Prosecution lawyers have promised to seek maximum penalties and confiscation of assets of those implicated in the National Youth Service (NYS) corruption scandal as the hearing of the case kicked off yesterday.
Prosecution lawyer Vera Khamisi said the prosecution has enough evidence to show how suspects siphoned Sh60 million from the Integrated Financial Management System (Ifmis).
When the scandal erupted, Mrs Lillian Mbogo Omollo is said to have taken her battles to a frontier few would dare when she accused National Intelligence Service Director-General Phillip Kameru of exaggerating the rot in the National Youth Service.
Unknown to her, Maj Gen Kameru and the Director of Criminal Intelligence, Mr George Kinoti, had taken it upon themselves and with the blessings of State House to investigate the scandal at the cash cow that the NYS had been turned into since its budget was increased from Sh2.5 billion to Sh25 billion.
The President had put his trust on the personality of Maj Gen Kameru, a former military intelligence officer, and Mr Kinoti, a detective credited for tracking down criminals and dismantling their networks.
It also emerged that some NYS tenderpreneurs had secretly met at an office in Liaison House on State House Avenue to plot how to unblock accounts that had been frozen by the Kenya Revenue Authority, which was part of the multi-agency investigation attempting to unravel the payment riddle in the NYS scandal.
But unknown to them, Mr Kenyatta had decided to act since of all citadels of corruption, the NYS had become President Kenyatta’s nightmare.
By sitting at the heart of the intelligence, Maj Gen Kameru reports directly to the President and is the head of one of the three national security organs, the others being the National Police Service and Kenya Defence Forces.
He also sits at the nine-member National Security Council, which is chaired by the President and which is only attended by three cabinet secretaries: Defence, Foreign Affairs and Interior.
A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign majoring in Entrepreneurship Studies, Mrs Omollo has a Bachelor of Education degree from Kenyatta University.
She previously worked with United Nations Development Programme, Catholic Relief Services and Southern Sudan Council of Churches.
In taking on Mr Kinoti and Maj Gen Kameru, the PS said the vouchers under investigation were for Sh900 million and that this amount “was not even remotely close to the Sh8 billion that the director-general NIS is claiming lost/stolen/fraudulent”.
Whether she thought her statement would scuttle the NIS and DCI efforts is not clear but the spotlight turned on her, especially on what she knew as the accounting officer.
Today they have to contend with remand rules written in Swahili on a black board: Heshimu hesabu, heshimu maombi, heshimu sahani ya mwenzako na heshimu usafi.