Leads Insurance Limited has filed a petition with the Constitutional court challenging the seizure of its property by the director of public prosecutions (DPP).
The company is owned by Christopher Obey, the jailed former principal accountant in the ministry of Public Service. On November 11, Anti-Corruption court judge Lawrence Gidudu convicted Obey of misappropriating Shs 88.2bn meant for pensioners, together with Jimmy Lwamafa (former ministry of public service permanent secretary) and Stephen Kiwanuka Kunsa, the former director of Research and Development in the same ministry.
Obey was handed seven years in jail. Before their trial, the DPP and police seized several properties owned by the convicts. The DPP argued then that the properties were acquired using money stolen from government and that the matter was still under investigation.
But in a petition filed on January 31, Leads Insurance Limited says that on November 13, 2012, police officers led by Hebert Wanyoto searched its office on King Fahd plaza and seized several documents, including five land titles belonging to the company.
“That on November 14, 2014, we wrote a letter to the DPP seeking for those titles to be released but we received no response and no titles were ever released to us…,” the petition says.
Leads Insurance Limited further claims that on December 8, 2014, the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA) decided to de-recognize its investment properties because the DPP had its titles.
Later, IRA computed the solvent position of the company at Shs 1.4bn but Leads Insurance Limited disputed that valuation because IRA omitted the value of titles which were being held by the DPP. The insurance company claims the titles are worth Shs 3.5bn.
“That IRA declined to process the petitioner’s [Leads Insurance] license for the year 2015 unless the petitioner expedites the process of recovering its titles from the second respondent [DPP] and has since then declined to issue any license to carry out insurance business to the petitioner…,” the Leads Insurance Limited’s petition reads further.
In 2015, the company says it instituted legal proceedings and High court judge Yasin Nyanzi ordered the attorney general, who represented the DPP, to release the titles to IRA within seven days. However, the Leads Insurance Limited claims the attorney general refused to comply, prompting it to institute a different set of legal proceedings.
“On March 30, 2016, the trial judge Steven Musota ruled that the said titles be released immediately and further held that the respondents by refusing to surrender the petitioner’s titles were acting unconstitutionally and interfering with the petitioner’s right to property ,” the petition says.
The insurance company contends that the attorney general and the DPP never complied with that order or appealed but instead lodged an application in the Anti-Corruption court in 2016 before Justice Lawrence Gidudu seeking to attach its properties.
On July 11, 2016, Justice Gidudu declined to grant the order but the insurance company says it was aggrieved by the judge’s ruling that the attorney general’s order to the DPP to release the contested titles was “superfluous”.
DAMAGE
That as a result of the refusal by the DPP to release the titles, the company claims it engaged the services of McLaren Uganda Limited, an insurance surveyor, loss adjusters, risk manager, to assess their loss between 2015 2017. That indeed, McLaren found the loss amounted to Shs 2.8bn.
“That the petitioners by failing to secure its license for the said period has failed to pay its staff a sum of Shs 643, 228, 000,” the company says.
“That the petitioner further states that by refusing to comply with various court orders, the second respondent [DPP] has expropriated their properties, which properties are worth Shs 3,980,000,000…”
With that, the embattled insurance company wants the court to compel the attorney general to pay Shs 8.3bn in compensation.
dkiyonga@observer.ug