NAIROBI, KENYA: Chief Justice Willy Mutunga has appointed a three-judge bench to hear case challenging the authenticity of Mombasa Governor Joho’s degree certificate.
The bench, comprising of Justices Christine Meoli (Presiding), Edward Muriithi and Martin Muya, will sit in Mombasa.
Last year, Mr Silas Otuke filed a case in the High Court claiming that the Constitution and the Elections Act had been violated.
Justice Muriithi in his May 14, 2014 ruling certified that the matter raised substantial constitutional questions of law that warrant consideration by a three-judge bench.
The east African nation came de at police in attempt t out worst in a list of nations across the continent examined by the watchdog group Global Financial Integrity (GFI), with nearly $19bn in illicit flows over the past decade, the equivalent to over 7 percent of its total government revenue.
“There’s a narrative in the development community that there’s something wrong with developing countries, because we keep pumping money in, and they’re not developing as quickly as we’d like them to,” GFI economist Brian LeBlanc said last week.
“The reality is that we’re draining money out, and we’re doing it at an increasing rate.”
The GFI’s examination of trade mis-invoicing reveals stark figures. Mis-invoicing occurs when businesses deliberately lie about the value of the goods they are importing or exporting. There are a lot of illegal reasons to do this, including tax evasion and money laundering.
GFI said trade mis-invoicing was a $424bn a year problem globally, and made up about 80 percent of all the money that flowed out of developing countries illegally.
Numbers like this, when compared with aid, mean there is far more money draining out of Africa than going in.
Much attention has been given to transfer pricing, when multinational companies employ accounting tricks to shift profits into countries where they will pay less tax.
