A Namibian court on Friday dismissed urgent release application of two former ministers and four others who are accused of taking bribes to offer fishing rights in the country’s biggest corruption scandal, Reuters.
The six are accused of conspiring to get 100 million Namibian dollars ($6.8 million) in kickbacks from subsidiaries of Iceland’s biggest fishing company Samherji to secure quotas.
The accused claim the charges of fraud, laundering and tax evasion should be dismissed because of the faulty process in their arrests. They argued all the charges filed against them were unlawful and politically motivated.
“The Namibian constitution should not become subservient to the public as well as political pressures,” their lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said at the Windhoek High Court.
However, Judge Kobus Miller ruled on Friday that the release application did not meet requirements to be heard as an urgent matter due to delays in the request.
Bernhard Esau, former Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources and Sacky Shanghala, former Minister of Justice along with two former employees of South Africa’s financial services firm Investec, have been in custody for a month awaiting trial.
The scandal was exposed with the help of documents leaked by Johannes Stefansson, a former employee of the Icelandic fishing conglomerate Samherji, to the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks.
The scheme used a bilateral deal between Angola and Namibia to win Samherji quotas of tens of thousands of tonnes a year of horse mackerel.
As per the documents, Samherji, one of Iceland’s largest fishing companies, paid bribes to Bernhard Esau, the Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources, and Sacky Shanghala, the Minister of Justice, in return for giving preferential access to Namibia’s rich fishing grounds.
Samherji has denied wrongdoing. Esau and Shanghala have also denied the accusations.
The next hearing is scheduled for February 2020.
