Former cabinet ministers Basil Mramba and Daniel Yona have been set free, six months after they were sentenced to three years in jail for abuse of office.
Dar es Salaam. Former cabinet ministers Basil Mramba and Daniel Yona have been set free, six months after they were sentenced to three years in jail for abuse of office.
However, the Kisutu Resident Magistrate’s Court in Dar es Salaam ordered the two to do community service while serving a suspended sentence for the remaining two years of their jail term .
Mr Mramba, 76, and Yona, 77, were in July last year found guilty of abuse of office and causing a loss of Sh11.7 billion (around $5.3 million) to the government.
In his ruling yesterday, Magistrate In-charge Cyprian Mkeha said they would now serve the remaining two years cleaning up at Palestine Hospital in Sinza, in Dar es Salaam.
They will be doing community work from Monday to Friday, starting 10am onwards. This will be their routine until November 5, this year, when their sentence ends.
The decision to adjust the jail term from imprisonment to suspended sentence was reached by the court following an application from the Prisons Department that the duo qualified for a suspended sentence.
The application by the Prisons Department was made on December 5, 2015 under section 3 (1) of the 2002 Community Service Act.
The law provides that any person who has been convicted and jailed for less than three years or fined could be granted suspended sentence by the court.
Qualifications for a suspended sentence include old age, having a family to look after, and if the offence was committed for the first time and the convicts repented.
Another qualification is if the convicts are ready to participate in community service.
After the application was filed, the court submitted it to the Social Welfare Department to ascertain whether the duo qualified for the suspended sentence.
However, the suspended sentence will be effected after the Prisons Department completes its legal procedures.
On the judgment day last year, the court acquitted a former permanent secretary with the Treasury, Gray Mgonja, who was charged alongside the two for what the judges said was lack of evidence.
Immediately after the sentence, lawyers of the former ministers — Mr Peter Swai and Eliasa Msuya — said they would challenge the decision in the High Court.
Mramba and Yona, who served as Finance and Energy and Mineral ministers, respectively, in former president Benjamin Mkapa’s administration, were first arraigned in November 2008 alongside Mr Mgonja, and charged with 11 counts of abuse of office and occasioning loss to the government.
They were accused of granting tax exemption to UK-based Alex Stewart International, a company that was controversially hired to audit gold in Tanzania in 2003.
The deal saw the company receiving a whopping $50 million (about Sh65 billion) in gold audit fees paid at an average of S h1.3 billion per month from June 2003 to August, 2007. The company completed the assignment and left the country in August, 2007.
Two of the three-member-panel that heard the case—Judge Sam Rumanyika and Mr Saul Kinemela, a senior official in the Labour Commission, said the prosecution proved their case “beyond all reasonable doubt.”
They rejected the defence given by the former ministers that the then President Benjamin Mkapa had authorised the hiring of the gold assayers firm.
They said there was no sufficient evidence that the former Head of State had directed urgent procurement of the Alex Steward Assayers without following the necessary procedure.
They further said the government notices granted by Mramba for tax exceptions were arbitrarily issued in total disregard of an advice by the Attorney General and officers from the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA), leading to pecuniary loss.
The chairman of the panel read the judgment, which disagreed with the finding of the two other members. He differed in evaluation of evidence that led to the conviction of the two.
The court convicted Mr Mramba in all the 11 counts he faced, and handed him three years in jail for each count. However, the sentences run concurrently, meaning he was to serve only three years.
The court found Mr Yona guilty of five counts and sentenced him to serve three years in jail for each count. His terms, like those of his fellow ex-minister, also run concurrently.
