The Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development has tasked Uganda Revenue Authority to recover Shs15.7 billion paid to Safaritech company for work they never did.
A recent investigation has revealed shocking details of corruption and within the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), resulting in a staggering loss of Shs15,716,832,682 billion in the financial year 2023-2024.
Eagle Online has established that failure to deliver on their Safaritech, seem to have conned the taxman that has led to protestation from the Permanent Secretary/ Secretary to the Treasury Ramathan Ggoobi who has indeed directed that money be recovered.
The report exposes a web of deceit and collusion between URA officials and a dubious company, M/S Safaritech Limited, which was allegedly founded by URA insiders with the sole purpose of siphoning off funds through the procurement system.
The report exposes Safaritech Limited, as indicates that the company was registered in Kenya, and awarded a contract to provide audit consultancy services and related services, including the provision of hardware and software servers for URA.
The contract terms were deliberately designed to facilitate fraud, with Safaritech Limited set to receive a 5% revenue share of the recovered revenue. However, the project failed, resulting in significant revenue losses for the country.
Notably, the report reveals that key officials involved in the corruption deal, including Mutebi Robert, the current Commissioner of Information Technology at URA, and former MTN-Uganda employee Richard Mwami, the country, CEO of Safaritech Limited, are close associates. The report suggests that their involvement in the scandal was not merely coincidental.
Furthermore, the investigation found that Safaritech Limited’s addresses have been changing, with the company initially registered in Kenya, then moving to the United Kingdom, and now seemingly operating without a traceable address. Moreover, Richard Mwami, the CEO of Safaritech Limited, does not appear in any records of Kenyan taxpayers. Another notable individual cited in this deal is Ken Lubega a Kampala IT associate and also businessman.
It is said that this very Safaritech company misinformed URA that they would detect and expose fraud and this would in the end help the tax body scale down on tax circumvention but update they have not yield a single case.
