KAMPALA – The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has ordered Judiciary to table all reconciled bank statements of all activities undertaken in the 2016/17 and 2017/18 financial years after more rot was discovered on the institution’s expenditure.
The directive followed the failure of the Judiciary to furnish Parliament with all the UGX32Bn accountability under the watch of embattled former Secretary to Judiciary, Kagole Kivumbi who had told lawmakers that most of the money was sent to courts and judges to undertake their judicial work.
However, MPs were left furious when the Judiciary Officials led by the current Secretary to Judiciary, Pius Bigirimana showed up for another meeting without the documents prompting the Committee to demand for the bank statements to establish the facts around the expenditure.
Although Bigirimana promised to avail the documents, he declined to take the blame, asking the Committee to summon his predecessor to answer for his sins noting, “I want to request that since these people are still alive and they are there, you could invite them here to come and answer those questions. I can’t be responsible for that because I don’t know. What I can do is to get the details from the Chief Registrar of those courts that have not submitted those bank statements and give them a time frame. If they don’t submit them in that time frame I will sanction them.”
Pac Chairperson, Nandala Mafabi issued a four-day ultimatum to the Judiciary to produce the bank statements saying, “We are giving you up to Friday. We need all the bank statements and reconciliation. What you submitted are some bank statements again with missing reconciliation.”
Speaking to journalists after the meeting, Mafabi explained that the accountability the accounting officer gave to the Committee doesn’t match the figures.
He explained, the Judiciary said some of the money was given to courts and there is need for the Committee wants to know if these courts received the money adding, “We have agreed that we summon the former accounting officer to answer for his misdeed of actions. There is a mischarge of Shs34Bn. We need bank statements for all courts for 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 because there was a lot of money transferred to all these courts and if the money taken was doing the right thing. Our question is, how was reconciliation being done because before you give somebody more money, they should account for the first money. The money we are looking at is about Shs38Bn.”
