The Kenyan government is to declassify and release secret documents to help unravel the role played by retired president Daniel arap Moi’s regime in a financial scandal that defrauded the treasury of billions of dollars, an official said on Wednesday.
”Some documents on the Goldenberg scandal that were classified as ‘top secret’ by the former regime are going to be made public, to help the commission investigating the Goldenberg fraud,” an official at the judiciary said.
The inquiry is seeking to unearth the truth behind the Goldenberg scandal, an elaborate scheme that penetrated the treasury and got away with more than nine billion dollars in compensation for bogus exports of gold and diamonds.
Attorney General Amos Wako told the inquiry on Tuesday that the government had realised the need to open the secret files to ensure that ”no stone is left unturned in the quest to unravel the Goldenberg affair and deal with the consequences arising there from”.
”We need to declassify certain circulars and documents from ‘top secrets’ and ‘secrets’ to enable them to be reproduced in public and thereby facilitate the commission to having access to them,” Wako said.
He said circulars on destroyed classified materials and other documents that name Moi in the affair are among the contents of the documents which are to be released. People linked to Moi’s ousted Kenya African National Union (Kanu) party, including some members of his family , have been named in the Goldenberg affair, blamed for the near-collapse of the Kenyan economy in the early 1990s.
Moi, his son Gideon and step-daughter June, have also been named in the scandal involving Euro Bank, which collapsed in February, taking with it more than $24-million dollars in deposits from parastatal firms. – Sapa-AFP