A week before the Tripartite Committee submitted its findings into the investigation of the past and other electoral processes and results, the tribunal established to investigate alleged professional misconduct and breach of confidentiality by the Auditor General of Sierra Leone, Mrs Lara Taylor-Pearce and her deputy, Tamba Momoh, submitted a booklet containing their report to President Julius Maada Bio.
However, the report including the findings and recommendations by the tribunal, going into the second week after it was submitted, has not been disclosed to the public. Based on the practice of leaking such reports to the public, there is the assumption that the report has not been handed over to those the tribunal was investigating, the Auditor General and her deputy.
Headed by former Justice of the Supreme Court – retired Justice Nyawo Finda Matturi-Jones, the tribunal looked into the actions of the suspended Auditor General and her deputy for contacting and receiving receipts from hotels in South Africa, Lebanon and The Gambia during compliance audit of the Office of the President. Among other things their investigation discovered that receipts were forged by the president’s office, with a cash payment of over $150,000 made to one hotel. The fallout between the president and the Audit Service Sierra Leone heads came when the Office of the President ordered that audits of his office and those of his wife’s and vice president’s should not be included in the audit report. At the end of the exercise, the president indefinitely suspended both substantive heads for professional misconduct.
News of Mrs Taylor-Pearce and her deputy’s suspension became hot news topic as the president had once again performed his duty outside the stipulated procedure. It is procedural that for the sacking or suspension of the Auditor General and her deputy the president was first supposed to set up a tribunal, and that there suspension or sacking should follow the same as for sitting judges or magistrates.
According to reports Lara and Tamba were suspended nearly three years ago in November 2021 after they investigated corruption, including double dipping at the president’s office and corruption in the president’s wife’s office.
During the past three years many civil society organisations have been keeping Lara and Tamba’s case in the limelight after the tribunal’s work went cold with the suspended duo still out of work. They called for swift judgement after the tribunal’s investigation.
But to the surprise of the public who has followed this case closely, including the international organisation of supreme auditors who promised not to consider any reports from those that replaced Lara and Tamba as credible, after receiving the report, the president and his media people have remained quiet and have not released the report to the public, an action that is seen as gross disrespect for the rules of disclosure and transparency. Since we have not had access to what is in the report, the call is being made for the president to submit to due diligence and make the report and recommendations by the tribunal public.
Members of the public fail to see why it is wrong for the Auditor General and her staff to seek receipts to justify a disclosure from the Office of the President without taking explicit permission from the president, citing that the president must have had something to hide, especially when there was disclosure of double dipping and forging of receipts as stated in the Auditor’s report into the Office of the President.
Before she and Tamba ran afoul of the president, Mrs Taylor-Pearce was the darling of the Bio led presidency as her reports on the previous administration headed by President Ernest Bai Koroma showed massive levels of corruption, which coupled with the governance transition report by former Chief Minister David Francis led to him calling the APC a “criminal racketeering enterprise”. A report cited by many includes the ASSL’s findings into how the Ebola Fund was spent by the EBK regime for which Bio, then in opposition, took the former president to task in the media.
But when the Auditor General’s reports into the Bio-led government started surfacing, the president started having issues with the AG. Members of the public consider president Bio’s order for audits of his and the offices of his wife and the vice president not to be included in the report as the day the president lost his fight against corruption.
Meanwhile, every Auditor General’s report covering 2018 to 2022 has shown this regime as the most corrupt since such reports started being produced. For a regime that came into power to fight public corruption and blocking financial leakages, the action of the president with regards Lara and Tamba has been seen as the opening of the floodgates of corruption for the act to flourish without official sanction.
The public is however calling on the Office of the President to release the tribunal’s report into the sacking of Lara Taylor-Pearce and Tamba Momoh for the sake of justice, respect for the investigative process and the integrity of the Office of the President, who is the subject for which the duo were suspended.
