Rotich now defends ‘mix up’ of Eurobond reference numbers

Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich

A mix-up of reference numbers on letters directing the Central Bank of Kenya to transfer Eurobond billions to the Consolidated Fund is no more than an administrative issue, Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich has said.

On Thursday, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga released letters written by the Treasury on different dates with instructions on different amounts of money bearing the same reference numbers.

Mr Rotich said letters bearing the same reference numbers do not point to any loss of money from government accounts. He dismissed the Opposition leader as clutching at straws to keep the Eurobond debate alive.

“The referencing is a clerical issue and I just need my staff to tell me how they were filing it but this is just an administrative issue and it does not point to any loss of money. The letters were internal memos to the Central Bank. The principal issue in this matter is if money was lost or not. But records are very clear that all the money was accounted for,” the CS told The Standard on Saturday in a telephone interview yesterday.

Raila claimed there was improper referencing and “haphazard numbering where Folio reference numbers go up and down unpredictably”.

These are the letters contained in the bundle of documents tabled before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). They are the main evidence which the Treasury relied on to prove that Sh87.7 billion of the Eurobond proceeds was paid into the Consolidated Fund.

“What dents the credibility of these purported transfer instruction letters is the fact that you have a case where one document purporting to transfer the sum of Sh25,000,000,000 on September 15th, 2014 into the Consolidated Fund and separate document dated October 28th, 2014 purporting to transfer the sum of Sh15,000,000,000 into the Consolidated Fund bear the same folio reference number of AG/CONF.17 / 1 / 1. Vol. 1 (25),” Raila stated in his documents.

But Rotich yesterday said the CORD leader has now resorted to picking clerical issues instead of focusing on the explanations given by the Treasury on how the money was spent.

“We have shared the letters that transferred these funds to the National Exchequer Account with the Auditor General, the Controller of Budget, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and the Director of Criminal Investigations who have confirmed that the funds were received into the National Exchequer Account from the Sovereign Bond Account at the CBK, from where the Controller of Budget authorised the withdrawals,” Rotich said.

He said it was ridiculous to purport that the letters written to the CBK were not authentic and that the transfer instructions were not genuine.

Raila claimed in his latest revelations on the Eurobond saga that Sh88 billion ($999 million) was missing and the documents of remittances of the money into the country were forged. The Opposition claims the matter was exposed on September 8, 2014 when the $999 million balance on the JP Morgan Chase Bank account was transferred to an account at the Federal Reserve Bank, New York.

“There are no bank statements or third party evidence of what happened to the money deposited into the account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” Raila said.

Raila said that unlike the proceeds of the tap sales which were received in Kenya and were deposited into the Consolidated Fund as required by law, there were no records to show that the other amounts were received in the country.

“An amount of 999 million US dollars has to date not been deposited into the Consolidated Fund as required by Law. Nobody knows whose account it ended up in or whether it came into Kenya at all,” he said.

But Rotich, who also came out to explain the role of Qatar Bank which was brought into the transaction at the last minute, said that the Sh88 billion was received and confirmed by the Auditor General.

He explained that the government did a special procurement to include Qatar Bank into arranging the controversial Sh250 billion Eurobond to cater for the Middle East market.

“We had JP Morgan to take care of the US market, Barclays was to handle the European market while Standard Charted Bank has a strong presence in Africa. We really wanted to succeed and Qatar was to take care of the Middle East so that everyone who wanted to participate would,” Rotich added.