Ugandan investigators have arrested the country’s Accountant General and eight senior officials for a heist in which US$16mn was stolen from the Bank of Uganda (BoU) in September 2024.
Accountant General Lawrence Semakula and several officials in his office are the most high profile among those arrested.The US$16mn was meant to repay loans to the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank, but was instead diverted to accounts in Japan and the United Kingdom.In early January, Uganda’s legislature forwarded an audit of the heist by the country’s Auditor-General to the Criminal Investigations Department for action.
“The arrests follow a detailed information systems audit report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) revealing that computer experts and accountants manipulated the government’s digital transaction portal,” the country’s police spokesperson Kituuma Rusoke said on Tuesday.
“These fraud incidents were initiated outside the BoU IT systems to divert the funds,” Dr. Atingi-Ego, who serves as Deputy Governor and Acting Governor of the BOU, said in early December.
BoU, which initially locked horns with the Ministry of Finance over the heist and subsequent audit, has since said that it has recovered US$ 8.2 million of the stolen funds. The money was recovered from MJS International, a London-based entity that received US$ 8.596 million meant to repay the AfDB.
The heist and the complicated audit trails exemplify the many loopholes in the modern central banking system, and the technology meant to boost accountability and prevent fraud. At a technical level, the country’s central accounting system’s, IFMS, failsafes all failed to detect the heist in good time.