By ADRIAN MWANZA
THE Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) has described as malicious claims that it lost US$2.5 million in an Intelligence Management System deal which has not been fully installed and attributed the statements to those involved in the abuse of public resources in an attempt to discredit it.
FIC acting Director-General, Victor Zimba said it had a number of systems it uses for its operations but was constrained to give details because they were intelligence systems.
Mr Zimba however said there was no system that had been paid for and not installed at the FIC.
“We are not aware of the US$2.5 million allegedly lost by the FIC in a US$10 million deal to install an intelligence management system,” he said.
Mr Zimba said the FIC, being a Government spending agency was audited annually by the Auditor General and that its audit reports were clean.
Information has emerged that FIC paid US$10 million in 2017 for a US$2 million system that has not been fully installed because spy towers, probes, and the network system have never been installed.
It has allegedly been paying US$2.5 million a year for maintenance, resulting in a cumulative payment of US$18 million to date
According to sources, the FIC apparently abandoned a powerful system which was bought in 2012/2013 called the “IBM i2 Intelligence System” which is the same system that the Pentagon and the CIA used to track down terrorist financing, in preference for the new Israeli system whose suppliers have now vanished.
The new information follows a story that the Daily Nation published last week that a vendor paid US$2.5 million for a surveillance system had disappeared.
Meanwhile, Citizens Democratic Party (CDP) president Robert Mwanza said Government must investigate reports that the FIC paid US$10 million for a surveillance system worth US$2 million and has been paying US$2.5 million a year for maintenance, resulting in a cumulative payment of US$18 million to date.
Mr Mwanza said the FIC needed to prove that there were no shady dealings in which public funds may have been pocketed.
“This information should trigger quick action from the state which need to ascertain this information. These are public funds which may have been lost so there is need to ascertain the reports,” he said.
An informed source had explained that the defective system’s full capacity was to tap into people’s phone calls, read WhatsApp SMS massages and Skype calls among others.
However, the system was reportedly not “FIT-for-PURPOSE” and that there was no justification supported by a thorough business case to install such a system as per the ICT Governance principles at the Centre. The ICT Department was allegedly never consulted as experts on the matter.
The named company based in Israel is alleged to have been paying kickbacks to some public officials at FIC and Ministry of Finance into offshore accounts.
