Maseru | Monday
THE High Court of Lesotho has postponed a high-profile corporate corruption trial until December. The postponement came after pressure from lawyers for a number of Western construction companies, members of a consortium accused of paying US$2m (US$1=3D M8,20) or more in bribes over a dam-building project, and a request for more time from the state prosecutor.
The companies concerned have much to lose. If the consortium is convicted of bribery in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), all concerned could be barred from taking part in any World Bank-funded projects.
French company Spie Batignolles leads the consortium, but it also includes the UK’s Balfour Beatty as well as three other European construction firms. Seven other companies, three of them British including Sterling International and Kier International, are also alleged to have paid bribes as part of the LHWP.
For the first time, the companies, and not just the person receiving the money, are in the dock.
“Maybe this is a test case,” Lesotho’s attorney general, Lebohang Fine-Maema, said.
“But for once we are saying it takes two to tango.”
The government aims to see the case through, he said, despite the bigger financial muscle of the defendants. “It doesn’t matter how much it’s going to take,” he said.
Meanwhile the criminal case against the alleged middleman, former head of the Lesotho highlands development agency Masupha Sole, continues on 14 August. Sole denies the charges. He has already lost a civil suit on the matter and is appealing.
The consortium accused of corruption is involved in building a group of huge dams in Lesotho, a scheme agreed in the 1980s between Lesotho and the then-apartheid government of South Africa, which needed reliable sources of water and electricity.
The World Bank arranged much of the finance, and is currently holding an internal investigation into the project. The World Bank representative in Southern Africa, Fayez Omar, said that the Bank “will definitely take very strong action if companies are found to be guilty of misconduct of World Bank funded parts of the project”.
Over the past two years, 54 companies had been blacklisted from bidding on Bank-funded operations, he said. But a recent UK parliamentary committee report noted comments from Bank president James Wolfensohn that the Bank will only disbar a company if corrupt activity can be proved within a specifically Bank-funded part of the project. – Misanet