Eurobond was low-hanging fruit for our kleptocrats

It would be a pleasant surprise to me if it were to be established eventually that some of the Eurobond cash wasn’t stolen.

If you read the Kroll Report account of how Moi-era kleptocrats siphoned public funds into offshore accounts and followed the more recent Anglo Leasing drama in which the infamous ‘ghosts’ at some stage wired back some cash to the Treasury, you get the sense that Eurobond was a low-hanging fruit for the practised Kenyan bureaucrat.

Indeed, Eurobond’s unholy link to Anglo Leasing scandalised it from the start.

Faced with opposition, including pockets from its ranks, the Jubilee administration had to last year resort to its parliamentary tyranny to force through a controversial payment of an Anglo Leasing debt to clear the way for the floating of the bond at the Irish bourse.

The Controller of Budget appears to have been kept in the dark about some of the transactions, although she has curiously taken to revising her story on any controversial issue a lot lately.

It hasn’t helped the government’s case that the Treasury bureaucrats won’t say what the proceeds from Eurobond, initially sold as meant to fund infrastructure projects, were spent on.

The Treasury Cabinet Secretary, Henry Rotich, has been mumbling something about complex accounting procedures for months now without mentioning a single infrastructure project that was funded by the Eurobond money.

Then there is the small matter of an election coming up next year.

CAMPAIGN MONEY
Without a campaign finance law, incumbent governments in Kenya faced with a potentially tight election have been known to fish far and wide for campaign cash, including the public purse.

Nearly every big scandal in the recent past has been linked to campaign fund raising.

Anglo Leasing is widely believed to have been part of the deals meant to finance the Kibaki administration’s re-election bid in 2007.

The Bosire Commission inquiring into the Goldenberg scandal in 2003 was told that some Sh37.5 million looted from the Central Bank of Kenya was used to fund Kanu’s election campaign in 1992.

The Opposition and civil society have more or less concluded that Eurobond is the Jubilee administration’s campaign loot.

Time will tell if there is any truth in these claims.

And, the truth might not take too long to come out on this one, unlike, say, Anglo Leasing or Goldenberg.

TRUTH WILL BE KNOWN
The American banks JPMorgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will most likely feel compelled to shed light on the international aspects of the Eurobond transactions in the coming days after the Opposition leader, Raila Odinga, dragged their names into the matter last week.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, in the event that he perceives the bad publicity generated by the Eurobond affair as hurting his re-election bid in 2017, might ask his bureaucrats to offer a clearer explanation, even if for public relations purposes.

And who knows; Mr Rotich might just recover the list of infrastructure projects funded from the Eurobond proceeds from his office out-tray.

The write is chief sub-editor, Business Daily; [email protected]