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How suspected fraudster brought down Mwenda's Independent Rwanda to its knees
In his long and celebrated career as a journalist and media proprietor in the region, Andrew Mwenda has established himself as a shrewd player with a good nose for sniffing out fraud in all its guises.
However, even he was recently caught off guard by an internal scam in the Rwanda bureau of his Independent Publications Ltd (IPL) whose flagship product The Independent Magazine made its name uncovering corruption scandals in high levels of government.
A recent article by online news platform Matooke Republic blew the lid on a series of scandals that have rocked IPL's Rwanda bureau lately, from a mass staff exodus over unpaid wages to a shocking row with the national taxman that led to a temporary freeze of the company's accounts.
In this Special Report we share the results of an in-depth investigation into the events that led to the crisis and profile the alleged mastermind behind it all.
At the heart of the scam, our sources say, is Mr. Paul Oloya, Country Director of IPL's Rwanda office, with the alleged connivance of an unnamed higher-up at headquarters in Kampala.
But who is this intrepid man who had the balls and the cunning to pull the wool over the eyes of a respected confidante and advisor to regional leaders?
Mastermind
Pictures of Mr. Paul Oloya at past staff parties reveal a chocolate-coloured man of medium build and height, rounded-out cheeks, a winning smile, and a mischievous sparkle in his eye.
Indeed, by all accounts, Oloya, whose employment record is chequered by accusations of gross fraud and wanton abuse of office, cuts an innocent figure on first acquaintance.
"Maybe this is the reason Mwenda trusts him so much," a former staffer remarked of Oloya, who was wont to boast that he was one of the altar boys who served at Mass led by Pope John Paul II in his 1993 visit to Uganda.
Becoming IPL Rwanda's Country Director
In 2014, Paul Oloya, then the company accountant, was appointed head of The Independent's Rwanda outfit after the arrest of the then Country Director over fraud charges.
As new Country Director, Oloya's mandate was simple: regain the trust of advertisers, and boost the office's revenues to the point that the Rwanda bureau could be weaned off Kampala's support.
It was a baptism of fire for IPL's new boss, with the notoriously advertising-shy Rwanda market proving exceedingly hard to penetrate. The Independent magazine, which till then had only carried a nominal lead story with Rwanda content with the rest being Ugandan, seemed doomed to a premature death.
Only an IPL-led commemorative publication of Rwanda's 20-year (at the time) story of recovery, which was personally marketed to advertisers by Andrew Mwenda, saved the bureau from financial ruin.
Clearly, a new strategy was needed.
The 'dream team'
A change of tack that saw the magazine adopt a lot more local content and hire a 'dream team' of vibrant marketeers and beef up the editorial department resulted in improved prospects for the beleaguered company by mid-2015.
Soon the bubbling energy of the newsroom spilled over into the market and business started to flow. For the first time in years the Kigali office was earning enough to survive without support from Kampala.
But the good times would not last.
Storm over paradise
In late 2015, the company's marketers would walk out after a banal disagreement over money.
"Paul (Oloya) refused to increase my pay despite an earlier agreement to do so if I met my marketing targets," says an ex-marketeer, "and Kampala did not help me even after I appealed for their intervention, so I walked."
Before long, the pinch of the marketing team's exit began to be felt, with revenues diminishing rapidly into non-existence.
Writers, who had long complained of insufficient facilitation for story sourcing saw this reduce even further, a fact that they say hampered them in meeting their story count.
Although, by living off the accumulated reserves from recent cash inflows, the company was able to maintain the appearance of vivacity and hobble on till March 2016, insiders knew the end was near.
War in the newsroom
"January 2016, facilitation for stories stopped coming completely; salary soon followed," a former writer narrates. The natural result was that the number and quality of stories finally petered out.
Kampala, unaware of the crisis in Kigali, started to complain about the quality of its Rwanda bureau.
Rumours of growing bad-blood between a frustrated Editor in Chief and the Country Director echoed in IPL's dimly lit corridors.
In March, to the surprise of the long-suffering staff, an intransigent Oloya accused the editorial team of 'sabotage', and 'going on strike', resulting in a stand-off that eventually saw production of the Rwanda edition grind to a halt. The Uganda edition was dispatched to fill in for it on the gaping shelves.
Kampala acts, unearths massive fraud
Whether as a matter of due administrative course, or if it was a result of reports of Oloya's suspected financial imprudence, Kampala in April 2016 sent an auditor to Kigali to assess the company's financial health and investigate the structural issues afflicting it.
Preliminary results of the audit revealed an extent of fraud that shocked even Oloya's most strident critics.
The payroll was bloated far beyond the actual, with staff that had left long ago being maintained on it.
"Some writers discovered that Oloya had been claiming and quietly pocketing salaries on their behalf months before they were actually instated as staff, while others learnt that they had been promoted to 'Senior writers' and their retainer bumped up from the standard 250,000 Rwf to 400,000 Rwf without their knowledge!" our sources reveal.
This was accompanied by filching of petty amounts such as deductions from freelancers' wages and inflated facilitation claims.
"At one point I thought it was just a mistake," a former freelancer recalls. "I expected over 300,000 Rwf net pay, only to find 260,000 Rwf. When I crosschecked on the official list, it had 300,000 under my name," a former freelancer said.
Mr. Oloya's standard response to the numerous cases such as this was to blame it on "errors at bank", and promise to follow up, after which he would frustrate the victimized writers with excuse after excuse until they gave up.
The Taxman comes knocking
The rain that batters a poor man does not let up.
As the company was reeling from the shock of an audit that had shaken it to its core, officials from Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) stormed IPL Rwanda's Kicukiro office threatening to put it under padlock for outstanding tax arrears in excess of 50 million Rwf (about 200m Ugx).
Our investigation shows that most of this debt had been inherited by Oloya from previous regimes, and he managed to obtain a temporary stay from the taxman.
However, the reprieve was short-lived, and IPL's Rwanda accounts were frozen about a month later in an attempt to recover some of the outstanding taxes.
The Reckoning
In a series of meetings arranged with staff on the 5th and 6th of July 2016, Mwenda heard tale after tale of his Country Director's misdeeds.
"I was shocked by the extent of this boy's (Oloya's) unpopularity," Mwenda later reported to his colleagues in Kampala. "How can you be hated by everyone from the cook, to the cleaner and all the staff?"
Meanwhile, IPL General Manager Charles Kankya, who Mwenda put on speaker phone to address some of the charges being leveled against Oloya, defended his Rwanda colleague, saying that he had been made aware of the irregularities in the wage bill as a cover for resources channeled towards 'greasing the palms' of certain officials in government in order to win advertising contracts.
During the same meeting Mwenda also cited a pertinent reason for his trust in Oloya- efficiency.
"Since he took over, Paul (Oloya) has cut down office expenditure on salaries and running costs from $50,000 to $15,000 a month," he revealed.
Mwenda goes mad
Not one to be hasty, Mwenda still took no action. The standoff remained. Most staff, who had hung on in the hope that the meeting with the top boss would resolve the matter, moved to seek alternative employment.
It was at a convocation of top management in Kampala two weeks later that Mwenda's legendary calm would spark into fireworks.
Here is how it happened.
Well-placed sources in Kampala reveal that Mwenda summoned top managers from the Kampala and Kigali offices for a high-level discussion on the problems afflicting IPL's Rwanda bureau.
In attendance were Charles Kankya, General Manager; Joseph Were, Kampala Editor; Paul Oloya, IPL Country Director, Rwanda; Edward Ojulu, Rwanda Bureau Editor; and Andrew Mwenda, Managing Director.
The results of the audit, detailing Oloya's financial misdeeds were read out, and Mwenda gave a brief report of findings from his Rwanda trip.
An interrogation of Mr. Oloya soon ensued, led by the former 'Hot Seat' moderator.
After a particularly hard line of questioning, Oloya broke and confessed to forging his (Mwenda's) signatures and other details on the payment orders to gain great advantage in the allocation of funds.
Mwenda was livid.
"You could see sweat flowing on his bald head as he shouted at the top of his voice: 'Oloya you mean you have been altering my signatures?'", narrates an inside source.
The meeting was called to an abrupt halt and participants shooed out as Mwenda struggled to master himself.
In Kigali, news that Oloya had spent the night in the coolers was met by an uncorking of bottles and imbibing of frothy drinks by jubilant ex-staffers.
Return of the king
Like a soap opera that will not end, Oloya was, in a surprising twist, reposted to Kigali office a week later, where it is said he struts around in an empty office like a victorious cock in a hen-fight.
Word in the Kigali media grapevine is that IPL Rwanda is on the search for a new editor as the former one named Oloya's expulsion as the nonnegotiable condition for his stay.
Former employees say they are in suspense over their unpaid salary arrears of 3 months, and accuse the company of not having courtesy to advise them on the way forward.
But the most unexpected victim of the scam is Rwanda Government where IPL has been making good money from in form of projects, courtesy of good standing of its proprietor in the eyes of top echelons of power in Kigali.
A senior lawyer in Kigali, says he is surprised that no legal action has been taken against Oloya, adding:
"Article 609 of penal code is clear: Any person who forges or alters documents by forged signature or fingerprint, falsifying documents or signatures or impersonation, forging agreements, its provisions, obligations, discharged obligations shall be liable to a term of imprisonment of more than five (5) years to seven (7) years and a fine of three hundred thousand (300,000) to three million (3,000,000) Rwandan francs."
This has left many wondering what power Oloya wields over Mwenda who well knows that Kigali does not tolerate financial impropriety of any sort, not least the rampant fraud the IPL Country Director is accused of.
It is testimony to Mwenda's clout in Kigali that the scandals at his firm have not been amplified, unlike his sister's recent troubles in Kampala.
*****PS: Mr. Oloya, in a telephone interview with our reporter, refused to comment on the allegations leveled against him unless identities of our sources were revealed to him. For obvious reasons of journalistic confidentiality, we could not do that.***
--
*Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba*
Stalk my blog at: http://semuwemba.com/
"My journey is long and my preparation is so little, and weakness has gripped me and death is chasing me!"
-- In his long and celebrated career as a journalist and media proprietor in the region, Andrew Mwenda has established himself as a shrewd player with a good nose for sniffing out fraud in all its guises.
However, even he was recently caught off guard by an internal scam in the Rwanda bureau of his Independent Publications Ltd (IPL) whose flagship product The Independent Magazine made its name uncovering corruption scandals in high levels of government.
A recent article by online news platform Matooke Republic blew the lid on a series of scandals that have rocked IPL's Rwanda bureau lately, from a mass staff exodus over unpaid wages to a shocking row with the national taxman that led to a temporary freeze of the company's accounts.
In this Special Report we share the results of an in-depth investigation into the events that led to the crisis and profile the alleged mastermind behind it all.
At the heart of the scam, our sources say, is Mr. Paul Oloya, Country Director of IPL's Rwanda office, with the alleged connivance of an unnamed higher-up at headquarters in Kampala.
But who is this intrepid man who had the balls and the cunning to pull the wool over the eyes of a respected confidante and advisor to regional leaders?
Mastermind
Pictures of Mr. Paul Oloya at past staff parties reveal a chocolate-coloured man of medium build and height, rounded-out cheeks, a winning smile, and a mischievous sparkle in his eye.
Indeed, by all accounts, Oloya, whose employment record is chequered by accusations of gross fraud and wanton abuse of office, cuts an innocent figure on first acquaintance.
"Maybe this is the reason Mwenda trusts him so much," a former staffer remarked of Oloya, who was wont to boast that he was one of the altar boys who served at Mass led by Pope John Paul II in his 1993 visit to Uganda.
Becoming IPL Rwanda's Country Director
In 2014, Paul Oloya, then the company accountant, was appointed head of The Independent's Rwanda outfit after the arrest of the then Country Director over fraud charges.
As new Country Director, Oloya's mandate was simple: regain the trust of advertisers, and boost the office's revenues to the point that the Rwanda bureau could be weaned off Kampala's support.
It was a baptism of fire for IPL's new boss, with the notoriously advertising-shy Rwanda market proving exceedingly hard to penetrate. The Independent magazine, which till then had only carried a nominal lead story with Rwanda content with the rest being Ugandan, seemed doomed to a premature death.
Only an IPL-led commemorative publication of Rwanda's 20-year (at the time) story of recovery, which was personally marketed to advertisers by Andrew Mwenda, saved the bureau from financial ruin.
Clearly, a new strategy was needed.
The 'dream team'
A change of tack that saw the magazine adopt a lot more local content and hire a 'dream team' of vibrant marketeers and beef up the editorial department resulted in improved prospects for the beleaguered company by mid-2015.
Soon the bubbling energy of the newsroom spilled over into the market and business started to flow. For the first time in years the Kigali office was earning enough to survive without support from Kampala.
But the good times would not last.
Storm over paradise
In late 2015, the company's marketers would walk out after a banal disagreement over money.
"Paul (Oloya) refused to increase my pay despite an earlier agreement to do so if I met my marketing targets," says an ex-marketeer, "and Kampala did not help me even after I appealed for their intervention, so I walked."
Before long, the pinch of the marketing team's exit began to be felt, with revenues diminishing rapidly into non-existence.
Writers, who had long complained of insufficient facilitation for story sourcing saw this reduce even further, a fact that they say hampered them in meeting their story count.
Although, by living off the accumulated reserves from recent cash inflows, the company was able to maintain the appearance of vivacity and hobble on till March 2016, insiders knew the end was near.
War in the newsroom
"January 2016, facilitation for stories stopped coming completely; salary soon followed," a former writer narrates. The natural result was that the number and quality of stories finally petered out.
Kampala, unaware of the crisis in Kigali, started to complain about the quality of its Rwanda bureau.
Rumours of growing bad-blood between a frustrated Editor in Chief and the Country Director echoed in IPL's dimly lit corridors.
In March, to the surprise of the long-suffering staff, an intransigent Oloya accused the editorial team of 'sabotage', and 'going on strike', resulting in a stand-off that eventually saw production of the Rwanda edition grind to a halt. The Uganda edition was dispatched to fill in for it on the gaping shelves.
Kampala acts, unearths massive fraud
Whether as a matter of due administrative course, or if it was a result of reports of Oloya's suspected financial imprudence, Kampala in April 2016 sent an auditor to Kigali to assess the company's financial health and investigate the structural issues afflicting it.
Preliminary results of the audit revealed an extent of fraud that shocked even Oloya's most strident critics.
The payroll was bloated far beyond the actual, with staff that had left long ago being maintained on it.
"Some writers discovered that Oloya had been claiming and quietly pocketing salaries on their behalf months before they were actually instated as staff, while others learnt that they had been promoted to 'Senior writers' and their retainer bumped up from the standard 250,000 Rwf to 400,000 Rwf without their knowledge!" our sources reveal.
This was accompanied by filching of petty amounts such as deductions from freelancers' wages and inflated facilitation claims.
"At one point I thought it was just a mistake," a former freelancer recalls. "I expected over 300,000 Rwf net pay, only to find 260,000 Rwf. When I crosschecked on the official list, it had 300,000 under my name," a former freelancer said.
Mr. Oloya's standard response to the numerous cases such as this was to blame it on "errors at bank", and promise to follow up, after which he would frustrate the victimized writers with excuse after excuse until they gave up.
The Taxman comes knocking
The rain that batters a poor man does not let up.
As the company was reeling from the shock of an audit that had shaken it to its core, officials from Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) stormed IPL Rwanda's Kicukiro office threatening to put it under padlock for outstanding tax arrears in excess of 50 million Rwf (about 200m Ugx).
Our investigation shows that most of this debt had been inherited by Oloya from previous regimes, and he managed to obtain a temporary stay from the taxman.
However, the reprieve was short-lived, and IPL's Rwanda accounts were frozen about a month later in an attempt to recover some of the outstanding taxes.
The Reckoning
In a series of meetings arranged with staff on the 5th and 6th of July 2016, Mwenda heard tale after tale of his Country Director's misdeeds.
"I was shocked by the extent of this boy's (Oloya's) unpopularity," Mwenda later reported to his colleagues in Kampala. "How can you be hated by everyone from the cook, to the cleaner and all the staff?"
Meanwhile, IPL General Manager Charles Kankya, who Mwenda put on speaker phone to address some of the charges being leveled against Oloya, defended his Rwanda colleague, saying that he had been made aware of the irregularities in the wage bill as a cover for resources channeled towards 'greasing the palms' of certain officials in government in order to win advertising contracts.
During the same meeting Mwenda also cited a pertinent reason for his trust in Oloya- efficiency.
"Since he took over, Paul (Oloya) has cut down office expenditure on salaries and running costs from $50,000 to $15,000 a month," he revealed.
Mwenda goes mad
Not one to be hasty, Mwenda still took no action. The standoff remained. Most staff, who had hung on in the hope that the meeting with the top boss would resolve the matter, moved to seek alternative employment.
It was at a convocation of top management in Kampala two weeks later that Mwenda's legendary calm would spark into fireworks.
Here is how it happened.
Well-placed sources in Kampala reveal that Mwenda summoned top managers from the Kampala and Kigali offices for a high-level discussion on the problems afflicting IPL's Rwanda bureau.
In attendance were Charles Kankya, General Manager; Joseph Were, Kampala Editor; Paul Oloya, IPL Country Director, Rwanda; Edward Ojulu, Rwanda Bureau Editor; and Andrew Mwenda, Managing Director.
The results of the audit, detailing Oloya's financial misdeeds were read out, and Mwenda gave a brief report of findings from his Rwanda trip.
An interrogation of Mr. Oloya soon ensued, led by the former 'Hot Seat' moderator.
After a particularly hard line of questioning, Oloya broke and confessed to forging his (Mwenda's) signatures and other details on the payment orders to gain great advantage in the allocation of funds.
Mwenda was livid.
"You could see sweat flowing on his bald head as he shouted at the top of his voice: 'Oloya you mean you have been altering my signatures?'", narrates an inside source.
The meeting was called to an abrupt halt and participants shooed out as Mwenda struggled to master himself.
In Kigali, news that Oloya had spent the night in the coolers was met by an uncorking of bottles and imbibing of frothy drinks by jubilant ex-staffers.
Return of the king
Like a soap opera that will not end, Oloya was, in a surprising twist, reposted to Kigali office a week later, where it is said he struts around in an empty office like a victorious cock in a hen-fight.
Word in the Kigali media grapevine is that IPL Rwanda is on the search for a new editor as the former one named Oloya's expulsion as the nonnegotiable condition for his stay.
Former employees say they are in suspense over their unpaid salary arrears of 3 months, and accuse the company of not having courtesy to advise them on the way forward.
But the most unexpected victim of the scam is Rwanda Government where IPL has been making good money from in form of projects, courtesy of good standing of its proprietor in the eyes of top echelons of power in Kigali.
A senior lawyer in Kigali, says he is surprised that no legal action has been taken against Oloya, adding:
"Article 609 of penal code is clear: Any person who forges or alters documents by forged signature or fingerprint, falsifying documents or signatures or impersonation, forging agreements, its provisions, obligations, discharged obligations shall be liable to a term of imprisonment of more than five (5) years to seven (7) years and a fine of three hundred thousand (300,000) to three million (3,000,000) Rwandan francs."
This has left many wondering what power Oloya wields over Mwenda who well knows that Kigali does not tolerate financial impropriety of any sort, not least the rampant fraud the IPL Country Director is accused of.
It is testimony to Mwenda's clout in Kigali that the scandals at his firm have not been amplified, unlike his sister's recent troubles in Kampala.
*****PS: Mr. Oloya, in a telephone interview with our reporter, refused to comment on the allegations leveled against him unless identities of our sources were revealed to him. For obvious reasons of journalistic confidentiality, we could not do that.***
*Abbey Kibirige Semuwemba*
Stalk my blog at: http://semuwemba.com/
"My journey is long and my preparation is so little, and weakness has gripped me and death is chasing me!"
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