atingi-Ego said the fraud came from outside of the Bank of Uganda, telling media that “instructions were received to pay the wrong beneficiaries, leading to the diversion of the funds”.
He also denied that the fraudsters had hacked into the bank’s IT system.
The police then started investigating the transfers.
© Agence France-Presse
