ACB clears State House of hotel bill probe
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has cleared State Residences of wrongdoing on allegations that it accommodated some foreign guests at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe at an inflated rate.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, ACB principal public relations officer Egrita Ndala said the bureau has since closed the case due to lack of evidence of wrongdoing.
She said: “There was no inflation of figures by State House on the payments that were made to Crossroads Hotel. The payment made by Miguel Elias of Chitundu Distributors to Crossroads Hotel for the accommodation did not come from State House Account.
“The K12 500 000 payment was made by State House directly to Crossroads Hotel towards the accommodation costs of the guests. There was no corruption in the payments that were made to Crossroads Hotel as alleged in the complaint.”
But she said the bureau’s investigation established that there were guests who visited the country at the invitation of State Residences and were lodging at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe.
The investigation followed reports that emerged in October last year that State Residences hosted ghost visitors at Crossroads Hotel in Lilongwe in a bid to defraud the public purse.
In an interview on Tuesday, Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC) Gift Trapence, whose grouping moved the bureau to conduct the probe, expressed gratitude that the ACB was speeding up investigations.
He said: “HRDC is happy that ACB is speeding up investigations of reported cases. It is our hope that many reported cases will also be concluded soon.”
Invoices that circulated on social media at the time showed that State Residences paid the hotel over K50 million in bills.
But Crossroads Hotel told The Nation at the time that it had received a K12.5 million cheque from State House.
One of the directors at Crossroads Hotel, Sameer Sacraine, said that four international guests, whose nationalities he could not disclose, were booked at their hotel for over a month.
He said the four were booked by Miguel Elias of Chitundu Distributors in Blantyre.
