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Amama Mbabazi meeting lockout plot hatched

Saturday November 15 2014

Revelations last week that the state was investigating former prime minister Amama Mbabazi for fraud and money laundering appear to be part of a campaign to block the ruling party’s secretary-general from its much-anticipated national conference that is one month away.

Options open to President Yoweri Museveni, the party chairman, include raising a new delegates register by striking out Mr Mbabazi’s supposed supporters, an exercise that is ongoing, according to sources privy to these efforts.

Criminal charges could also be brought up to cow the secretary general into submission, or at the very least book him a date in the courts about the time of the conference slated for December 15.

READ: Former Ugandan PM Amama Mbabazi fears arrest

The conference seeks to amend the party constitution to give the chairperson powers to appoint the secretary-general, which is currently an elective post like all others.

President Museveni however faces an uphill task to justify these actions to party members and the general public, a number of whom have expressed indignation at how Mr Mbabazi has been treated.

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With particular regard to the charges, Museveni will be hard-pressed to deconstruct the positive image of Mr Mbabazi — his right-hand man over the past four decades — as a clean man, which he himself helped to build, without making it look like a political witchhunt.

The head of state had often vouched for Mr Mbabazi as an upright, loyal, focused and hardworking man whose few mistakes, in his view, were not so grave as to warrant the sort of attacks that had been levelled against him.

For instance, in October 2008, at the height of a parliamentary probe into allegations that Mr Mbabazi had used his influence as security minister to force the NSSF to buy his land at above market rates, President Museveni reportedly said: “I know very well that this NSSF land issue is not about Mbabazi but about [destroying] the party and I will not sit back and see my party being destroyed… If I were him, I would have got a better price for that land.”

Mr Mbabazi allegedly sold each of the 414.14 acres he jointly owned with Amos Nzeyi at Ush24 million ($8,800) when its market value would have been Ush12 million to Ush18 million.

“The state is not going to make any pretence that prosecution of Mbabazi is a purely judicial matter,” said Nicholas Opio, a lawyer who has been involved in a number of politically motivated lawsuits. “You have only to look at what happened to Dr Kizza Besigye when he wrote that opinion that eventually forced him out of the party.

“The same treatment that was meted out to him is what awaits Mbabazi should he declare open hostility towards the president.”

“The state will file those charges on record and remain silent,” Mr Opio added. “It will depend on how Mbabazi behaves. If he chooses to remain silent and seek reconciliation then they will not be of much use. But for as long as he declares his interests to run against the president inside the NRM, that will be seen as enough hostility to activate them.”

On November 5, a legal team comprising four law firms and acting on Mr Mbabazi’s instructions wrote to the Inspector-General of Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions to express concern over reports that the two respective offices were conducting criminal investigations against their client over allegations of fraud and money laundering.

“If the above is true, our client takes a very serious view of the matter. It is our considered opinion that this is a gross violation of the criminal principles of the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda and criminal law,” the letter reads.

Invoking what is known in law as the doctrine of the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, they demanded that the two offices inform their client at the earliest opportunity of the nature of the investigations against him in order that he have enough time to prepare his defence.

Otherwise, they wrote, the investigation was “politically motivated to curtail our client’s fundamental human rights and freedoms and is intended to ambush him and subject him to humiliation.”

The allegations are pegged on a 2008 transaction involving the National Bank of Commerce (NBC) and two Saudi Arabia-based businesses.

In the deal, the latter sought to buy a controlling stake from the bank’s major shareholders — Mr Nzeyi, Mr Mbabazi and Ruhakana Rugunda, his successor as prime minister. They offered a $7 million downpayment and agreed to pay the balance of $43 million later.

The investors would, however, turn to the commercial court in 2012 to complain that they had been denied their shares. The case was referred to arbitration in London as per the terms of their contract but it is understood they never went there.

Sources familiar with the case say the state chose to revisit it as part of a scheme to keep Mr Mbabazi away from the conference.

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