THE partial deletion of the Ministry of Finance’s bank reconciliation and manual cheque system and suspension of a former system administrator more than 7 years ago, were purportedly attempts at covering up a mass web of corruption that reached as far as the Minister, Edward Ronnie Mannetti claimed this week.

Mannetti was suspended in July 2004 after he was accused of tempering and deleting data from the ministry’s bank reconciliation and manual system. He eventually resigned a month later. In a letter to Informanté Mannetti accuses the then Under Secretary in the State accounts department Ericah Shafudah (now PS) of conspiring with Deputy Minister Calle Schlettwein (then PS) he (Mannetti) had stolen money from government and attempted to destroy data records.

The former system administrator also pointed fingers at James Links, a retired former Finance Information Technology Deputy Director of having misquoted the ministry in the procurement and installation of 250 terminal devices, 60 printers and 30 fileservers meant for various government ministries and institutions.

Mannetti alleges that the ministry paid a local computer company N$3.6 million, which was later deleted from the ministry’s system, apparently to cover up dubious money exchange trails. This transactions were reportedly deleted from the treasury system by Links out of panic, after pocketing over N$700 000.

According to Mannetti, Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila purportedly received an unspecified large amount, which she allegedly used to purchase a town house in the posh Ludwigsdorf suburb. That property has allegedly since been repossessed by the ministry. This could however not be confirmed.

Links, who resigned in 2008, denied that he ever procured computer terminals on behalf of the ministry and rubbished Mannetti’s claims. “Mannetti was suspended after being found guilty of deleting data from the system and of having known about data irregularities that he had not reported until the data deletion was detected,” says Links.

An internal investigation report compiled by Links days after the detection of the system discrepancies, found Mannetti guilty of visiting the ministry’s offices on Sunday 27 June 2004 with the aim of rectifying the data deleted without informing his superiors.

“Why would he visit the office over the weekend to rectify a problem which was not known to us at the time, unless he was responsible for deleting them in the first place” Links asked. According to those in the know, the lack of a database audit trail in the ministry’s system could easily be manipulated without detection.

Questions forwarded to Minister Amadhila’s personal assistant were not answered by the time of going to press.