Police, judicial staff using fake court receipts to con drivers

              Traffic police at work in Nairobi.  [PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

By MOSES MICHIRA

A racket through which traffic officers and judicial staff collude to extort thousands of shillings from unsuspecting motorists by issuing fake court receipts can now be revealed.

Investigations by The Standard on Sunday have unearthed fake receipts and a litany of conned motorists accused of various traffic offences most of which are trumped up. On September 9, 2013, Alex Mwangi was a victim of the cartel. Mwangi, a delivery driver working for a local NGO with three decades of driving experience, was returning to Nairobi from a field assignment in Eldoret.

He claims to have a stellar driving record and has vowed he would never bribe police officers over alleged traffic offences. On that Monday afternoon, Mwangi was pulled over by traffic officers as he drove into Nakuru and accused of speeding at 115km per hour exceeding the set speed limit by 5km. What followed was four agonising hours after being arrested.

The traffic officers offered Mwangi a lifeline of sorts. If he agreed to pay a Sh10,000 bribe, the offence could go away and he could be on his way to Nairobi. He refused.

Later in the day, he was arraigned before a Nakuru court and charged with breaching the speed limit in criminal case number TR.73/3/13. Mwangi pleaded guilty and was promptly fined Sh20,000. He paid the fine in cash at the court registry and was issued with a receipt.

What Mwangi didn’t know however was that he had been conned by the police officers and judicial staff because the receipt issued was not legitimate, a fact The Standard on Sunday has now established.

Double pay

Even more startling, Mwangi had just paid double the Sh10,000 bribe the police officers had asked for earlier. By a strange twist of fate, just two weeks later, a similar fate befell Mwangi’s workmate and fellow driver Robert Wanjala. He was arrested and accused of speeding at about the same spot as Mwangi. The only difference for Wanjala was that he was fined Sh9,000. But there was an odd twist. Wanjala was only issued with a receipt of Sh5,000 which The Standard on Sunday has reliably confirmed to be fake. During our investigations, we showed the receipts issued to Mwangi and Wanjala to a judicial officer in Nakuru and his findings were startling. He cross checked the filings and established that legitimate receipts bearing the same serial numbers issued to both Mwangi and Wanjala had actually been issued to different offenders.

Peter Mulwa, the registrar in charge of subordinate courts in the Judiciary, told The Standard on Sunday that all fines imposed on offenders should be paid directly into official bank accounts – implying a major deception in both cases. “Judicial staff are not allowed to receive fines that exceed Sh500 - which are for very petty offences,” he said. Mulwa is now probing how the two drivers paid their fines in cash. “Typically, offenders are given account numbers to deposit the fines and it is the bank slips that are presented (to the court registry) to grant them freedom,” he explained. Mary Omare, the provincial police boss in Nakuru, says the matter was purely a criminal case but relating to the judicial officers.

Twin cases

“This is a case of judicial officers stealing from the government. It should be investigated, it is criminal,” says Ms Omare, who defended the calibration on the speed guns as accurate. John Koki, the Nakuru Police County Commander, said his office has received such complaints and had called in investigators from the anti-corruption agency to unearth what he believes could be a scandal involving different agencies. “I believe different agencies are involved in this fraud –the Judiciary and possibly the police,” said Koki. “I have commissioned a probe; this could be a big syndicated crime.” These twin cases, for which we have the actual receipts given, may point to graft in the Judiciary. 

Recent surveys have shown that the police and Judiciary rank as the two most corrupt institutions in Kenya. Police officers were involved in half of all cases of corruption reported last year, according to the report compiled by the Society for International Development (SID) that was released in November last year.

SID reported that 30 per cent of all graft cases were linked to the Judiciary. It is through such cases as Mwangi’s that rogue officers execute massive looting of public funds that would otherwise be internally generated revenue for the different departments, in this case the Judiciary.

Mobile courts on highways could just be the biggest cash cow for State officials because it is structured to speedily deal with traffic offenders through fines. Mwangi claims that he has never breached speeding limits in the 30 years.

“There was no evidence adduced in court to support their claims that I had committed an offence,” said Mwangi, referring to the incident that happened in September last year. There was no speed gun record produced in court and the magistrate relied purely on the word of the prosecution that an offence had been committed. Mwangi says he was driving back to Nairobi after a field assignment, when he was flagged down by police officers as he approached Nakuru town. The officers first asked for his driving licence, which he produced. Thereafter he was informed that he had been speeding. The officers announced promptly to Mwangi that he had committed a traffic offence, but were quick to add that the problem could go away if he paid a Sh10,000 bribe.

Mwangi was adamant he was not speeding and the officer did not have a speed device to prove he had committed the offence. Still, they insisted he had committed an offence. He was taken to an underground cell after he refused to pay a bribe, he claims.

Later he was taken to court where a charge of breaching the speed limit was read out to him. The presiding magistrate handed Mwangi a fine of Sh20,000 with an option of four months behind bars if he could not pay the fine. The fine is just over half of Mwangi’s monthly pay. He had planned to use the Sh20,000 to settle his son’s college fees.

“The other option was to plead not guilty and pay a lot more for a cash bail, which I might never get back,” he said. Motorists and other petty offenders prefer to plead guilty and pay fines, but only as an easier way out of a criminal system that has suspects stitched up either way.

Escort to M-Pesa

But that marked the start of a series of events that were giveaways that the court was never meant to deal with traffic offenders. Court orderlies attached to the police escorted Mwangi to a nearby M-Pesa outlet to withdraw the fine from his mobile phone account, a strange arrangement for any court.

He was issued with a receipt of the amount he gave to one of the female officers whom he only identified as Martha. Mwangi was unable to obtain the officers service number on the badge, which would help in an investigation over the matter. He had bought his freedom but was suspicious because the receipt was delivered outside the courtroom.

His fears that he had been conned have since been confirmed. Burning with the ordeal he had just been through, Mwangi arrived in Nairobi and within the week, he sought to report the fraud to the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.

Frustration awaited him when he visited the corruption watchdog office at Integrity Centre and reported the matter to an officer who identified herself as Jacinta Njue, of the designation of a “report analyst” according to her business card. We tried to reach Ms Njue on the numbers printed on the business card given to Mwangi but the person on the other end claimed it was a wrong number.

Mwangi claims that Ms Njue asked him to investigate whether the receipt he had been given was actually fake before reporting back with proof.

He is a frustrated man: “How is a member of the public supposed to conduct his own investigation first to confirm if an offense was committed and then report the same to EACC?”