Malawi has jailed its first senior official for the so-called “Cashgate” affair – the worst financial scandal in the country’s history.<\/p>\n
A court in Lilongwe sentenced former tourism official Treza Senzani to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour.<\/p>\n
She pleaded guilty to stealing $150,000 (\u00a393,000) of government money.<\/p>\n
At least 70 people have been arrested over “Cashgate” after an audit revealed that about $30m had been skimmed from the government payment system.<\/p>\n
Businessmen and politicians are alleged to have connived with civil servants to make payments for goods and services that were never delivered.<\/p>\n
Western donor nations and agencies, which provide 40% of Malawi’s budget, pulled the plug on vital aid worth around $150m in reaction to the scandal.<\/p>\n
Allegations of the massive looting of government money became public following the shooting of the finance ministry’s then budget director Paul Mphwiyo in September 2013.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi has jailed its first senior official for the so-called “Cashgate” affair – the worst financial scandal in the country’s history. A court in Lilongwe sentenced former tourism official Treza Senzani to three years’ imprisonment with hard labour. She pleaded guilty to stealing $150,000 (\u00a393,000) of government money. At least 70 people have been arrested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":54460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-54458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}