Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera has stripped his Vice-President Saulos Chilima of all his delegated powers after the latter was named in a $150m (\u00a3123m) corruption scandal involving government contracts.<\/p>\n
The vice-president has not yet responded to the allegations.<\/p>\n
A report by the country’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) named 53 current and former officials as having received money from British-Malawian businessman Zuneth Sattar between 2017 and 2021, the president said.<\/p>\n
This is in relation to 16 contracts that the Malawi Police Service and the Malawi Defence Force awarded to five companies belonging to Mr Sattar.<\/p>\n
The officials named in the report include the vice-president and the head of police – who has been sacked.<\/p>\n
But Malawi’s law does not allow the president to sack or suspend his vice-president as the latter is an elected official.<\/p>\n
“The best I can do for now, which is what I have decided to do, is to withhold from his office any delegated duties while waiting for the bureau to substantiate its allegations against him,” the president said in a national address on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Mr Chakwera joined forces with Mr Chilima to defeat incumbent Peter Mutharika in 2020 presidential elections. The pair had promised to fight corruption in government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera has stripped his Vice-President Saulos Chilima of all his delegated powers after the latter was named in a $150m (\u00a3123m) corruption scandal involving government contracts. The vice-president has not yet responded to the allegations. A report by the country’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) named 53 current and former officials as having received […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":23709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11264,5268,1451,1384,2264,10342,2669,5612,421,3805,7212,11377,8522,7217,12264,5020,594],"class_list":["post-23708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-allegations","tag-british","tag-businessman","tag-corruption","tag-government","tag-law","tag-malawi","tag-money","tag-police","tag-president","tag-president-lazarus-chakwera","tag-presidential","tag-sack","tag-sacked","tag-scandal","tag-the-vice-president","tag-who"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}