Namugongo trial postponed

THE corruption trial of former Ministry of Environment and Tourism official Sackey Namugongo is scheduled to return to the Windhoek Regional Court near the end of January next year.

Namugongo appeared before Regional Court Magistrate Sarel Jacobs again on Friday, three days after completing testimony in his own defence on the 20 counts of corruption, alternatively theft, and 20 charges of fraud, alternatively forgery and uttering, on which he is on trial.Namugongo (57), a former Deputy Director in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, pleaded not guilty to all the charges when his trial started on July 1 last year.With his appearance before Magistrate Jacobs on Friday, Namugongo’s defence lawyer, Titus Mbaeva, told the Magistrate that Namugongo is asking for a postponement of the case so that the record of the trial can be transcribed before Mbaeva and Deputy Prosecutor General Orben Sibeya address Magistrate Jacobs with their final arguments on the verdict that the Magistrate has to deliver.Namugongo is now scheduled to return to court on January 25.He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.Namugongo is accused of having solicited and accepted payments totalling over N$330 000 from people who wanted to apply with the Ministry of Environment and Tourism to be issued with gambling house licences. He allegedly received the payments from March to September 2006.At the time, a moratorium on the issuing of gambling house licences had already been in force since early 1997.Namugongo told the court that he received gambling house licence applications from gambling machine owners, and that he told them that once the moratorium was lifted, their applications would be processed. He however denied that he told them that they could use letters that he gave them to acknowledge receipt of their applications to start operating their gambling machines in the meantime.During the trial, 17 State witnesses testified that they submitted applications for gambling house licences to Namugongo and in the process also paid a total of N$332 500 in supposed licence fees to him.Of this total amount, N$43 000 was paid directly into a bank account of Namugongo’s, while the remaining N$289 500 was handed over to Namugongo in cash, the witnesses told the court.Namugongo denied having received any of the cash payments. He admitted having received the money that was paid into his bank account, but claimed that all of this was money that was lent to him – except for N$10 000, which he said he suspected was an attempt to bribe him and which he paid back to the person who had paid the money into his account. Other large deposits of cash into his bank account were the proceeds from other work he was doing in his free time, he claimed.In his testimony last week, Namugongo claimed he was actually a victim in the whole affair. He claimed he was targeted by his seniors in the Ministry because he was about to open a can of worms about fake gambling licences that had emanated from the Ministry.Namugongo was stumped, though, about a possible reason that could have prompted some of the witnesses, who he said were friends of his, to falsely implicate him in their testimony in court.Namugongo remains free on bail in the meantime.