RIGHTS-BENIN: Corrupt Judges to Remain in Detention until Trial

By Ali Idrissou-Toure Reprint | | Print |

Ali Idrissou-Toure

COTONOU, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - The 24 Beninoir judges, detained for alleged fraud in September, have failed to raise the bail set for them and will remain in detention until their trial opens.

No date has been set for the trial yet.

The Department of Judiciary has charged the judges with “forgery, abetting the diversion of public monies, and aiding and abetting fraud”.

The judges allegedly stole around two billion CFA francs (around 2.9 million U.S. dollars) over a three-year period. Forty court clerks and treasury officials also have been charged for being accomplices in the scandal.

The judges are being held at Lokossa, about 100 kilometres from Cotonou, while the clerks and treasury officials have been detained in Cotonou, Benin’s commercial capital.

Supreme Court Judge, Gilbert Ahouandjinou set the bails between six million and 145 million CFA francs (8,571 and 207,143 U.S. dollars) respectively.

The detainees, who previously requested to be released while awaiting trial, were shocked by the amount of the bail. Judicial sources say the bails were set according to the perceived role that each judge played in the fraud.

Ahouandjinou, who is in charge of the case, will soon hear testimony from all the 24 judges involved in the alleged corruption, according to judicial sources. The investigation could last more than a year.

The case, involving mostly young magistrates, is considered to be one of the biggest corruption scandals in Benin since independence from France in 1960.

Some of the judges and clerks, who masterminded the scandal, “went as far as forging the signatures of their colleagues in order to implicate them”, according to a judicial source who requested anonymity.

Joseph Gnonlonfoun, the Minister of Justice, described the scandal as “an upheaval in the House of Justice”.

A columnist in ‘Le Matinal’, a private newspaper, said the behaviour of the detained judges was “a consequence of impunity, which is the gangrene of Beninoir society”.

“The public is now waiting to see what will happen in the judicial proceedings against these rogue judges, and what their punishment might be,” another columnist in ‘La Nouvelle Tribune’ wrote.

The scandal was uncovered when former Finance Minister Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane ordered the judiciary’s 1998-2000 books to be audited. After auditing, it was discovered that the judges and the treasury employees overcharged legal fees and divided up the loot among them.

Bio-Tchane, who became director of the International Monetary Fund’s Africa Department in March, wanted the accounts audited so as to help the authorities draft the long-awaited ‘payment’ laws in Benin. The laws were required for all members of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), based in Dakar, Senegal.

The embezzlement scheme was shrewdly organised by court officials and their financial branch accomplices from seven cities: Cotonou, Porto-Novo, Kandi, Parakou, Natitingou, Abomey and Ouidah.

In Kandi, 650 kilometres north of Cotonou, for example, local residents were surprised to see court officials amassing wealth, and becoming rich.

The officials could afford new mopeds, new vehicles, and new trucks for transporting goods. They also were buying plots of land to build fancy houses on.

Later, the residents of the seven cities discovered that a racket of judges and revenue collectors were swindling the court’s legal fees.