. CHISENGA

By XAVIER MANCHISHI –
TWO senior managers at Lusaka City Council (LCC) are on the run after being implicated in financial impropriety involving an undisclosed amount of money.
Lusaka Mayor Daniel Chisenga said the two, Gift Kasalo, who is the head of procurement and stores, and Kizito Chintu, the assistant accountant and book keeper, had abandoned their official cars at the council.
Mr Chisenga said three cashiers, who have not been named, were also on the run and that the matter had since been reported to the Anti-Corruption Commission and the Drug Enforcement Commission for investigations.
The mayor said after noticing a drastic reduction in revenue collection returns, the council decided to institute a probe which revealed glaring irregularities perpetuated by the two senior officers.
“These things started not too long ago. The loss of revenue was noticed between November and December and we decided to institute an investigation,” Mr Chisenga said in an interview in Lusaka yesterday.
He said by the time the investigation was taking root the suspects had already tampered with some of the receipts and made it difficult to estimate the total amount of money misappropriated.
Mr Chisenga said the most notorious practice was the printing of fake receipts by individuals who collected money on behalf of the local authority but did not end up in the council coffers.
“What we need to start doing now is to get receipts directly from Government Printers because buying them from private individuals is what is giving a loophole for these unscrupulous individuals to print their own,” he said.
He said following the investigation, the council was back to its normal revenue collection of between K900,000 and K1 million monthly.