IEBC TO AUCTION PROPERTIES OF POLITICIANS OVER SH400 MILLION IN UNPAID COURT FEES
The IEBC is to auction properties of the politicians who lost election petitions. This comes after the commission was awarded Sh400 million as court fees arising from the unsuccessful petitions filed against its declared election results.
This was over governor seats and parliamentary ones, even as far back as in the 2013 and 2017 elections.
IEBC is now involving auctioneers to recover this Sh400 million, which Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu flagged. The recovery would come from Sh1 million security deposits paid by the petitioners.
IEBC Chief Executive Officer Hussein Marjan led the Parliament into this situation before the Public Accounts Committee.
Marjan said the commission was facing some challenges in the recovery process.
“We are currently in the process of procuring auctioneers to recover the monies,” Marjan told the committee.
This included limited access to security deposits; the execution process was very slow. Some petitioners had stalled payments by appealing against the court orders, while others could not be found.
He said the auctioneers would be paid approximately 1.5 percent of what they collect. IEBC had earlier engaged lawyers to try to recover the money, but the efforts did not yield satisfactory results as the commission has only collected Sh6.8 million out of the owed Sh400 million.
Other challenges faced by the lawyers were that of delay in follow-up of costs and delay in taxation.
Surrogate litigants were also a problem. Surrogate litigants filed petitions to protect the politicians from paying costs.
The involvement of auctioneers was on advice from the Office of the Attorney-General. The IEBC hopes this way will be easier.
