Dr Kizza Besigye, the former presidential candidate and one of the founding fathers of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), has dismissed the report by the elders’ committee into allegations of “dirty” money brought into the party.
The committee led by Dr Frank Nabwiso was constituted after Besigye revealed to the FDC national council that he had received information indicating that the FDC secretary general Nathan Nandala Mafabi had brought dirty into the party money from the incumbent President Yoweri Museveni.
Besigye allegedly received the information weeks after Nandala had entrusted him with Shs 300 million and had given another Shs 280 million cash batch to the party president, Eng Patrick Oboi Amuriat (POA). According to Besigye, Nandala told him that the money was from his account, which he feared Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) would seize due to pending tax issues with his companies.
Besigye also responded to Nandala’s allegations that he returned only Shs 294 million of the Shs 300 million cash that was given to him.
“When that came out, I obviously had to investigate what had happened, and I indeed established that it was true the money was received in 3 or 4 installments. But that was the wish of the lady who was receiving it. It was not because there was no money to receive but she didn’t want to take it at ago. That was her request,” said Besigye.
“Secondly, I got to learn that part of that money because it had stayed where we put it for long and that during the election time, money becomes devalued – loses value they decided to translate part of it into dollars. And so, when I said please return the money they also returned the money still in dollars. But the dollars apparently instead of gaining value which was expected in the elections, actually the value had gone down…leading to that difference in the money that was not returned…Clearly, nobody informed me about this, there was absolutely no reason why I would want to keep Shs 600,000 of money belonging to the party with me. If I wanted I could have kept the Shs 300 million because there was nowhere I signed, and nobody knew I had it.” he added.
