the head of Tshisekedi’s anti – corruption bureau placed under a temporary arrest warrant
Ghislain Kikangala, coordinator of the Office of Prevention and Fighting Corruption (APLC), was placed under a preliminary arrest warrant on Friday, December 18, after several hours of questioning by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Kinshasa Court of Appeal. Gombe.
They are suspected of abuse of power and extortion. These documents were condemned on Friday by the lawyer of Arinze Kenechukwu Oswachale, CEO of the subsidiary of the Nigerian bank Access Bank.
Early in the evening, this Friday 18 December, the courthouse had already been emptied. But Ghislain Kikangala had not yet convinced the Advocate General, Yves Mwepu Ilunga, who had called him. Of the three people expected, Ghislain Kikangala was the only one who responded to the prosecutor’s invitation this afternoon. His two “operations managers”, who appear in a video of the bank during the process raise $ 30,000 in cash at late times, December 10, did not respond. “They fled,” according to a legal source.
Another source close to the case said they sent their lawyers to the prosecutor “to say they had been sent on a mission to the province of Congo Central”, which borders Kinshasa. Ghislain Kikangala, a lawyer in Brussels close to the presidential family, was heard for many hours about the skills of his establishment, created by President Félix Tshisekedi in March 2020 to track down “economic crime” in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Long before he responded to the call, he had already spoken in a television program during which he had confirmed that his two chiefs of operations did not have the task of collecting 30,000 of the 50,000 US dollars demanded by his agency from Arinze KenechukwuOswachale, whose bank was accused for money laundering. A case revealed by a whistleblower, former banker Israel Kaseya. He had spent many months in prison before being released.
The Presidency announced inquiries into these facts. “If they are true, they are reprehensible and expose their authors to the rigor of the law,” the statement said. APLC’s expertise divides non-corruption organizations.
When Chouna Lomponda, the agency’s spokesperson, confirms that she has the right to receive a deposit, Jean-Jacques Lumumba, coordinator of UNIS, the pan-African anti-corruption network, says: “I have zero part in the regulation that the agency has the right to fix or collect money (…). “I think they have committed a serious mistake that deserves to be sanctioned by justice,” he told RFI.
This whistleblower caused “serious problems in the way of recruiting people” within APLC. The Congolese Association for Access to Justice (ACAJ) said in a press release “deeply concerned” about the anti-corruption agency’s actions. The NGO no longer doubts: the measures taken constitute “harassment that was only intended to take the money” from the CEO of Access Bank.
