The High Court has set May 8 to decide whether former minister of Finance Joseph Mwanamvekha should be part of the accused persons in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) misreporting case.
In the matter, some former Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM) officials are accused of giving wrong information to the IMF to create an impression that Malawi Government was meeting conditions for the $108 million Extended Credit Facility (ECF) that was in effect at the time.
Mwanamvekha was discharged from the case in January 2024 after he made an application on grounds that he was not minister of Finance when the misreporting occurred and that the State had no evidence against him.
However, the State in August 2024 made an application for Mwanamvekha to be brought back into the case.
On the other hand, the court dismissed an application by former RBM governor Dalitso Kabambe to stay proceedings of the case on the basis that other board members were not included.
The court was yesterday expected to rule on the matter and the suspects were also supposed to take plea, but the defence sought an adjournment, citing a number of issues, including applications that are challenging charges that the court needed to look into.
The court granted the request for adjournment and set May 8 2025 to rule on whether Mwanamvekha should be brought back into the case.
In an interview, hired prosecutor Kamudoni Nyasulu said the State wants Mwanamvekha brought back because he was allegedly part of the misreporting.
He said: “Initially, he was discharged because there was a mistaken belief that at the time the things were happening he was not a minister of Finance, but the documents show that he was already a minister because the case now is from 2018 to September 2020, and he was minister during that period.”
On the Kabambe application for stay based on the exclusion of some board members, Nyasulu said the State could only arrest people that it has evidence of involvement in the alleged crime.
Mwanamvekha’s lawyer Kalekeni Kaphale, a former Attorney General, said the defence made its submission objecting to having Mwanamvekha brought back in the case, but could not give details of the submissions, as they will be discussed when the court makes the ruling.
“Whichever way the ruling goes, the defence is ready to take to the stand and vindicate the accused persons,” said Kaphale.
In the case, which is being heard by Judge Redson Kapindu, Mwanamvekha, Kabambe, former RBM deputy governor Henry Mathanga and former secretary to the Treasury Cliff Chiunda are accused of conspiring with two others to expend public funds amounting to $350 million without Parliament authorisation.
The accused are also answering a charge of making misleading statements. Kabambe, Mathanga and Mwanamvekha are accused of knowingly omitting material information from RBM’s annual reports and submissions to IMF, in the process concealing from the IMF the existence of a $350 million facility that was obtained from the African Export and Import Bank (the Afrexim Bank).
Further, Kabambe, Mathanga, Mwanamvekha and Chiunda are also facing a charge of money laundering. The four are suspected of possessing and dealing with public funds knowing that the said funds were derived from an unlawful source, in the sense that they were funds that had been obtained from the Afrexim Bank without Parliamentary approval.
