Bribery lands Chinese citizens in prison

A STERN warning that Namibian courts view corruption as a serious crime that should be fought with tough measures was sent out by the Windhoek Magistrate’s Court on Friday, when two Chinese men who admitted they tried to bribe a police officer were each sent to prison for two years.

Considering the seriousness of the crime they admitted to committing, a sentence giving Chinese citizens Xu Siyong and Yang Huaifen the option of paying a fine to avoid going to jail would trivialise their offence, magistrate Vanessa Stanley remarked before telling the two men they were each sentenced to a two-year jail term.

Xu (55) and Yang (53) were sentenced a week after they admitted guilt on a charge of bribery.

They admitted that they offered a bribe of N$4 000 to a Namibian Police inspector on 5 September in an attempt to stop the investigation of a case in which Yang is suspected of money laundering involving an amount of N$1 million.

Both men were employed as managers at the Chinese-owned construction company New Era Investment, which built the new head office of the Namibian Police in Windhoek.

Xu and Yang were released on bail of N$30 000 each with their first court appearance on 7 September, when they also admitted guilt on a charge of corruptly offering gratification to an agent as an inducement, which is an offence in terms of the Anti-Corruption Act.

The two men “displayed some accountability by pleading guilty and opting not to test our justice system and every piece of evidence, as so often happens”, the magistrate said during the sentencing.

“Bribery is an age-old offence, which has been regarded as morally repugnant for a long time,” she remarked. She added that by offering a bribe to a police officer in a bid to have an investigation stopped, the two accused showed that to them, money was a tool to buy corruption, and that they made themselves guilty of corruption.

The sentence imposed on Xu and Yang had to send a message to honest people that society will not tolerate dishonesty, she also said.

Xu and Yang should realise that bribery and corruption were serious offences, and that Namibian courts were not lenient when it came to such crimes, magistrate Stanley said.

The two men’s defence lawyer, Mbanga Siyomunji, suggested to the magistrate during a pre-sentence hearing on Wednesday that they should be sentenced to a fine of N$10 000 each. Public prosecutor Marcus Angula suggested a fine of N$50 000, or a period of four years’ imprisonment for each of the accused.

His clients will be appealing against their sentences, Siyomunji said on Friday. “The sentence induces a sense of shock,” he said.

Magistrate Stanley also ordered that the N$4 000 offered to the police officer as a bribe be forfeited to the state.

The investigation that Yang tried to stop originated from his arrest at the Hosea Kutako International Airport on 30 September 2015, when he allegedly tried to take US$610 252 (then the equivalent of about N$8,4 million) out of Namibia without having declared the foreign currency in his possession to customs officials at the airport.

Yang was charged with failing to declare foreign currency in his possession. During a trial in the Windhoek Regional Court, he claimed he had only US$45 720 (about N$634 000), which he said he obtained through an authorised foreign exchange dealer, in his possession at the airport.

Yang was acquitted on that charge in February this year, after the presiding magistrate found he had not been asked if he had any foreign currency to declare before he was searched and the money was found.

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