The letter dated September 21, 2020, signed by three law firms indicates that neither the attorney general nor the Uganda Revenue Authority who were listed as respondents in this matter had filed a response to the petition.
Kyazze thus asked court to endorse the withdrawal of the petition, saying that each party should bear its own costs since the respondents had not filed a response. The attorney general’s representative Brian Musota also did not have objections to the petition.
Accordingly, the judges were left with no option but to dismiss the petition. In 2009, Basajjabalaba’s company Haba Group Uganda Limited was awarded Shs 169 billion as compensation for the loss of contracts to manage and develop the city markets and the Constitutional Square.
The compensation was assessed by the then attorney general Prof Khiddu Makubuya following President Museveni’s June and November 2009 directives with a consideration that the businessman shouldn’t pay tax.
However, according to the court record, on June 22, 2011, Uganda Revenue Authority issued third party notices freezing the bank accounts of Haba Group Uganda Limited in Orient, UBA and Tropical banks where the authority suspected that the compensation had been channelled.
Aggrieved with URA’s decision, Basajjabalaba through his lawyers petitioned the Constitutional court in 2011 where he sued the tax body and government.
In his petition, Basajjabalaba argued that the actions of the tax body and government were unconstitutional because he had been deprived of property (money) without even being accorded a right to a fair hearing. Court further heard that the actions of freezing his company’s bank accounts were unconstitutional because they were frozen when there was no tax owed to URA.
In March 2020, another panel of Constitutional court justices led by Justice Kenneth Kakuru ordered Basajjabalaba to refund to government all the money that was illegally paid to him as compensation for losing the tender.
The judges noted that the compensation monies were paid to Basajjabalaba and his companies illegally following a contract that he had entered into with the defunct Kampala City Council without the advice of the attorney general.
This March decision followed a successful petition by Legal Brains Trust through their lawyer Isaac Ssemakadde who had asked court to direct Basajjabalaba, his companies and all the government officials implicated in this compensation saga to refund it as it had reportedly been obtained fraudulently.
Basajjabalaba was in 2015 charged before the Anti Corruption court for Shs 20 billion tax evasion. But he petitioned the superior courts seeking to block the trial, in vain. In July 2020 a panel of seven Supreme court justices led by Dr Esther Kisaakye gave him an order which blocked his trial until his petition seeking to quash the charges against him is concluded.