Namugongo awaits judgement day

FORMER Ministry of Environment and Tourism official Sackey Namugongo should be acquitted on all of the corruption and fraud charges on which he has been standing trial, Namugongo’s defence lawyer argued in the Windhoek Regional Court yesterday.

The prosecution has not managed to prove any of the 20 counts of corruption and 20 fraud charges faced by Namugongo, defence lawyer Titus Mbaeva argued before Magistrate Sarel Jacobs when he and Deputy Prosecutor General Orben Sibeya addressed the magistrate on the judgement that is set to be delivered in Namugongo’s trial.Sibeya argued the opposite: that the prosecution has proven that Namugongo made himself guilty of corruption time and again when he allegedly received applications for gambling house licences from owners of gambling machines, accepted payments totalling N$332 500 from them, and issued the applicants with letters acknowledging receipt of their applications that he said they could use to start operating their gambling machines while waiting for proper licences to be issued to them.Magistrate Jacobs is scheduled to give his judgement in Namugongo’s trial on May 21.Namugongo, who was arrested and charged in mid-September 2006, pleaded not guilty to all charges when his trial started before Magistrate Jacobs on July 1 2008.He is accused of having corruptly received hundreds of thousands of Namibia dollars from people who wanted to apply for gambling house licences that would allow them to operate gambling machines in Namibia. It is alleged that Namugongo, who at the time was the Deputy Director of Gambling, Casinos and Lotteries in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, received the money from gambling house licence applicants from March to September 2006.This allegedly took place while a freeze on the issuing of such licences was in place. The moratorium has been in force since 1997.In the course of his trial, 17 of these alleged applicants told the court that they handed over supposed licence application fees to Namugongo either in cash, or by making deposits into his bank account. Namugongo pocketed a total of N$332 500 in this way, the court was told.In his own testimony Namugongo however denied having received most of these payments. He only admitted having received a total of N$43 000 from three of the applicants. This money, which was deposited into his bank account, was lent to him, Namugongo claimed.Sibeya told the magistrate in his arguments that Namugongo should be acquitted on two of the charges, since the State did not call the complainant in those charges to testify.On the remaining counts, Namugongo should be convicted on all of the remaining 19 corruption charges, Sibeya argued. Because those charges and the fraud charges relate to the same actions and intention, Namugongo should however be found not guilty on the fraud charges, he argued.Sibeya reminded the magistrate that when Namugongo testified, he claimed that the former Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Dr Malan Lindeque, and other officials had a hidden agenda to falsely implicate him and that he was a victim of circumstances because of his affiliation to Swapo. These claims were never put to Dr Lindeque or other officials from the Ministry when they testified earlier in the trial, and as a result Namugongo cannot now try to rely on such a defence, Sibeya said.On all of the charges where Namugongo is alleged to have received payments in cash, he offered a bare denial of the charge, Sibeya argued. He said that an analysis of Namugongo’s bank account statements however showed a correlation between the cash payments that the witnesses claimed to have made to him and large cash deposits that were made into his accounts at the same time.Mbaeva argued that the State failed to prove that the witnesses who claimed to have made payments to Namugongo actually had businesses in which they wanted to use gambling machines, or had the sort of income from which they could have been able to make such payments to him. Many of them were also single witnesses, since they claimed that they and Namugongo were alone when they handed money over to him, he said.These witnesses are not reliable, and the court should not rely on their evidence to convict Namugongo, Mbaeva argued.Namugongo remains free on bail until the case returns to court.